I've been following this story for a while. When people say the soft serve machine is "broken", they really mean "unavailable to serve ice cream to customers". That could mean something as innocuous as performing a pasteurization cycle during the day (because it failed to run at night for some reason, perhaps the machine's clock is set wrong). It could also mean there is a physical problem with some part of the machine. The word "broken" implies the latter, but I'm pretty sure the former situation is far more common.
In other words, the machine has determined it's unsafe to serve the contents (because soft serve needs to be pasteurized at certain intervals), not that it's physically incapable of doing so. Therefore it's "broken".
(Disclaimer: I've never used one of these soft serve machines, just read through manuals and stories about them.)
It also needs to be said that similar machines provided by Taylor to McDonalds' competitors do not have anywhere close to the amount of downtime that McDonalds' machines have. There's also ample evidence that software updates to Taylor's McDonalds machines have made the error codes more cryptic and the machines more unreliable over time.
I think there's a pretty strong legal case to be made that these machines are deliberately designed to break down in order to drive repair service revenue for both Taylor and McDonalds at the expense of franchisees. Unfortunately, franchisees seem to be locked up under binding arbitration clauses in their franchise agreements. Luckily for consumers, 3rd party vendors aren't subject to these contracts.
"It also needs to be said that similar machines provided by Taylor to McDonalds' competitors do not have anywhere close to the amount of downtime that McDonalds' machines have"
But they're not similar machines. The machines in question are models developed for McDonald's that use internal heat treatment to pasteurize the machine and clean it on a more frequent basis. The intent was to keep the machine running longer than previous models, the opposite of your assertion.
The other models need to be disassembled and cleaned by hand to maintain food safety.
That doesn't dismiss the complexity of the product and the likelihood that breakdowns happen, because obviously they do.
Source: I've done engineering work on the C602. I know how it works.
The fact that the design intent is to reduce downtime does not mean it is achieved in practice. McDonald's ice cream machines constantly being "broken" is so well known that it's a meme among normal people. This is not the case for other fast food places that use Taylor machines. I've seen statements from employees confused about why it's such a big deal to clean the machine once a day because it's not that hard. (Personally, I find it kinda gross that the machine is intentionally not cleaned for weeks.)
In practice, there's a huge difference between someone at corporate buying machines that don't work as well as expected, and a shadowy deal where someone at corporate is getting kickbacks from the vendor for buying a deliberately sabotaged machine.
The former is just the normal sort of shit that a franchise has to deal with, the latter is what a lot of people, myself included thought this issue was... But I've turned my thinking around on this.
It doesn't have to be all dark, suitcases full of money, cigar smoke filled rooms, and maniacal laughter. You can get the same effective outcome just with misaligned incentives over a long period of time and a steady rotation of pressured middle managers creating a ratchet effect. "The evil of banality" to turn the phrase around.
That’s not even the full picture. Often the app will let you order only for them to tell you at pickup that their machine is down. The site relies on the restaurants keeping up with availability in app.
I worked for McDonald's in my teenaged years and saw the inspection report on one of the old-style machines. It was pretty horrible. The self-cleaning machine was created for a reason.
Unlike the fryers and grills the soft-serve machine is filled with dairy product, loaded by hand via human interaction, and just hovering underneath the safe zone temperature-wise.
No. It means that they just open up and clean the machine each day, just like every other appliance that touches food. The MD machine was designed to run without daily cleaning.
> No. It means that they just open up and clean the machine each day, just like every other appliance that touches food.
Maybe on paper, but having worked in jobs that required the routine cleaning of things, I can state with certainty that said things were often either 1) not actually cleaned or 2) not properly cleaned.
Employees do clean these machines every day, but because of how it's designed they don't need to do so?
Is this something kind of like: I can change my motor oil every 500 miles my car is driven, but according to the manufacturer I don't need to do so that often?
No, the McDonald's machines heat up any leftover milkshake mixture every night to kill all the bacteria in it, then cool it all back down before the morning.
If it hasn't been run in the last 24 hours, the machine will refuse to dispense ice cream unless you run the process (which takes a few hours).
Non-McDonald's machines work how your imagining: you have to toss the leftover ice cream once it goes bad, disassemble the machine and clean it by hand, then load new ice cream into it.
By "cleaning" I mean opening it up, unscrewing things, and cleaning the internal mechanisms of the machine to remove any leftover ice cream before it goes bad.
> Source: I've done engineering work on the C602. I know how it works.
After watching the videos on how these machines work, and all the hidden menus within hidden menus with self-sabotaging software/hardware....
Admitting you have dev'ed on this is plainly disgusting. As a fellow engineer, we need to put our foot down and not work for places that institute such unethical and/or illegal behaviors. The faster companies are starved out for *trying* to institute unethical computing, the better.
This is maybe backed up by the fact that in other countries, McDonalds serves the same ice-cream from machines that seem to always be working. The "McDonalds ice-cream machine is always broken" meme seems to be a uniquely US phenomenon - or at least it's not completely worldwide.
>There's also ample evidence that software updates to Taylor's McDonalds machines have made the error codes more cryptic and the machines more unreliable over time.
Source?
>It also needs to be said that similar machines provided by Taylor to McDonalds' competitors do not have anywhere close to the amount of downtime that McDonalds' machines have
>I think there's a pretty strong legal case to be made that these machines are deliberately designed to break down in order to drive repair service revenue for both Taylor and McDonalds at the expense of franchisees.
