The "Real" conspiracy behind McDonald's "broken" Ice-cream machine

Being a fan of McDonald's ice cream is a pretty tough task. You get excited for a scoop of McFlurry and rush to the store, only to be told that the ice cream machine is broken — yet again. It's a problem nearly every McDonald's customer has to face. And it's not something which has been discovered recently, in fact, it has been this way for a few years now. It's a familiar observation for all that the ice cream machines at McDonald's always seem to be down. So after  looking at the internal data, reading 100 page instruction manual for ice cream makers (which was absolutely boring but did give me the results), and it turns out there is something really weird and fishy going on here, something that hasn't been reported on before and something that shows that how McDonald's broken ice cream machines actually disclose a major story about how big businesses protect each another even if that hurts their customers. Once the people started to notice this, the Wall street journal, Wired and a bunch of other media houses started to report on it and the conclusion that they came to was that these machines aren't actually "broken", they're just going through a really long and complicated cleaning cycle that lasts four hours at a time and when that happens, the employees tell you it's broken because that's just easy to explain.

So human error and this long cleaning cycle, that was the conclusion that like everyone came to and everyone seemed to be satisfied with that. I mean, I would be satisfied with that,  but wait, hold on a minute. After going through some more paperwork, we found out that other popular fast food chains such as Wendy's, doesn't have this problem and what's even insane to know is that they use the same brand of machine as McDonald's does, and yet they don't have a broken machine**. So why is it only McDonald's that has a problem with the broken ice cream make?** If you want the real answer to this, take out time and talk to the people who suffer the most when these machines are broken, which actually isn't McDonald's Corp., in-fact it's the people who own these restaurants or franchises. These are the people who have to pay the price in terms of lost revenue. So, I went deep in the 111 page owner's manual (don't even try to read it!) and I will summarise what it says. What I've found is as mind-boggling as infuriating it is and to understand this you have to understand how these ice cream machines work and why they break so often. So sit back and grab something to eat as it's going to be a long journey. Firstly, you understand that, who is getting rich every time one of these thing breaks and why they have an incentive to keep them broken.

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So let's look at the specific machine in talk here, it's known as C602 and it's made by a company called Taylor, specifically for McDonald's. Taylor is like an old friend of McDonald's and they've been working together since the very beginning of McDonald's but, as we discussed, Taylor makes ice cream machines for a bunch of other fast food restaurants like Wendy's and Chick-Fil-a but they don't have a broken machine. So it's something really particular to McDonald's and Taylor that explains the ice cream machine issue. But here's crown jewel of the portfolio, usually the employees working at McD perform the cleaning process and they do this overnight while the store is closed, someone in the night shift gets the cleaning cycle running and then they lock up for the night, the next morning they can expect to see one of two things, heat cycle was successful the ice cream machine is ready to use or heat cycle failed. Now they don't know exactly why the heat cycle failed overnight. They're looking at this ancient interface that looks like it's from the Indus Valley and all they see is a heat mode failure or some other obscure code that doesn't really tell you what the exact error is. So this is the reason why they always say "The machine is broken". Now the Store Manager has nothing to do but to call the technician and  it turns out that Taylor is the only company that is authorised to repair and maintain these machines, it's in their franchise-contract, so you are obliged to follow it. And the Taylor's repair cost is insanely high, so the franchise owners have no option but to spend thousands and thousands of dollars, just because the machine locks them out and they have no idea why.

And the interesting fact about Taylor is that when its profit and loss sheet was observed carefully, it was found that around 25% (quarter) of their business comes from "Repairs and maintenance". Surprisingly, since when this thing came out in 2003, there have been quite a few software updates but instead of improving usability of the software, it has actually introduced a bunch of weird error codes that don't help anyone solve, any problems. "It is a product that is set up to fail and that has no incentive to improve" because what this means for Taylor is simply more profit. Long story short, this isn't some conspiracy, this is actually very rational human and business behaviour, when one has a monopoly over ice cream makers and they've created a product that breaks all the time and gives users no clear feedback as to why it's broken. Now Taylor has the capacity to manufacture and improve ice cream makers and they do that all the time at Wendy's, Chick-Fil-a and In and Out and yet the machine made for their exclusive partner McDonald's doesn't receive the same improvement and updates. Instead, it receives a bunch of new error codes and miserable user experience which always leads to more profits for Taylor.

So, in conclusion, the theme here is the same and it has been same the whole time; two very old companies that have been working together for a long time looking out for each other and saving their own necks from being disrupted by new companies. It's honestly some smart shrewd cutthroat business behaviour, but it hurts the franchisees and all of us who want to go and buy our favourite ice-cream at McD. This is an anti-competitive behaviour, trying to crush new products in the name of retaining control. So the next time you're at McDonald's and they don't have an ice cream, just know that it's not because of lazy employees or because of lack of resources, it's just because there's an old relationship between two old companies that don't want things to change.

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