To latch onto your comment: What about competition? Ice cream machines are not complicated, relatively speaking. Isn't McD's fed up with the cost and loss of reputation? They could build their own - high efficiency, high quality, high reliability, low maintenance cost - line of ice cream machines and distribute them to the... over 40.000 McD's franchises worldwide.

The company that they purchase ice cream machines from make reliable, efficient machines for other resteraunts. McDonalds corporate has a stipulation that franchisees mist purchase the same, old ice cream machines. The major problem with them, as I understand it, is that any sort of malfunction leads to the machine shutting down and displaying an archaic, nonsensical error code. When you look the code up and how to resolve it almost always says that you need to call a licensed maintenance tech. It is all about propping up the service division of the machine's OEM.

That's not the entire objective situation.

McDonald's is trying to run an industrial volume process with ingredients subject to contamination and spoilage... using minimum wage young workers with varying levels of attention/dedication to details.

It's a difficult set of constraints that includes a non-negligible amount of blaming the machine for willful lapses in procedure.

Those are the same constraints that every other fast food chain has, yet only McDonalds appears to have this problem.

We don't have any evidence to support this claim though.

McDonald's appears to sell a lot more soft serve (by volume) than any other fast food chain. People go there specifically for McFlurries and others, and then leave disappointed when the machine is not working. Few, if any, go to Burger King or Arby's only for a soft serve product.

So, the issue appears more visible. But that's not evidence that McDonald's machines are less reliable. It could simply be they're the most used.

The Wendy's Frosty though?

McDonald's is nearly 6 times larger than Wendy's by number of stores, and double the revenue, with more than half of that revenue coming from franchise fees[1], if I'm reading this correctly.

[1] https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/content/dam/sites/corp/nfl/p...

To be quite frank, McDonalds seems to hire a lower grade of worker than the rest, or at least their workers perform worse than the rest because they're paid poorly and overworked, or for some other reason...

Point is, they can't even get "no pickles" right.

I'll take anything over the cheese quesadilla, except they forgot the cheese, that I got at a new Chipotle location.

You can't make this generalization for a franchise business.

McDonalds is a franchise, so "McDonalds" doesn't hire the workers. Each independent franchise owner does. There are some franchise owners who own numerous locations across an area, so sometimes the same party is to blame for quality and hiring practices. For sure some hire really bottom of the barrel, but I've been to some where the workers were top notch. I remember one lady that was so smart, helpful, and cheerful that I wanted to hire and train her! It all depends on the individual franchise owner's philosophy/approach.

That's why a lot of fast food chains don't offer soft serve. At McDonald's scale, their peers that do would be KFC (only some locations?), Burger King, and Wendy's.

For reference, here's a first person report from one of the previous times this was brought up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26938854

Burger King appears to also use Taylor equipment, although not the combo 2-in-1, do-it-all model that McDonald's does.

Wendy's uses a custom machine built by Kappus for their Frosties. [0] [1]

[0] History https://www.wendys.com/blog/history-of-frosty

[1] How It's Made https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oorX3mHgHQs&t=95s

Somehow Dairy Queen is able to serve ice cream ok

Then it DQ must be using alien technology. Just as in the UFO debate, there is no other possible explanation, therefore it must be aliens.

And I would hope that Dairy Queen, a company founded in 1940 to sell soft-serve ice cream (original formula 1938), is better at selling soft-serve ice cream than McDonald's.

Also, they're a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway since 1998.

There is a detailed video about it. Ultimately, conclusion seems like it is collusion between the two corporates to get profit at the expense of franchise owners

The REAL Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken by Johnny Harris

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4

> McDonald's is trying to run an industrial volume process with ingredients subject to contamination and spoilage

You're getting at the heart of it. McDonalds used to use very simple Taylor machines that were very reliable. The only problem was they had to be taken apart, cleaned, and sanitized at the end of every day. That required an extra employee at closing for about an hour, and another employee the next morning to put the machine back together. This wasn't difficult, but it wasn't totally obvious either so it did require an employee who had been trained on how to do it.

McDonald's wanted to save the training and the $10-$20 of labor, and a few dollars of product waste that this was costing them every day, so they asked Taylor to develop a machine that didn't have to be taken apart and sanitized every day. Taylor did that, and the machine got a lot more complicated. It heats itself up to a temperature that will kill bacteria, then cools back down. If there is a power glitch or fault or for any reason that cycle is interrupted, the machine locks out and has to be "repaired."

Also, as part of the daily cleaning and re-assembly of the old machines, all the O-rings and seals would be inspected and lubricated and replaced if they were cut, worn out, etc. Now that doesn't happen so you get more failures of seals, leaks, etc. which can also shut the machine down.

This video [0] alleges that McDonalds franchise are required to purchase a specific model of Taylor soft serve machine.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4

Apparently the machines are cheap and McD likes that.