AFAIK mcdonalds machine are also self-cleaning, which makes them more complicated and prone to failure. There's also advantages though (ie. you don't have to rely on a minimum wage worker to adequately clean the machine to prevent food poisoning), so absent some sort of evidence showing intent, it's at least plausible that there isn't some sort of conspiracy to drive up repair costs.
I don’t know the source but definitely did read an article here on HN last year reporting this. Call me a conspiracy theorist but I would bet McDonald’s is paying a pr firm to get reports like that taken away off the net.
I've commented on this previously as I worked as a jack of all trades for a McDonald's franchisee for years.
The machines tanks and shaving cores must be disassembled and cleaned every two weeks. They have a very intelligent series of sensors and internal mechanisms that make it impossible to defeat or cheat.
This is not a low skilled job. I'd say it would be easier to change your cars oil than complete this. There's multiple gaskets and seals which need to be rotated quarterly in a tune up kit. While we were hiring at minimum wage the shake machine trained people were making 15$. I can only imagine what they're making now.
I don't find the "cryptic messages" issue to be valid. New machines had new systems and codes, it wasn't malicious. Everyone had access to the manual and the Taylor provider in my region did some phone troubleshooting free of charge to prevent service calls. They even did free annual trainings.
Mechanically older machines can have issues, and some franchisees can be stubborn about replacing them. However I believe the vast majority of the time the issue is the machine not being cleaned.
> This is not a low skilled job. I'd say it would be easier to change your cars oil than complete this. There's multiple gaskets and seals which need to be rotated quarterly in a tune up kit. While we were hiring at minimum wage the shake machine trained people were making 15$. I can only imagine what they're making now.
Genuine question: Mom-and-pop shops used to somehow keep their frozen yogurt machines running with part-time teenager labor. What does this particular machine do that makes it so complicated?
Is it complicated merely for the sake of "job security" on behalf of the ice cream machine vendor?
I'm vaguely familiar with the pay by weight frozen yogurt shops. I can't speak from first hand experience but I would say that if you had 6+ machines and that was all your business did it would be a non issue. A few locations, rotate your cleaning days, could be handled by one individual that services them all.
Is part-time teenager labor the same as low skilled labor? In general but also more specifically to the time period you were referencing?
While teenagers generally have low experience, some of them are have the ability to perform at a level above low skill and are able to follow complex instructions. Look at any of them in more advanced classes who are performing academics at a level beyond what would qualify as low skill. These could've been the teenager running the machines at those mom and pop shops of yesteryear.
It does lead me to question where are they working now and why not at McDonald's. Given a moment of thought I've already generated a number of hypothesis that might explain it, but I'm too lacking in relevant data to narrow them down.
It's optimized for high capacity, high throughput, low planning, production.
Do you sell 1 milkshake or 100 a day? Doesn't matter, the tank holds the mix and freezes it on the fly. Taylor machines can output hundreds of units an hour. Or none.
It's always "fresh", there's waste when you clean the machine but other than that the ice cream you get has only been frozen seconds before being served.
It's highly profitable, when the machine is operating correctly the base food cost is much lower than the other food categories(sandwiches and chicken) but not as good as soda and cookies.
> the machine has determined it's unsafe to serve the contents
Wouldn't that mean, though, that the Kytch device could be working around the issue in detriment of the patron's, or "end user", safety?
The franchisees certainly were very happy with Kytch's reduction in their maintenance and downtime cost, caused by very temperamental, ill-designed machines. Franchisee's are clearly victims of a tightly controlled McD ecosystem (sounds so Apple...). But if the machine is operating in a way that could harm users, even if harmful workarounds is just 1 or 2 out of 30 other harmless issues Kytch monitors, fixes or clarifies, still, it would absolutely justify the take down!
Imagine a batch of people who suddenly get a bacteria from unpasteurized ice cream from a Kytch-hacked McD machine. How could McD justify knowing their franchisee's were installing a device that could put their patrons in risk of eating a spoiled dairy products? It's a backdoor for a health crisis, a PR nightmare and endless lawsuits. Even if it doesn't know for sure the device can be blamed, the liability is there.
I don't have any first-hand knowledge of what the Kytch device did. But nothing I've read about it ever gave me the impression that it was overriding lockouts. It was intended as a remote monitoring device and troubleshooting tool. For example, instead of an employee having to read a pattern of blinking lights on the machine itself, a franchise owner might receive an email that says "soft serve machine cleaning required" and send somebody to take care of it.
Regardless, like I said, the Kytch box (a Raspberry Pi) is overriding the code that accesses the secret menu of the ice-cream machines [1]. That's outside the intended operation. And that's liability if McD knows about it and says nothing.
The machine produces food that goes into people's bodies. Ie, if it were to produce a poisonous glycol ice-cream (glycol one of the pasteurization ingredients) all of a sudden, even if it has nothing to do with what Kytch is intended to do, could you really 100% discard in front of a judge that a glitch or a hack in the Kytch's linux computer, which is btw connected to the internet, didn't order the ice-cream machine to do that which, as a consequence, killed a hypothetical 5-year old kid from food poisoning?
Imagine McD is now Boeing and the Kytch box is something airlines found that make 737-MAX fly safer by plugging into and overriding the system codes so that it can warn pilots of possible 737-MAX issues... Does it make sense for Boeing to allow such thing even if it makes planes safer?
