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The FTC and DOJ want to make sure it’s legal to repair McDonald’s ice cream machines
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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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.