That’s not fair. I don’t eat at McDonalds, but I would never go around telling everyone that.
Oh.
Bugger!
14 Likes
I worked in a shop where we had a similar situation with a CNC machine. I won’t name the company, but the quid pro quo was much more obvious as you needed to get one of their certified technicians to deal with the problems. Once we were on a first name basis with our technician, he gave us a higher level password so that we could access parts of our own CNC machine to get better data or change parameters that solved the problems.
Just like the Taylor machines, this CNC machine would show cryptic error codes that gave no real information.
Now some may say it keeps people from overriding safety features (not really, those were easy to override), but what it really did was just make it that much harder to find out what was actually malfunctioning on the machine.
On the other hand, we had machines from a different company that was very helpful. Once their tech guy knew I was somewhat computer savvy, he had me hook up a laptop to our drop/scan table and straight line rip set up so I could read off error codes and find out what was putting them out of sync.
Which machines do yo think I’ll reccomend?
9 Likes
In Japan, the ice cream machines at McDonald’s are never broken.
3 Likes
Having worked in a few McDs, back in the day, the REAL deal is that these machines are nearly always purposefully broken by the employees in the first place. NO ONE likes having to a) deal with serving from it, because it’s slow as heck, or b) clean the damn thing, which is a throbbing, greasy PITA.
6 Likes
McDonald’s has ice cream?
I dunno. They control a lot of their franchisee’s behavior, though. My father loved McDonald’s, partly because it was predictable. It may not be a great meal, but you always knew what you were getting and it would be the same from one Mickey D’s to another. So maybe they don’t want to mess with McDonald’s ice cream or open up to variation by having more than one machine vendor.
3 Likes
What Maccas (aussie slang name for them) sell is homogeneity. You can go to any McDonalds, anywhere in the world and have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to get.
2 Likes
but that doesn’t explain why the Taylor machines for McDonald’s break down so often but the machines Taylor makes for other companies seldom do.
there’s collusion.
2 Likes
If you haven’t seen the Michael Keaton movie “The Founder”, it’s worth a watch. It’s about Ray Croc, the longtime McDonald’s CEO, and how he basically stole the McDonald’s concept from the brothers who conceived it. Basically, it shows that McDonald’s has been screwing over their franchisees from the very start. Ironic that Croc started as a salesman of milkshake machines.
8 Likes
Right to repair is irrelevant in this case. In order to own a franchise, the owner agrees not to have any unauthorized-by-the-company-that-makes-it technicians work on the machine, even to the point of reading error codes or even knowledge of what the error codes means. If someone who does own one of these machines does repair it themselves, that breaks the contract, and the restaurant is no longer a McDonald’s, and no longer has access to McDonald’s supply chains. And that’s assuming someone is actually allowed to own one of these specific machines in the first place, which is probably not the case.
3 Likes
It’s a good video and good journalism. While I disagree with his final takeaway (new innovators versus old corporations), he does a solid job laying out the information. We NEVER had these problems with ice cream machines back when I worked at McDonald’s, but that was long before this machine became the one and only choice for franchisee’s. There is indeed some sort of collusion going on between the management of these two companies, especially when you realize their machines for OTHER chains don’t exhibit the same problems. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out McDonald’s execs own significant shares of Taylor stocks (now converted to whatever company owns Taylor), but I have no proof of that of course.
On his take away: he makes the classic modern mistake of assuming “disrupters” are a net force for good by getting around corporate roadblocks. He’s right in this case, but unfortunately the MO of disrupters tends to be “we can ignore all laws on the books that protect customers and workers so we can soak up far more profits and undermine and industry.” While those industries (cabs for example) have their own problems, doing an end-run around public law to provide the same service ultimately is bad for society as a whole. The ideas are always sound (“let’s create an app for ride sharing!”), the execution always horribly flawed because the only motive once the venture capitalists get their funding mitts on the product is “maximize profits and wipe out competition.”
7 Likes
I really cannot believe he has 30 minutes to tell his story, then glides over the question: Taylor makes machines not just for McDonalds, but for Wendys, Dairy Queen, etc. so why don’t those franchisees experience the constant service interruptions?
Is it because McD franchisees are specifically required to use the Taylor C602/C606 machine, and Wendys/DQ/etc use different Taylor products? (Could this perhaps be explained that each company has slightly different product specifications? The C602 machine that makes a McD McFlurry® cannot be used to make a DQ Blizzard®?) However, even if that is the case, why does Taylor drop the ball with McD machines but, apparently, does an adequate job with non-McD machines? Because DQ/Wendys/etc do not enforce Taylor-exclusive agreements upon franchisees and thus Taylor has competition and is motivated to innovate non-McD machines?
5 Likes
I’ve used lots of Taylor machines, mostly basic ice cream freezers, and they could all be cleaned by pouring hot sanitizer through the drum and running it for a while, then running the small bits through the dishwasher. These machines are designed to clean themselves while filled with ice cream mix-which is just weird. Even when I worked at BK in the 80s you had to empty the machine to clean it. Apparently the amount of mix in the machine can have a huge effect on how well the cleaning cycle goes, and I can easily see employees filling that sucker all the way to the brim so they don’t have to do it twice. That the machine has a deliberately obfuscating interface just makes it more frustrating to deal with. I suspect that the machines at non McDs locations don’t have this “feature” and thus are easier to deal with.
As for what McDs gets out of this-how many people come to the drive through and drive away with nothing? It also gets people in the habit of going to the restaurant and checking. If you went by and got your cone, you might not return for weeks. If you don’t get your cone, you might be back tomorrow.
2 Likes
Agreed he should discuss that more. I was thinking that it may be because those other restaurants are not franchised, but Wendy’s is
Wow. That’s a paradoxical and pathological possibility. (Did McD bean counters do the research on the downstream effects of 1/8th of their outlets not being able to serve ice cream?)
I wonder, though, if it’s simply more likely that: unsatisfied customer gets fed up, goes to a competing fast food chain (for the ice cream), becomes ongoing customer of competing fast food chain.
3 Likes
There is a long form article in Wired that explains this. These are not the same machines those other franchises use, but a much more complex machine. In other franchises, the machine must be emptied and cleaned every night, but the machines used by McDonalds instead are capable of re-pasteurizing their contents on their own every evening, preventing the waste of the ingredients they contain. It is this extra complexity that seems to be the source of the reliability issues.
2 Likes
The mix emptied out of the machines isn’t wasted, it goes into a container and is kept in the cooler overnight. The “easy” option of making the machine repasturize the mix is only compounded by the inscrutable interface design.
The mix shouldn’t need repasturization if it’s been kept cold enough in the machine in the first place.
1 Like
Hey, I didn’t design the thing, I’m just passing on what the article said! 
The article was posted elsewhere in the comments if you’re interested in the details.
1 Like
Perhaps McD executives also serve on the BOD of Taylor or its parent company and are thus interested in its stock performance. Or it could just be under the table kickbacks, but the stock options are legal.
2 Likes
In Russia, the ice cream machines at McDonald’s break you.
2 Likes