Again, I have no first-hand experience with this device so I can only infer things from the articles and documents we have available.
I fear I am being overly pedantic here, but to me, "override" implies that the device is circumventing sensor readings or physical interlocks or something similar to manipulate the machine's mechanisms to doing something they weren't intended to. However, I've see no indication of that. The device is described as, essentially, a second control panel. Anything the Kytch device can do is something an operator could already do by pushing buttons on the factory-installed control panel. The difference is that it interprets the data to be easier to understand, and provides remote monitoring.
It's really no different than plugging a ScanGauge into a car's ODB-II port. The ScanGauge can tell you all sorts of things about the state of the engine, but it isn't going to stop the brakes from working.
I remember reading that Wired article when it first came out. Near the beginning, it says:
> As O'Sullivan says, this menu isn’t documented in any owner's manual for the Taylor digital ice cream machines
Frankly, the manuals Taylor has made for these machines are quite thorough and well written. The claims from the article about how this is "secret" and "undisclosed" seem disingenuous when a simple Google search reveals evidence to the contrary. I suppose one could argue that a "service manual" is not an "owner's manual", but that seems overly pedantic (even to me!).
I can't find it from Taylor, though. I think the point they're making with the "secret" is that the manufacturer won't give them to you. The 3rd party copies are likely illegal; I would presume the service manual is copyrighted.
> Anything the Kytch device can do is something an operator could already do by pushing buttons on the factory-installed control panel. The difference is that it interprets the data to be easier to understand, and provides remote monitoring.
It does allow access to things that users weren't meant to be able to access, and some of them are dangerous. E.g. you can change the temperature of the boil cycle down to something too low to kill bacteria.
> It's really no different than plugging a ScanGauge into a car's ODB-II port. The ScanGauge can tell you all sorts of things about the state of the engine, but it isn't going to stop the brakes from working.
The ScanGauge can't actually change any parameters, afaik. This is closer to replacing the ECU. It gives you more data on what you car is doing, but also gives you the option to tune the engine. You can either make it more efficient, or you can destroy the engine, depending on how you tune the settings. Except in this case, "destroy the engine" roughly translates to "give a bunch of people listeria infections".
In my opinion, it's unreasonable for McDonald's to block off access to the data, but it is reasonable for them to not want franchisee's to be able to change parameters like the boil temperature, or how frequently cleanings need to be done (which is another parameter in that secret menu). The whole situation is a mess, because I can't see a way to allow access to the data without access to the whole secret menu, other than replacing all the hardware. I think I saw McDonald's trying to sell their own device on that front; likely because then they can ensure that the parameters aren't exposed.
The C602 was released in 2003 afaict. I don't think this was a malicious decision so much as no one in 2003 predicting that it would be beneficial (or cost-effective) to have a WiFi/Bluetooth remote data port. That was 4 years before the iPhone, and interestingly, also only 5 years after the first consumer bluetooth device was unveiled. I don't find it shocking that a behemoth like McDonald's isn't putting nascent technology in an ice cream machine they plan to use for decades.
Chemist here. The use of propylene glycol in the clean/sterilize cycle is OK, it is related to 3 carbon glycerol and is not toxic and any breakdown product(glycerol) is safe and edible.
Ethylene glycol, a 2 carbon polyol, is metabolized to poisonous oxalic acid and 1000's of pets and other animals are killed every year. Most states require Bitrex, a very foul tasting additive to be added to various products people/animals might eat. https://www.bitrex.com/
There is a pet safe antifreeze based on Propylene Glycol, which I use, that is a good antifreeze and not toxic. So save a pet/animal https://safeantifreeze.com/
That is the difference between family business and industrial food production. The cleaning products used in small restaurants are basically harmless. A little bleach residue in someone's food will taste horrible but probably won't kill anyone. Glycol tastes like sugar. It very much will do harm if it leaks into the food. But using glycol allows a food producer to reduce labor costs via automation, automation being a bright line between mom-and-pop burger bars serving perhaps 10 customers per hour and a busy MacDonald's location serving 500.
As a sibling comment mentioned, polypropylene glycol <> ethylene glycol. Polypropylene glycol is an FDA approved food additive and one of the main ingredients of vape fluid.
Wow, you're really going to hate how people mod their cars. At some point we have to ignore hypotheticals because they are too divorced from what is actually happening.
Case in point, when someone mods their car it is not somehow the manufacturer's responsibility for a crash. It fails the pre-hearing test of "can we even have a lawsuit about this" if someone even tries to bring it up.
> Wouldn't that mean, though, that the Kytch device could be working around the issue in detriment of the patron's, or "end user", safety?
From what I understand the issue the Kytch device solves is the cryptic error code displayed by the machines. It tells the user what is wrong and how to fix it, which may just be restarting the machines heating cycle with the correct amount of liquid.
> a PR nightmare and endless lawsuits.
Not that McDonalds would have any issues managing actual health problems, just set the same people on it like they did in the McCoffee case and they can spin the families of a few dozen deadly ill children trying to pay hospital bills into a group of hypochondriacs trying to make billions.
Also it can mean that the first half of the lunch rush used up all the frozen ice cream and it can’t freeze new ice cream instantly. So the later part of a rush period will often have unacceptable soft ice cream.
