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Investigating why McDonald's ice cream machines are often broken [video]

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Re: Investigating why McDonald's ice cream machines are often broken [video]

#241

Post by curryst »

Grustaf wrote: post #125
mrob wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because losing 14% of ice cream sales beats getting sued for poisoning people and losing their reputation for good food safety. If you can't trust McDonalds to be a safe choice, why would you go there at all?

Did you watch the film? The idea is that McDonalds are knowingly letting another company overcharge their franchisees, it's not about safety. Supposedly other fast food chains use the same machines without these problems.

Someone above posted a Wired article you should check out. Basically, McDonald's uses the same machine to make both ice cream cones and milkshakes, meaning it has 2 hoppers. In addition, it uses a pump instead of gravity, which allows them to serve more ice cream cones per minute but makes it vastly more complicated.

I can see how McDonald's would make a strategic choice to lower their time to serve a customer in exchange for a machine that is broken part of the time. They actually track and chastise workers based on taking more than some absurdly short amount of time to serve a customer. It seems like a corporate strategy for them, and this is in line with that.

Re: Investigating why McDonald's ice cream machines are often broken [video]

#242

Post by curryst »

addicted wrote: post #22
ianai wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s no fixing operator error.

It’s not operator error. As the video repeatedly points out, the same machines, by the same vendor, installed in other fast food restaurants (Wendy’s, etc), do not face similar breakdowns. It’s clearly a McDonald’s Corporate sanctioned plan.

McDonald's uses unique machines that have two hoppers so they can serve both milkshakes and ice cream. More parts, more complexity. They also use a pump instead of gravity, so they can serve customers more quickly. That pump is probably what necessitates all these complicated moving parts, and makes it so much more prone to failure.

Re: Investigating why McDonald's ice cream machines are often broken [video]

#244

Post by smcl »

ChrisRR wrote: post #124
smcl wrote: post #76

Is this "the ice cream machine is always broken" meme has always puzzled me. I don't go often to mcdonalds but with my ex-gf we would stop by if we're on a trip somewhere and she'd usually get an ice cream. I don't think we ever encountered the ice cream machine being out of service. Is it more of an issue in the US or did we just have extremely good luck?

Well statistically, every 7/8 of the times it would be broken. If you go often enough, I would think 1/8 feels like it's all the time.

Ah but what I meant was in the ~50 or so visits in the last 5 years this has never happened to me. So I was wondering whether I was just lucky or if it’s an entirely different situation in Europe

Re: Investigating why McDonald's ice cream machines are often broken [video]

#245

Post by viztor »

alpb wrote: post #227
viztor wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they? As long as their business is profitable, there is no reason to launch a lawsuit that could cost them their business just for some repair cost.

Imagine you have 50 EC2 instances and each of them suffers 15% downtime monthly. Amazon is asking money to reboot them and get them up and running.

That's different isn't it? Those McDonalds aren't completely shut down, but suffers 'performance' issues where they still have most of their revenue, just not all of what they would regularly have. And your business don't depend on AWS, while most McDonalds restaurants do depend on McDonald to have a business to begin with.
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