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iFixit wants Congress to let it hack McDonald’s ice cream machines
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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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.
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.
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