When I ran frozen daiquiri machines it took a lot of finesse to make it through a busy night. Have to constantly manage the temperatures and levels to a nearly absurd precision while doing the rest of your job as well. But the only parameters you can manipulate are material input and material output, there’s no “freeze it faster” button or “store it colder” dial.
Broken could also mean that nobody has bothered to refill the machine. In my experience working at McDonald's many years ago, it was actually incredibly rare for the ice cream machine to be down for any reason besides nobody has filled it. When cars are wrapped around the building, line is out the door, and you're short two people, nobody is going to take the five minutes to fill the ice cream machine.
I'm always torn between my disdain for swinging down at the working class and my experience from the time I was 14 until I was 26,
My politics have always aligned with something far more left wing than the Democrats. Pro-private unions, pro m4a, pro welfare assistance, higher minimum wages, I wish people had guaranteed sick and vacation time, better work safety protections, better paternity/maternity leave. And a culture that saw jobs that didn't take a degree as something that could still be worked with a since of dignity.
But in my actual experience working... I worked just about anything you can think of.. Starbucks, Applebee's, TGIFridays,a BBQ restaurant, Sallie Beauty Supply, CVS, Rite-Aid, CompUSA, video rentals, grocery stores, I worked construction, painted, did lots of odd jobs.
And the types of people I met along the way.... The adults in restaurants, pharmacies and retail stores.. who eclipsed me in years anyways, to be frank, were losers.
Lazy, shiftless people who had to be told, constantly, to do the basics even when you had entire days when there was little customizer traffic or stock to take care of
People who would openly lie about "oh my back" and sit on a stool not doing shit all day, then go off to party at night.
People who wouldn't see a customer for hours and couldn't be fucked to "front and face" or do some basic cleaning of the store without being told to.. At 40, 50, 55 years old.
I can't tell you how many people at various jobs who got arrested bc they were jacking shit from the store and selling hit items. I worked a toy store in a mall during the Xmas season once and the manager was cleaning the inventory out by 30% and flipping it every week.
These were always people with kids before they were 18, or had multiple kids from multiple partners, drug use was way more open and regular than anything you see in the office.
You go to McDonald's and you see more tattoos and "grills" than you see any sense.
Do you think they give af about an ice cream machine?
But the bigger question, is why in 2022 is anyone still buying toxic crap from fast food restaurants?
Everyone says that until their health starts failing and you realize the way to death is a slow procession of fear inducing, painful medical conditions that tortures you while youre on your way out
The one near my house removed it from their menu due to menu simplification during the pandemic, and despite bringing the menu back, not to long after, the ice cream products never returned. Its just missing from the menu, and they tell you they don't sell ice cream.
there's a more reliable Italian machine that is also available to franchisees. most (all) american locations use the Taylor. I assume the opposite is true in europe
Machine clock being wrong? IDK about the US, but in the UK we have at least 2 different radio-clock signals to choose from for machine synchronisation (one is domestic, one is based in Germany so you can still get it if reception is good). Neither requires internet access or any setup, and is cheap enough to integrate into sub-$30 electronics.
I cant think of anything more definitionally anti-competitive than keeping mcflurry machines available so you can crush any DQ that pops up in your vicinity by fixing it ("oh whoops... it was unplugged!"), and then also crushing a business that aims to solve your problem to help serve customers better.
Let's get the FTC on this, afaik it's illegal to advertise a product you have no intention of actually serving. eg: used car dealers used to do this with an "amazing deal car", which often never existed. People would come down and get enticed to a diff model at a high price.
edit: The "whoops it's unplugged" was a joke about absurd root causes, but also intended to imply equivalently poor attempts to keep the machine working. That is I do not think they literally did not plug it in, but I do think they are not trying very hard to keep the machine up and running. Other threads point out that the real root may actually be that the original creator of the machines made a complex/crap machine and the cost of technicians makes it unprofitable to bother
THis "theory" doesn't make any sense. It's the Franchisee who doesn't get the sales AND pays the huge cost for an official repair rep to come out and basically restart the cleaning cycle. This doesn't jive with crushing an upstart DQ; they're only really competitors in that they both sell "fast food". Ice cream @ a McD is a loss-leader (soft serve) or minor line item (McFlurrys) while it is the core product of DQ, despite their hot food offerrings.
> Ice cream @ a McD is a loss-leader (soft serve) or minor line item (McFlurrys) while it is the core product of DQ, despite their hot food offerrings.
IMO this is actually the point being made. There's no need to run a loss leader if the competition doesn't exist.
1. if it's a loss leader that they don't want to continue, why not just... stop offering it? After all, you see "participating restaurant" disclaimers everywhere. Why can't a particular franchise just choose not to participate if it's not in DQ territory?
2. Regardless of whether it's a loss leader, I doubt the marginal cost of the ice cream is more than the $1 or whatever the discounted price is. They paid for the expensive ice cream machine and the counter space. They might as well use it.
> lce cream a McD is a loss-leader (soft serve) or minor line item (McFlurrys)
This is why the franchisee has little incentive to keep them functioning until there's a competitor next door? I don't know if it has to even do with the whole Kryst debaucle
And now that car dealer ads have to specify the exact car they're referring to (by VIN or stock number), that one car will often be the only one the amazing deal applies to and once it's gone, so is the deal.
