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We can now fix McDonald's ice cream machines

ifixit.com

251–260 of 326 posts

Re: We can now fix McDonald's ice cream machines

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did this for a year and a half in high school. The McD procedure involves draining the barrel, flushing it with water, then disassembling each barrel assembly and removing every o-ring and gasket. https://youtu.be/SaYTx7qNJU4?si=Y2ZjWHQJHiKQfAFh Each part is washed in detergent, rinsed, and sanitized. Rings and gaskets are relubricated with food safe petroleum jelly, then everything is reassembled. Forget one ring…

Basically right, where I worked the parts were set in trays to air-dry overnight. There was a spot on the tray for each part, o-ring, and gasket so you could easily see if any were missing. The machines were reassembled the next morning. So the closers only had to break them down, wash, and sanitize. Once a week any dairy mix left in the machine was discarded, this "breaks the cycle" of any bacteria in the mix. So on…

Yeah, I was thinking more about the grandparent above that said it took 45 minutes and that had to mean breakdown/cleaning/reassembly in one step. I was there in 1985-86 and we did like you said, one crew member did the cleaning at close and let it air dry for the morning crew. But that was also because shakes/ice cream wasn't served during the breakfast shift. Someone had time in the morning to assemble and prime the machine before 10:30am (me).

I'm guessing 24/7 operation changed when and how the cleaning was done, leading to more contamination instead of less.

Re: We can now fix McDonald's ice cream machines

#252
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree. Who cares if the McDonald's ice cream machine is broken? It's shit ice cream. Most of you probably live near a better local ice cream/soft serve/custard joint. Heck, most of you probably live near a better corporate chain ice cream joint that probably also serves better food than McDonald's: Dairy Queen, In-N-Out, Shake Shack, Culver's, etc. If McDonald's didn't have breakfast or coffee the whole cha…

It's pretty good soft serve ice cream, which is a style many people like. It isn't really any worse than other chain soft serve ice cream like Dairy Queen's. It's not the same sort of thing as scooped hard ice cream, and it isn't something you can really make at home, whatever the merits of home made ice cream are.

We've made homemade ice cream dozens of times over 50 years... and the way I think about the delicious result is that it's like... soft serve ice cream. I think I prefer the texture of "scooped hard ice scream" but homemade with just cream, eggs, sugar, and whatever for the flavorings is just an outstanding tasty thing to eat.

I've never tasted industrial soft serve, maybe something else is going on?

Thinking back we always made it with a hand cranked machine[1], cooled by lots of salt on bagged ice cubes, maybe the current generation of electric home machines makes a different texture.

[1] A strong argument for keeping kids around.

Re: We can now fix McDonald's ice cream machines

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't see the OP campaigning, just stating fact. People vote against their personal interests when convinced to do so. I don't think that's a particularly controversial statement.

It is the height of arrogance to assume that someone is so dumb that they don't even know what their interests are. I have my interests. Some are satisfied by the Democrats. Some are satisfied by the Republicans. Some are satisfied by both. Some are satisfied by neither. My vote goes to the person who best satisfies my most important interests at the time. Sometimes I have to eat shit in doing so, but that's politics…

> It is the height of arrogance to assume that someone is so dumb that they don't even know what their interests are.

It’s also true. Call it arrogant all you want but it remains fact that people vote against their interests when persuaded to do so. If the retort is that it’s somehow rude to say this… so be it.

Re: We can now fix McDonald's ice cream machines

#255
post #137

> Meanwhile, Canada is in the final stages of considering legislation that would fix the Canadian version of the DMCA, a bill called C-244 that is in its third reading in the Senate and expected to move before the end of the month. If Canada legalized circumventing technological protection measures for the purposes of repair, we might just have to head north to find the tools we need to do repairs. That's good news,…

The government of Canada is really missing out by not selling this bill as a reason to keep them in power

It's not a government bill.

Re: We can now fix McDonald's ice cream machines

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just as an aside, in political science/international relations, a "state" is what you are calling a nation state. A "nation" is like canadian first nations or the cherokee nation or the german nation before there was a german state (not very long ago), i.e. it's an ethnicity/language. A nation state is when a nation and a state are combined, like Italy (a country, a polity, where the italian people live) and Japan. T…

>The USA is not a nation-state, it is just a state, nor is Canada. That throws up the question in my mind: What makes a people into a nation? How uniform do they have to be?

Quebec has entered the chat.

Re: We can now fix McDonald's ice cream machines

#257

The biggest reason I have read for why machines do not work, or are not being used is due to lack of maintenance, and employees who are trained to do so. (and people quit all the time). Having worked at a fast food join (not McDonalds) much earlier in my life, any lacking maintenance and proper cleaning, especially if there has been a power outage will turn the the machine into a rapid incubator for bacteria that wil…

> any lacking maintenance and proper cleaning, especially if there has been a power outage will turn the the machine into a rapid incubator for bacteria that will make you ill.

Yes, the correct frame of reference here is “how can we scale ice cream delivery to millions a day while keeping everyone healthy?” At this scale a single failure can make a lot of people very sick in a very short amount of time. Under these conditions maintenance needs to be extremely rigorous and performed by qualified people.

“Right to repair” says that equipment owners can’t be stopped from performing repairs if they want to. They’ll still be on the hook for demonstrating that they were qualified to make the repairs, so I predict this will do little to improved McDonalds ice cream availability: They’ll still need to wait for the qualified technician.

Re: We can now fix McDonald's ice cream machines

#258
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government of Canada is really missing out by not selling this bill as a reason to keep them in power

It's not a government bill.

> It's not a government bill.

It's a private member's bill (from a member of the governing party, supported unanimously by votes from every party)

Re: We can now fix McDonald's ice cream machines

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just as an aside, in political science/international relations, a "state" is what you are calling a nation state. A "nation" is like canadian first nations or the cherokee nation or the german nation before there was a german state (not very long ago), i.e. it's an ethnicity/language. A nation state is when a nation and a state are combined, like Italy (a country, a polity, where the italian people live) and Japan. T…

>The USA is not a nation-state, it is just a state, nor is Canada. That throws up the question in my mind: What makes a people into a nation? How uniform do they have to be?

I swear I’m not trying to pull an RTFM, but the Wikipedia page is genuinely an interesting one and goes into the history and the fact that nation-states, in particular, are a relatively modern phenomenon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation

Re: We can now fix McDonald's ice cream machines

#260
Does McD's still use these machines today? It seems like this has been going on for decades, more than long enough that pretty much everyone seems to know about it. I would have guessed that by now McD's would want to move on to a new setup that did not cause them such consistent negative PR and leave a trail of unhappy customers.
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