iFixit wants Congress to let it hack McDonald’s ice cream machines

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 543 points – iFixit wants Congress to let it hack McDonald’s ice cream machines
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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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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.

2 more...

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.

TLDW?

TLDR: Mcdonalds and an ice cream machine company are up to some scummy shit to fuck over franchises and customers for more profits.

TLDW: Mcdonalds and the company that makes almost all fast food ice cream machines, Taylor, have had a long time partnership.

Through this partnership, Mcdonalds franchises are only allowed to buy a singular type of Taylor machine. All of Taylor's machines that other chains use work just fine, but the ones Mcdonalds is forced to use through the partnership are basically designed to be shitty. They break all the time, and when it breaks down, the error code doesn't even tell the employees what's wrong, even if it's something simple the employee could fix themselves. It forces the Mcdonalds franchises to get a repair technician from Taylor making them pay assloads of money on repair costs, and these repairs of Mcdonalds' machines account for a massive amount of Taylor's revenue.

Mcdonalds corporate is hurt none in this process, only the franchises, so Mcdonalds Corporate and Taylor stay buddy buddy. Some other company made a third party addition for the Taylor machines that puts out proper error codes that allow employees to fix minor issues on the fly, Mcdonalds has banned their franchises from using these for "safety issues".

I would still suggest watching the video in your spare time though, it's a really fascinating case study of how companies collude to fuck over customers and even their own lesser partners.

Edit: Grammar, Formatting

I used to work for Taylors competition Electrofreeze as a refrigeration repair tech. if Taylor is anything like Electrofreeze it was (going back 7 years) $265 just for me to walk into the door. If you forgot to flip a switch and that's all I had to do, $265 please.

I imagine they make a lot of money off of that. Plus marking up parts... $600 compressor we would sell for $2000.

I really enjoyed fixing things for people, I just hated having to hit them over the head with the service charge when they didn't really need service :/

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.

The original article contains 405 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 47%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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.

Do they really break all the time or they just don't fucking clean them when they should and they refuse to keep working

There's a 4 hour heat cycle it has to go through as part of the cleaning. In addition, the machines are apparently very temperamental and throw errors a lot, but the error codes are (arguably intentionally) obscure so typical employees just aren't going to know what's wrong with it. Also machine servicing is done exclusively by the machine manufacturer, so if any work needs to be done to it they've gotta schedule a tech call-out.

I have no clue about the McDonald's ice cream machine but the one I used to have to use when I worked at Burger King could have various issues, for instance the most common reason it went down was it getting low on mix and someone not refilling it, if that would happen for about 30+ min it would freeze the thing solid and at that point you have to turn it off for hours, and you still probably have to tear it apart and run hot water through it which would make a huge mess just to get it in unfroze. Worst part is I was a closer, and if the people on the shift before me weren't keeping up with it, I could come in to it being frozen... I hated that thing

Cmon MegaMan.EXE let's bust the Viruses in the Ice Cream machine

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.

I very much suspect that the ones that have their machines down more often are just struggling/refusing to pay the repair fees.

One near me that rakes in more than almost any other in the country always has their machines working. Yet the one that's always empty about 20 miles away almost never has their's working.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4 suggests it is far more than that. Rather the machines are intentionally designed to be hard to debug and just give cryptic errors rather than useful information. So simple things like the hopper is too full and could get get up to temperature during a cleaning cycle that an worker could fix or prevent if they knew instead have no idea what is wrong and need to call out a repair technician to diagnose and fix. There have been devices designed and sold a few years ago that can give this information to the workers - but where banned by McDonalds and are now in a lawsuit with them. The whole thing smells of a conspiracy far more than just bad franchise owners.

And the problem - with similar machines made by the same company - does not happen to other restaurant chains, only the McDonald's ones.

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.