The cost of maintenance is thrown onto the franchisee (350$ per 15min as explained in the article) which McD doesn’t have to care about. So Taylor seems them cheap because they know they will get their end from maintenance which the franchisee pays for

McDonalds corp cares whether franchisees succeed or fail. Failing franchisees start cutting corners, which results in McDonalds stores which are run down, with poor service and product quality and this harms McDonalds corp's reputation and bottom line. This is the reason McDonalds corp won't let just anybody start a franchise, you have to buy your way into this game by having at least a million dollars liquid, to prove to the corp that you have enough cash on hand to run the store properly. They also don't let a franchisee put the store anywhere they like, rather they choose and develop properties themselves to make sure those locations make strategic sense for the corp as a whole (they don't want two McDonalds franchises sitting right next to each other competing, driving each other out of business.) Furthermore if you want to be a franchisee you have to go through their training courses, you can't just buy a McDonalds franchise on a whim and gift it to your trustfund son. If you want your spoiled son to own a McDonalds franchise, you need to persuade him to go through their training program.

If Taylor machines were actually a real threat to the viability of many McDonalds franchises, McDonalds corp would make changes. It is against their interests for McDonalds franchises to fail and they already employ several severe and strict measures to reduce the likelihood of failure.

If this system seems overbearing, then simply start your own burger shop, or get a franchise from a fast food brand who doesn't give a shit like Subway. Subway will give a franchise to somebody with a tenth as much money, don't care if franchises sit on top of each other, etc. Not incidentally, Subway has an abysmal reputation for consistency, quality, cleanliness and food safety. McDonalds food is crap, but it's crap in a way that is consistent and safe (in the short term; it might give you diabetes but it probably won't give you botulism.)

Or, you know, just invest the $1Mi in a conservative investment fund and get a similar return for way less worries and work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJpNX_MyvYs

McDonald's operations teams: yes, they are probably fed up.

McDonald's investors: they also own the companies that make the expensive failure-prone ice cream machines. They are double dipping by writing themselves expensive repair contracts.

These machines are local ruled monopoly made by management to squeeze money from franchise restaurants. This is not about competition or service this is legal scam scheme to make money.

> Isn't McD's fed up with the cost and loss of reputation?

Let's make something very clear here. McD does not concern itself with the woes of the franchisees. Not one ketchup sachet worth of worry. Costs? Not their problem.

Reputation loss maaaaybe.

Taylor gets exclusivity from McD and in turn gets exclusive access to maintenance.

I see other commenters making the point "they are trying to make bottom dollar employees operate a machine with food safety worries". Absolutely correct. Which should be grounds for McD to ask Taylor to incorporate the more user friendly panels and operation.

Now think why McD is not doing that

Look at cross pollination of corporations where the McD board members also are. It's about propping up the system of extracting money from franchisees.

> Isn't McD's fed up with the cost and loss of reputation? They could build their own - high efficiency, high quality, high reliability, low maintenance cost - line of ice cream machines and distribute them to the... over 40.000 McD's franchises worldwide.

That's exactly what this machine is.

The issue is that it's doing something novel--sterilizing the machine while full of liquid--in order to be able to be run by unskilled (read as: super cheap) labor.

The fundamental issue is not that the machine breaks down--that's to be expected in a novel industrial machine.

The problem is that there is no incentive to fix the design of the machine. Taylor gets no extra profit for doing more R&D and fixing the machine--precisely the opposite, in fact, as they get less repair revenue. McDonald's, itself, gets no extra profit for doing more R&D and fixing the machine, either, and would have to spend money on training if they went back to traditional machines.

The total market for these machines is effectively the number of new McDonald's. Call these a $20K machine and McDonalds opens 500 stores per year in the US. That's $10,000,000 in new sales revenue in a year, max. That puts net profit at about $1,000,000 per year (call it 10% of gross revenue--probably optimistic for this kind of machinery)

And now we hit why Taylor certainly isn't jumping to fix this and no competitor really wants into the space. Net profit of $1,000,000 per year gets dwarfed by the service revenue really quickly.

> Are the machines leased or owned? Because if they are owned outright (which is implied by the fast that ifixit was able to buy a used one to work on) then wholesale replacement of the control electronics would just void any warranty but would not be able to be hit with any sort of firmwarm hack copyright claim, assuming any new software writted for the control logic was clean-sheet engineered and not reversed from the Taylor control system.

It’s not the warranties that concern them. The franchisees are worried about running afoul of McDonald’s corporate, which limits what franchisees can do even to owned equipment.

The Kytch board does not change the original firmware. There is no copyright case here.

> Are the machines leased or owned? Because if they are owned outright (which is implied by the fast that ifixit was able to buy a used one to work on) then wholesale replacement of the control electronics would just void any warranty but would not be able to be hit with any sort of firmwarm hack copyright claim, assuming any new software writted for the control logic was clean-sheet engineered and not reversed from the Taylor control system.

But Taylor (presumably) won't repair them if they have modified boards and it's a breech of contract for them to hire anyone else to repair them.

The base issue here is that the same group of people own McDonalds AND the company who fixes the machines.

They have zero monetary incentive to allow the franchise owners to fix the machines in any way. It's a net loss to them if they don't break down as often or they can service them without an expensive technician.