At least somebody can actually get that deal now, so it's better I guess.
> And now that car dealer ads have to specify the exact car they're referring to (by VIN or stock number), that one car will often be the only one the amazing deal applies to and once it's gone, so is the deal.
Sure, if its just one they have to identify it and say something like “1 at this price” but that also tells you up front what the deal is.
It's additionally better because you now have the option to call and ask "Is the car from the ad still available and will you hold it for me until I arrive?"
Parent post appears to be alleging that McDonalds - or their franchisees - only serve ice cream purely to starve competitors out of the fast food market, and then disconnects or damages those machines in order to get out of having to actually sell that ice cream.
Personally, I don't think that holds water. Everyone involved in this drama wants ice cream in the stores. It's not like McDonalds corporate has some Jobsian disgust towards putting ice cream and a burger in the same meal or anything. The far easier explanation is that McDonalds paid Taylor for a custom machine that's extremely temperamental, not that they secretly want to ban their own product because it's ice cream.
The machines frequently require technicians to come out and work on them, to the tune of several hundred dollars per hour, which the franchisee must pay. They are not permitted to get a less tempermental machine or use independent technicians.
You would think that the McDonalds franchise owners would push back on McDonalds corporate about this issue. They would rightly be complaining that they are losing revenue because the Taylor ice cream machine has low reliability.
Even one service call per month is a significant cost to a low-margin business like a quick-serve restaurant.
It is quite possible there is some hinky corporate politics and such within McDonalds corporate that is preventing improvement here.
McDonald's exerts extremely extremely tight control over its franchisees by corporate standards. Every single thing about a McDonald's is meticulously specified and regulated by corporate, from the equipment installations to the number of pickle slices that go on a burger and the soap that goes into the bathroom.
Franchisees in general don't wear the pants in this relationship. If McD corporate says you use this machine, tough shit, you use that machine. I'm sure the feelings of franchisees are broadly speaking "taken into consideration" but it's not like there's a union here, the dynamic here is that franchisees will shut their mouths and go make some money for daddy.
It's a weird arms-length model that has run into some trouble before, particularly surrounding labor law, as McD corporate has some very detailed expectations on how franchisees will hire, fire, pay, and operate their employees.
Anyway basically if McDonald's says "you will take those things out of our machine" yeah, franchisees are absolutely going to hop to it. tbh if McDonald's were smart they'd just have done it without the "ackshually this thing will steal your girlfriend, poison your customers, and kill your dog" defamation, because if they'd simply said "we're terminating our business relationship with Kytch, have it removed in the next 2 weeks" franchisees absolutely would have done it anyway. Now they are fighting a lawsuit about it because they just had to get a dig in.
Oh I know that McD is at the top when it comes to controlling franchisees.
But if 13% of restaurants have the ice cream machine non-functional at any given time, that means half or more of them are having the problem at some time in the last month.
If you're going to ignore a problem at that scale... well, that's just terrible.
I have to wonder if Taylor agreed to custom-build McDonalds an ice cream machine specifically because they figured they had implied license to hose franchisees on service costs. Or, in other words, if McDonalds had said "make the machine reliable enough to serve ice cream 100% of the time with no service calls", then Taylor would have charged 10x or something. The fact that McDonalds is libeling Kytch sounds like Taylor is speaking through McDonalds' mouth.
Even if McDonalds had been more reserved, however; Kytch still has some industrial-espionage claims that might go somewhere.
Also, for those wondering exactly how controlled McDonalds' franchise relations are: McDonalds franchisees are required to rent their locations from McDonalds, because McDonalds front-runs their business partners and buys the most valuable land[0] from under them. Literally nothing about the business of being a McDonalds franchisee works the way capitalism or business ownership is "supposed" to work[1]. It's more like paying to work at a somewhat-lucrative job than actually owning a business. McDonalds is a richest-of-the-rich company that sells business opportunities to the poorest-of-the-rich crowd[2], who are looking for a way to park lots of wealth[3] in a safe asset.
[0] Typically, land immediately next to US Interstate off-ramps or equivalently high-traffic highways
[1] Unless you're a left-winger, in which case the McDonalds "strip our business partners of capital interest in the store" policy is how capitalism is "supposed" to work, and treating your business partners as equals is a historical aberration.
For the record I do find the left-wing critique of capitalism to be at least somewhat grounded in current business reality.
[2] Menial labors of the capitalist class. If you define "poor, middle-class, and rich" based on how people make their money (poor: unskilled labor, middle-class: skilled labor, rich: capitalism), then you can recursively subdivide that grouping further, with richest-of-the-rich being people whose wealth comes from owning other businesses through some means (usually trademark or copyright).
[3] McDonalds wants their franchisees to hold at least $750,000 of liquid capital and be able to invest between $1,000,000 and $2,200,000 into their stores.
From what I understand, Subway is also very strict with the franchisees. At least as far as food suppliers go.
It is all in the name of "quality" or more truthfully "consistency".
Even so, unless you're a relatively small regional chain, you'd think that having at least two different equipment suppliers would help corporate drive down costs for the franchisees, and thereby make more profit for themselves.
That's what is so strange about this entire situation. McD corporate historically has been laser-focused on profit, which they get through scale (volume) and efficiency. I don't see how there aren't some people in corporate getting fired for this. If the ice cream machines work, they franchisees sell more product. This generates more revenue (and profit) selling the restaurants more ice cream mixture, as well as increasing profits for the restaurants themselves. Which also generates more profits for corporate too. Because of course corporate double-dips.
