The FTC and DOJ want to make sure it’s legal to repair McDonald’s ice cream machines

fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 485 points –
The FTC and DOJ want to make sure it’s legal to repair McDonald’s ice cream machines
theverge.com

Fucking absolutely!

25

It's too late, McDonald's screwed themselves on that by allowing the machine company to play stupid games. I don't see McDonald's as a place to go for ice cream, haven't for literally decades, and I don't know anyone who does.

I hope the temporary kickbacks they got were worth it.

They still need some rulemaking around this and general right to repair though.

Exactly, to use a bizarre example it illegal to trade onions on the futures market specifically but the bill that law is in has broader language curtailing market manipulation through supply hoarding. If the right to repair gets written up it will set precedent

and general right to repair though.

And right to modify!

McDonald corporation and their franchises are two separate entities. The corporation makes money no matter what. Its the franchises who suffer.

I'm sure the contractor made out like bandits and is friends with the board of corporate so it's totally fine since it's the franchisees[sic] who are responsible for fixing it.

The Pistachio McFlurry is kinda nice ngl

Hold up. When and where is/was this a thing?

I tought it was a global thing.

It's very hard to find it mentioned online outside of the Italian McDonald's branch. There is a chance it might be local to my country.

Braum's gang sound off!

With my luck they're also a shitty company and I had no idea...

They ended their exclusivity contract with the ice cream machine maker a few years back. So they can use other machines than the shitty ones.

Let's do that but also for everything else money can buy.

90 days to have someone to come fix the damn thing, absolutely ridiculous.

Lets not forget the debacle where a third party company designed a cheap and permament fix for the ice cream machines and mcdonalds responded by comiting libel against that company. The company that makes the ice cream machine then outright stole their IP (found to have outright copy pasted code with comments and all) and briefly sold it as their own fix before I belive discontinuing it.

Kind of like the ice cream machine fix version of 'embrace, extend, extinguish' but with all the finesse of beating someone up in an alley.

I didn’t think they would actually talk about the McDonald’s ice cream machine but no, it looks like the comments specifically referred to “soft serve machines” that can cost as much as $625 in lost sales daily!

its weird how every joke about some aspect of america is just some kind of corporate corruption.

It doesn't surprise me in the least that franchisees would stop selling ice cream, and claim the machine is out of order. It's by far the most rational response from their perspective. It also has the benefit of conditioning your customers not to expect ice cream. But that then begs the question: who owns the McDonald's experience, the experience deliverer or the brand owner?

I worked at a McDonalds in high school, and there were two reasons it was out of order: 1) standard “machine is broken” and 2) cleaning issues.

It took an employee almost an entire shift to clean the machine appropriately to pass health inspection. To their credit, there was never any half ass cleaning attempts, we always had to sterilize the machine. People would come in and joke about how the machine is down, “haha”, but in reality some poor sap is scrubbing down the parts that look like they belong in a bondage torture film.

I read that the machines are engineered to 'break' easily as a pretext to force cleaning. Supposedly McD's worry in a scenario with non-self-sabotaging units is that the worst franchisees would rarely clean, leading to customers getting sick, leading to brand risk worn solely by McD. You'd be better placed to determine the truth of that.

I honestly don’t know if they were broken. A light would come on saying it needed service. We would turn it off, drain it, clean it, then wait for the service guy.

this is like years too late, I'm not going to mcdonalds for ice cream anymore, especially not now that it's almost 6$ for a mcflurry. l can spend that much buying M&M's and the ice cream myself and grt more than one serving for it