We can now fix McDonald's ice cream machines • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by dangus » Tue, Oct 29, 2024, 1:01 PM UTC

downut wrote: post #296

dangus wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The home ice cream market is perhaps far more developed than you realize. You can make a harder scooped ice cream style with compressor-equipped machines from brands like Whynter. You can make soft serve, milkshakes, concretes, and gelato with the Ninja CREAMi. I've heard it even does a decent job of making a knockoff of what you get out of a Pacojet [1] at Michelin-starred restaurants. And of course there are a numb…

I think I spent a dollar, maybe two, at the flea market, on our second hand mechanical ice cream maker. The social benefits of having the various kids, always including the guests', working it, trading off until the beautiful result happened, makes me intensely glad we weren't being judged by having some of these oh so awesome technological miracles expected. Yeah, I don't envy your knowledge or experience.

I’m not understanding the negativity you’re projecting.

I personally think it’s wonderful that so many kitchen technologies are more accessible to home cooks. A machine like a Ninja CREAMi is opening up accessibility to ice cream varieties that were previously difficult or impossible to make at home.

I’m also not really understanding how improved appliances equals a lack of social family opportunity. You can still make cooking a group activity and I still do that with my family.

I’m not saying everyone needs some kind of expensive appliance. My ice cream maker is a KitchenAid ice cream bowl attachment which costs $60 brand new, and you could certainly find one used for much less. Products like that have all the modesty you’re desiring, it’s basically just an insulated bowl that attaches to an appliance that hasn’t changed in almost a century.

The top recommended ice cream maker on WireCutter is similar, it’s a $70 insulated bowl with a motor on it.

What I am saying is that the home ice cream market has become a gourmet hobby, so much so that commercial ice cream brands are really competing with home cooks who are saying “I can make better ice cream than this junk from the store.”

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

#322

Post by devilbunny » Tue, Oct 29, 2024, 4:41 PM UTC

wwweston wrote: post #263

devilbunny wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tell me more about arrogance, like it's not arrogance and maybe even hubris for someone to assert they just naturally know their interests and how they interact with various policies (much less how parties are going to show up to support them). It's not that someone is dumb if they sometimes don't know their own interests. It's that it's a hard problem that even smart people can fail at. Maybe especially smart people…

> Well, if it's true in a 2024 presidential race "about their policies, Harris would win handily... because voters — whether they know it or not — overwhelmingly prefer the vice president’s agenda to the former president’s"[0] but also true that the race is a coin flip, that suggests some significant margin of people who are doing something else other than policy-interest calculations.

I looked at that article. Distinctly missing from the methodology is "and how much do you actually care about this issue?". I might agree with Candidate A on dogs, mom's apple pie, and a thousand other issues, but Candidate B only on Hot Button Issue A and Hot Button Issue B - but if my concern is about Hot Button Issues A and B, then agreeing with a greater number of positions from Candidate A is really beside the point.

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

#323

Post by consteval » Tue, Oct 29, 2024, 6:50 PM UTC

trollbridge wrote: post #236

ThinkBeat wrote: post #226

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…

Except Dairy Queen, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s outside of the U.S. don’t have this problem. Somehow I doubt DQ employees are paid better or are better trained or more diligent about regular maintenance. The difference is they don’t have a machine designed to require expensive maintenance visits with a DRM lockout to retard attempts to maintain it by normal restaurant/HVAC maintenance contractors.

As a former DQ employee, I think they are better trained. We were required to know how to take down the machines and rebuild them, and we did it daily for cleaning. But DQ is in a unique position, because ice cream is the majority of their draw. We also taste tested the ice cream 5 times a day and measured air content 5 times a day.

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

#324

Post by xp84 » Tue, Oct 29, 2024, 11:07 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #170

xp84 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> decrease in revenue for McDonalds. It’s not a major problem for McDonald’s Inc. though! They don’t sell McFlurries! They lease buildings and land, and they do collect a 4% royalty on sales. But the franchisee loses the other 96% of the revenue and has to pay 100% of the “authorized Taylor repair” bill. So it’s a much bigger problem for them, and a moral hazard for McDonald’s to be able to force the store owners to…

If they want to squeeze more money from franchisees why not jack up the rent or royalties? The Taylor conspiracy is far less efficient at getting revenue (at the very least, you need to pay the technician), and doesn't even seem to be working very well, as evidenced by the number of stores not bothering to repair their machines.

> If they want to squeeze more money from franchisees

It's probably safe to say that any public company very much does want to ;)

> why not jack up the rent or royalties?

I assume that they will always do that (as much as contracts allow, and as much as the market will bear) regardless, so any upside from this scam is just incremental revenue on top of that.

Although I admit it's been so long since I read the original stories about this that I forgot what's in it for McDonalds Inc. Clearly Taylor's parent company makes out like a bandit (I'm assuming they pay the techs poorly and thus have a high margin) but IDK how much visibility we have publicly to what the financial arrangements are now, vs. what it might be if McDonalds Inc ripped up the Taylor contract tomorrow and say, signed a new one with a company that wasn't evil. Because I agree that I don't know how those dots are connected.

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

#325

Post by bonestamp2 » Wed, Oct 30, 2024, 12:58 AM UTC

borski wrote: post #186

minitoar wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything stopping a franchise from putting 2? I think it can’t be required because they have to meet some sort of smallest viable footprint.

Cost, most likely.

An ice cream machine costs less than $3,000. The whole McDonald's costs $1.5m - $2.5m. They could buy a second ice cream machine with 2-3 day's profit.

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

#326

Post by techjamie » Sun, Nov 03, 2024, 4:20 PM UTC

wkrsz wrote: post #314

wjnc wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My stint as a EU McD worker did give me a feel of how well scripted low skill labour can feel like pleasant work. I didn’t appreciate it at the time but it was six sigma checklist everything. There is a magic to smooth operation. In all my other jobs (dishwasher, mechanic, cleaner and now 20 yrs in insurance) nobody came close to the McD smoothness of operations. I hope I bring some of this smoothness to the people w…

> My stint as a EU McD worker did give me a feel of how well scripted low skill labour can feel like pleasant work. Would you care to write some more about this? I was under impression that scripted work is generally considered bad and makes people feel like cogs in a machine.

I would say that there is an upside to restaurant work in that, they're very small operations on a site level, and everyone's jobs usually feed into each other. So if you have a good leader and the team gets along, you're basically spending the day with people you know well and get to enjoy a pretty loose dynamic.

My favorite days were when I had my preferred set of team members and and the day barely felt like work at all for us. Working in a bigger org now, days like that aren't nearly as common.