Money being left on the table... that doesn't sound like McDonalds.
While not quite as deliberate an action as (great?) grandparent was suggesting, I could see the possibility existing where fixing the machines is too much hassle until a competitor opens and they begin having a noticeable impact on customer retention, increasing the expected ROI on fixing the machine enough for management/owner to take action.
The gist I'm getting is that McDonald's doesn't want to be in the ice cream/soft serve business. But it also doesn't want more competition than it already has.
So every McDonald's has an ice cream machine as a more sort of "break glass in case of emergency" situation. Or in this case "in case of DQ". But if there is no DQ in the area, why operate the machine? Just have it be "broken". It's not like people have an option they didn't have before.
> But if there is no DQ in the area, why operate the machine?
Why operate the grill or fryer? To sell food and make money. Instead of selling someone a meal for $7 McDonalds can sell them a meal + a mcflurry for $10. Why wouldn't they want to do this?
It doesn't make any sense that a bunch of franchise owners are all in together on some kind of ice cream conspiracy. Surely the truth is less interesting, it's most likely just a boring cost/benefit analysis. There seems to be some flaw with the machines they use that make them particularly prone to breaking down and difficult to maintain. So some stores that don't sell a lot of ice cream anyway decide it's not worth the cost of keeping them running, while other stores that sell more do keep them running.
And surely it's no coincidence that the markets where people buy more ice cream are also where Dairy Queen stores are more likely to open up.
The core point is it's not profitable or as profitable as other items. So ice cream is offered as a loss leader in areas with a DQ and turned off in areas without on but advertised nationally.
For the up-thread commenters, It's like people here can't fathom that a Fortune 107 corporation wouldn't implement policies that follow an ECON 101 supply/demand curve.
> a meal for $7 McDonalds can sell them a meal + a mcflurry for $10. Why wouldn't they want to do this?
you're assuming the consumer has a marginal $3 to spend and wouldnt instead spend $7 on a (burger + mcflurry) vs (Burger, fries, soft drink). I would guess that the latter has a much higher margin. So for the same $7 spend you can make more profit if your icecream machine is down.
But, if DQ can do the deal for $7 then foot traffic may move to DQ, meaning McD's loses _both_ profitable options. So, the game is to dissuade the market from the preferred package (burger + icecream) towards the more profitable package (burger , fries, softdrink) .
I'd also add that they probably know that the marginal cost of driving to 2 locations means they're just gonna get what they can at 1 stop. That is few people would buy the burger at mcdonald's and then drive to DQ for the mcBlizzard.
Kinda feels like playing roller coaster tycoon all over again.
I'm not saying it is or isn't the real cause, I'm saying that's what I feel the OP was trying to convey. That's what I read in his comment.
And I agree with you, it's likely got a way more pedestrian and human answer. The machines require some amount of maintenance or repair that is simply annoying. And eventually, people prefer to not be annoyed. So maybe one day, you just let the ice cream machine be broken instead of doing the annoying thing. Even if the store sells ice cream like gangbusters. The guy slinging cones for minimum wage isn't seeing a single cent difference if he sells 1 or 1000.
I think it is less a matter of intent and more a matter of incentives. McDonald's is probably perfectly happy to be selling more ice-cream and make money that way. But they just don't care about maintenance (franchise reasonability) and it isn't impacting the bottom line significantly, so nobody really wants to fix the contracts and/or vendor performance issues. If there was a better competitor out there, McDonalds might use them, but they just don't care enough (meaning aren't incentivized enough) at the corporate level.
The "whoops it's unplugged" was a joke about the root cause, but also intended to imply equivalently poor attempts to keep the machine working. That is I do not think they literally did not plug it in, but I do think they are not trying very hard to keep the machine up and running.
parents point is that operating the machines regularly is of no interest to mcdonalds (likely bad margins) and its only interested in ensuring other niche fast food restos dont start to take up market share instead.
ie: if i want icecream i can get it at macdonalds, instead if DQ, unless the machines are broken. if DQ gains significant market share they "fix" the machines and DQ loses its market share.
not saying this is fact. just fleshing out parents
Where is the evidence of such a strategy though, besides the fact that machines are always broken? Even the franchisees would rather have a working machine.
There is none, but "broken McDonald's ice cream machine" is a whole category of meme.
So people start wondering my McDonald's is so plagued by machines that seem to only work on the third Thursday following the fifth month after the Lunar eclipse.
But it's likely a combination of disinterested staff and machines that require more involved maintenance.
Not to mention, there's several points of failure. Not only can various parts of the machine break; the drum that spins the mix, the compressor to keep the mix cold, leaks in various hoses and lines, but you can simply run out of mix.
Why is YouTube "fucking shitty"? And why then if it were so that this content could never be available anywhere else (since _any_ storage cloud service could host it)? I think your answers to the second will counteract the first
The video makes some good points, but overall it’s very repetitive. Just count how many times the shot of the manual with “call a service technician” is used, always with similar narration, or the one of the finances of the company who make 25% of their revenue with parts and service.
This could have easily been a 5 minute video. Also, it does not offer any explanation why McDonalds is the only customer of the Taylor brand machines with this issue. Burger King is also “an old company”, why doesn’t it apply to them?
