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This great (mini) YouTube documentary gives some background what lead up to the lawsuit. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 )
Don't light your grill in someone else's lawn and expect your party keep on forever.
If you are a two-person startup, the last thing you should be doing in the face of a market disruption is protracted litigation. Pivot, just pivot.
Sometimes you pivot out. This looks like a pivot to litigation.
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I don’t understand your opening sentence. Why would they keep it unplugged?
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 Jobsia…
It's a cost problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are a two-person startup, the last thing you should be doing in the face of a market disruption is protracted litigation. Pivot, just pivot.
I think this is the pivot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t understand your opening sentence. Why would they keep it unplugged?
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 Jobsia…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 lik…
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.
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 McDona…
Yep, lawyers can take cases on either for a small fee + percentage of any settlement, or even just entirely on the chance of a win. The hope is to threaten McDonalds for a billion dollars (pinky) and get a settlement for a few million out of court and wrap things up quietly. Happens more often than you'd like.
Seems justified to me though. Maybe not legally, but I would too be motivated to annoy McDonalds in their situation.
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:…
I don’t understand your opening sentence. Why would they keep it unplugged?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t understand your opening sentence. Why would they keep it unplugged?
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 opt…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are a two-person startup, the last thing you should be doing in the face of a market disruption is protracted litigation. Pivot, just pivot.
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…
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.