iFixit wants Congress to let it hack McDonald’s ice cream machines::McDonald’s ice cream machines are notorious for breaking all the time, so iFixit wants to help people repair them without the help of the manufacturer.
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Well hopefully it won’t be up to McDonald’s.
Let me introduce you to lobbying, and also hiring some lawyers to argue in the company’s favor.
Damn, I really wish you hadn’t
Yeah, I wish it wasn’t such a big factor weighed so heavily in McDonald’s favor.
It actually doesn’t help or harm McDonald’s Corporate at all on this issue. That’s why they’ve been fine with the status quo. It would help McDonald’s franchisees quite a bit, so I suspect McDonald’s won’t send lobbyists to deal with what they view as a non-issue.
Taylor, the manufacturer of the machines on the other hand stands to lose a significant percentage of the profits they currently make, and absolutely does have a dog in this fight. Thankfully they don’t have McDonald’s type funding, so it’s possible that we can win this one.
A company like iFixit you mean? Both sides can play that game. I’ll grant you that McDonalds probably have more money to burn on bribes but still.
Based on a quick search, iFixit’s revenue is around 50m a year while McDonald’s is 24 billion. It’s not even comparable lol
If I remember correctly I saw a video explaining this. Same goes with the device. Apparently the company that makes the machines and McDonalds have some sort of agreement where McDonald’s gets the machine at a huge discount but they have to use that company for repairs and only them. Win win for both. Company also added script to stop the device from working. Something like that.
Either way im at the point where I completely forget that McDonald’s has ice cream.
Here’s the video: https://piped.video/SrDEtSlqJC4?si=F9x-GPjuXEaSk7zO
Company also added script to stop the device from working. Something like that.
I don’t think it’s quite that devious. That kind of “feature” would probably be racketeering and ripe for lawsuit. I think it’s more that the machines are temperamental as fuck and the methods to fix the machines are kept under a very tight lid.
Yeah, an incorrect cleaning procedure can cause a error that requires maintenance personnel to reset the error. They don’t need to do anything else though, it’s completely fine to just do the cleaning again. Stuff like that.
Yeah, sounds more like a feature of cheap ice cream machines than malicious intent.
That’s the one!
They also have birthday ice cream cakes
This guy went on a deep dive to uncover the scam that is McDonald’s and their ice cream machines. https://youtu.be/SrDEtSlqJC4?si=F9x-GPjuXEaSk7zO
Worth the watch
I can’t believe how much of an antitrust it is and it’s just somehow allowed.
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TLDW?
Is this a US only thing? I’ve travelled all over europe and americas and I always try to go to each country’s Mcdonalds to see if they have anything different. NEVER have I encountered a broken ice cream machine.
Broken ice cream machines are a regular thing here in the UK.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But now we may have some glimmer of Shamrock Shake-flavored hope: not only has iFixit performed a teardown of McDonald’s machines, but it’s also petitioning the government to let it create the parts required for people to fix them.
As shown in a video posted to YouTube, iFixit purchased the same ice cream machine model used by McDonald’s and spent hours trying to get it up and running.
The machine spit out numerous error codes that iFixit says “are nonsensical, counterintuitive, and seemingly random, even if you spent hours reading the manual.”
Despite consisting of “easily replaceable parts,” such as three printed circuit boards, a motor and belt, and a heat exchanger, the ice cream machine can only be fixed by its manufacturer — Taylor — due to an agreement it has with McDonald’s.
While a company called Kytch attempted to remedy this by creating a product to read ice cream machine error codes, iFixit says McDonald’s “sent a letter to all of the franchise owners” instructing them not to use the device.
“We’d love to be able to make a device like Kytch that can read error codes on the ice cream machine we have, but we can’t because of copyright law,” Elizabeth Chamberlain, iFixit’s director of sustainability, says in the video.
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Love the right to repair laws
Do they really break all the time or they just don’t fucking clean them when they should and they refuse to keep working
Both I’m sure
Cmon MegaMan.EXE let’s bust the Viruses in the Ice Cream machine
His jumpsuit is so hot
I was under the impression that the maintenance was a pain in the ass and McDonald’s workers are payed less than the cost of living so therefore aren’t doing shit like that.
I think it is more malicious then that on the manufacturers part. It is more that when something goes wrong it just gives a cryptic error message and the workers have no clue what went wrong and so don’t know what to do to fix it or stop it from happening again. For instance, it seems one issue is that if you overfill the hopper and out it through a (4 hour long) cleaning cycle it will fail to reach the required temp and then refuse to work until it has gone through the cycle (for safety reasons). But all it spits out is a cryptic error message and the workers are clueless as to what is wrong. Then they need to call out a technician to diagnose and fix it at a fairly high hourly cost, even though it is something the works could solve if they know what was wrong (ie not filling up the hopper so much).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 goes into a deep dive of the problem. And note that the problem is only with McDonalds ones - other chain using the same basic machine don’t have the same issues. Likely due to some old partnership between the manufacturer and McDonald screwing over the franchise owners.
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The ice cream machine at my local McDonald’s always works. I eat their ice cream somewhat regularly and never been told it’s down.
Guess we’re done here folks. This guy says it’s not a problem so it must not be!
At any given moment about 10-13% of machines are down in the United States. Just go to the mcbroken website to see
By the way, the one near me has been down for like two years…I think they just don’t want to pay the extortion fee to fix it. Or maybe they are too lazy to clean it properly. Apparently corporate doesn’t give a damn because I’ve complained and they still never have ice cream
According to the video (it’s elsewhere in the thread), the standard for uptime for industrial machinery is amazingly close to 100%. Given a million opportunities for such a machine to have a fault, you should want less than a handful of times that it actually craps itself.
McDonald’s machines are down more than 10% of the time.
If I was a big industrial conglomerate like GE, VDL or Samsung and I had a machine that was down 10% of the time, and the error reporting was opaque and forced me to call the manufacturer for a service technician, AND all the critical operating parameters are behind some special manual that only their service technicians are allowed to have, I’d fucking sue the manufacturer.
That’s pretty interesting if it’s true, makes me wonder if they’re doing anything differently from the other stores that keeps their machine working.