I really don't understand how McDonald's board and leadership has let this situation happen and continue.
These ice cream machines are the printer cartridges of McDonald's. Pointless DRM and obfuscation designed to maximize authorized call outs (with associated costs). Now you can argue taht McDonalds gets a cut of that (which may or may not be true; I just don't know) but all of this comes at the cost of customer experience and brand perception, which are two things McDonald's very much does care about. That's why I'm surprised they've let this go on for so long.
I really have trouble believing the board is unaware of this issue and have chosen not to resolve it.
Yeah I don't get it either, for the same reasons. All I can think of is... I worked for McDonalds back in the 1980s. They had soft serve and milkshake machines then, but they were simpler. They almost never broke down. I do not recall any breakdowns in fact. The machines did not have an automatic pasturization/sanitize cycle. They had to be taken apart, cleaned and sanitized every night after closing, and then put back together the next morning. That took an extra person on the closing staff just to clean the machines, and another person the next morning to set them back up. Roughly two hours of labor a day, every day, to do those tasks. An experienced person could do it faster, but that's a ballpark.
So McDonald's was betting on the labor savings offsetting the costs of the newer, more complicated and less reliable machines. Overall that may be working out on paper, but the perception of soft-serve being "always broken" is something I am surprised that McDonald's tolerates.
The pessimist in me says someone who sits on the board has a stake in the ice cream machine company, and they make bank on the crazy service fees for each tech they send out to "fix" the machines.
Kytch built a device that gave the ice cream machines remote debugging. They sold them to franchises. McDonalds got weird about this and told franchises that they weren't safe, and that they've got a new ice cream machines that already has that feature. Then McDonalds reached out to other companies and said not to use the startup's device. The startup wants $900M because "that's what we would've been worth" if McDonalds hadn't scared everybody off.
It sounds like Kytch wants to be a legal thorn in McDonald's side until they are paid off. How can a startup afford this? Do they work out some agreement with lawyers to only pay when they win?
> How can a startup afford this? Do they work out some agreement with lawyers to only pay when they win?
On a case like this it's probably even more sophisticated than that; they probably ran a process where many law firms pitched to represent them and competed on their contingency fees.
>Kytch has argued that Taylor was incentivized to keep its machines broken; repair and maintenance contracts across its business lines accounted for a quarter of the company's revenue stream in 2018, according to a document Taylor published at the time. But Kytch cofounders Nelson and O'Sullivan admit that doesn't explain why McDonald's would similarly seek to prevent a fix for its embarrassing—and expensive—ice cream machine failure rates.
This is strange. Another comment mentioned how the existence of these broken ice-cream machines is anti-competitive towards businesses like Dairy Queen. Does this explain why the machines are always broken? Taylor gets repair contracts that are worth less than the business McDonalds would lose to Dairy Queen?
I think the critical relationship here to understand is that it's 3 parties: McDonald's corporation, A McDonald's Franchisee, and Taylor. MCD Corp dictates franchisees must use this machine, which is very unforgiving in it's offline modes the machine may only be fixed by Taylor. McDonald's isn't losing the business, the franchisee is, and they are supposedly getting a kickback of some sort from Taylor. The party that gets the short end of the stick is the Franchisee.
If a kickback exists, that makes sense. But wouldn't the kickback have to be quite high to be worth the risk that McDonalds is opening themselves up to? I haven't looked at the Taylor financials, but the service contracts are supposedly 25% of their business, so a kickback is some % of that... but I'm having trouble seeing how it is worth the risk to McDonalds.
Which is why I think it has more to do with competition, and that there is no kickback. In that scenario, the incentive to McDonalds is that they can have more franchises that are successful, which means more money flowing back into the corporation. I imagine this gain would be higher than any kickback they could receive from Taylor.
EDIT>> I just realized that the competition scenario might not make any sense. Taylor wants service contracts. McDonalds wants the ability to make ice cream, and ideally have the machines work. The only way McDonalds is incentivized to not have the machines work is if there is either some leverage that Taylor has over McDonalds or if there is a kickback.
General franchisee revenue goes in a big bucket allocated across the entire corporation. A specific kickback might be going into one guy's pocket... If that one guy has sufficient political clout within the corporation, it could cause the present situation.
The thing that stands out to me is that apparently a lot of these "malfunctions" or "breakdowns" are not that at all, but safety features: "You overfilled the bin, so it can't automatically pasturize. I'm shutting off". So the fault ends up being on the Franchisee for using the machine wrong - and therefore the cost is on them.
What's even more strange is once they started getting bad publicity and the lawsuit talks became public, mcflurry machines magically all started working in my city. All of them. Some had not worked since the store opened.
Another thing companies seem to be doing a lot is false advertising. 7-11 is so bad with this. Sales posted everywhere but when you try and buy them 'it's not in the system sorry it will be regular price.'
Or even worse they list the (sale) price if you buy 2 or more, but do not list the regular single price anywhere.
I thought—and this is just a vague offhand recollection—that I had heard that Taylor provided some form of kickback to McDonald's for the lucrative contract.
Basically yes - I used HN Search to look for relevant titles, but the last link (which is by far the biggest thread) I ran into because someone posted it in one of the other threads.
Eventually I want to build software to support these 'related' lists so people can add links to them collaboratively.
Pivot to what? Their product is focused on a specific niche market with a specific niche problem, and the entire market is being closed. Why not take a moon-shot stab at fighting for it, when the sentiment for people stuck with these machines seems to be wildly in their favor? From my armchair it seems plausible there could be a legal outcome in Kytch’s favor because the sale and lack of adequate maintenance of these machines may be bordering on illegal.
The chances of winning are slim, appeals will take a very long time with considerable expense, and they'll have wasted time and energy that they could've spent on an _actual_ pivot. (I don't know if you've been through protracted litigation as a principal trying to recover damages but it is a long, expensive, and painful slog.)
An actual pivot would be finding a different niche market for the device or tweaking the device to serve the same market differently. Find an industrial machine to attach it to and use your notification system to provides alerts and reminders about its maintenance.
Completely agree this could be high effort on Kytch’s part. I mean launching a successful business is super high effort too, so there’s already evidence they’re up for a high effort long term play.
I guess it’s not up to us to define what an “actual” pivot can look like. Certainly switching to a legal strategy is in fact a pivot from product development and traction metrics.
This new strategy doesn’t seem crazy to me, having tried to launch a business myself. I agree it’s a moon-shot, but again, it’s plausible that they do have a leg to stand on here due to the history of problems these machines have.
* edit BTW, I’d speculate wildly that there’s a very good chance Kytch was fully aware of the legal dangers of their plan, and went into the product development phase with eyes wide open in the first place. In addition to their plausible chances for success here, it’s also plausible that this legal fight was the expected outcome of their plan, and part of its design, long before it happened.
Macdonald's wants to own the machines and owning maintenance is part of that. They do roughly the same thing with McCafe machines that arguably compete with Starbucks and others. The most likely explanation is that these ice cream machines have turned out to have serious reliability problems that have so far not been addressed.
Many of the startups have made a lot of their money by arbitraging regulation and safety (see Uber , AirBnB, Tesla self driving).
McDonalds is a company that literally serves billions of people. If there is any food borne illness, it can literally kill people and it will be front page news all over. As such, McDonalds keeps a very tight lid on what franchisees are allowed to do.
Installing an unauthorized addition to a very safety critical equipment (soft serve can easily harbor very nasty bacteria) which potentially enables people to do unauthorized diagnosis and work on machines they may or may not understand is a recipe for disaster at McDonalds’ scale.
Is this a cool device? Yes. Should you install a hack on something that can make thousands of people very sick? Probably not.
I think the core of the problem was less food safety failures and more "user error" reasons. Then instead of saying "there is to much milk in the hopper remove some, and restart", or providing an error code lookup they just flash "error call your technician".
This device just told the user what was actually wrong with the machine so they could choose to correct it, or call the technician to actually repair it. I don't think there was any indication that the franchises were tearing the machines apart to replace broken parts.
Simply providing a please manually discard product, clean and restart machine due to pasteurization failure code and procedure would have probably avoided the whole fiasco.
Which from the sounds of it, is basically what the "improved" machines do, they aren't improved in any way except to report the failures to the user, and provide appropriate user level remedies.
Yeah, the other element is that successful operation is dependent on a complex process that happens overnight, takes multiple hours, and cannot be bypassed (for legitimate safety reasons). The hacker device deciphers the error messages and also provides notifications to the owner during these processes. Thus, if the system runs into a common issue at 11pm, early in the cleaning, the issue can be addressed immediately, and the cleaning re-started. Without the hacker device, the problem is often not discovered until much later, by which time it's too late to complete the cleaning process by lunch; or, even worse, the extended delay means that a technician needs to be called to reset/clean the machine, adding more delays.
Huh. I guess I'd be surprised if McDonald's franchise license didn't allow them to just say "stop using Kytch, because we said so". So, why do anything more than that, as is alleged? Is it just that Kytch is mainly suing for discovery and/or settlement rather than because they think they'll win?
So in other words, friends of the McDonald Corporations majority owners (Taylor) saw a chance to steal a companies IP and use it for themselves to better their own products and McDonalds helped them do it.
I'm interested in the shift in terminology. Previous coverage has referred to them as a software company or device manufacturer, but this round is referring to them as "hackers", which seems like a framing McDonald's would benefit from in lawsuit proceedings.
Regardless of the technical or business merits of the device, there is a lesson in this for anyone building a product that effectively depends on the co-operation of a much bigger player.
Doing this with their enthusiastic co-operation has to be the best path. Doing it in the face of an antagonistic relationship is really risky.
I always assumed the margins on ice cream were very very thin and that was why the machines were so often broken: people come for the promise of ice cream, they buy a burger and fries anyway, so who cares if they actually get the ice cream...
from the sounds of the rest of the discussion - ice cream is a core enough part of DQ's business that they just have a normal machine that does it, where McDonald's uses a whiz-bang machine that can freeze the ice cream on-demand. So the McDonald's machine never has waste if they don't sell ice cream all night, but it also is a maintenance nightmare.
The machines at Dairy Queen are (mostly) not Taylor machines. They also don't have the pasturization function, they must be cleaned and sanitized manually.
In other words, the machine has determined it's unsafe to serve the contents (because soft serve needs to be pasteurized at certain intervals), not that it's physically incapable of doing so. Therefore it's "broken".
(Disclaimer: I've never used one of these soft serve machines, just read through manuals and stories about them.)