It’s probably locational and possibly the time of day. Since I understand cleaning them are a pain, certain locations may not prioritize it properly, or the downtime is always when you would go. The one by me for example has been down all of the 10+ times I’ve asked for something, but I know family members have gotten some ice cream there, so it’s not like permanently busted or anything.
The documentary on it explained that the cycles are timed to ensure proper cooling, and not warming too much for too long for sanitary reasons, so if an employee over filled the milk by a small amount the machine would sense the extra process time and default to needing a dump and clean. There was that raspberry pi device that would bypass that but for obvious reasons mcdonalds repair company lobbied against it.
Funny thing is that over here in Europe the ice cream machines seem to work almost all the time. I understand that it’s because they use a different brand of machines, but I’m not sure about the details.
There they had to change the machines to the other brand because the ones they use here (us) was found to literally be designed to require a ton of maintinence so they could make money charging for repairs.
TLDR machine designed to break breaks a lot, not allowed in Europe.
I’m not that often in Maccies but I’ve never heard of the flurry machine being broken, I’ve read it’s a US thing due to the maintenance contracts
That said the meme still works in Europe because I’m pretty sure they’re not allowed to call that hydrogenated vegetable oil-filled shite “ice cream” here 😂
Hydrogenated vegetable oil? The stuff that is used for soft-serv in the US is ultra-thick sweetened, vanilla flavored, milk. You could put it on cereal, if you really want diabetes.
Ingredients: Milk, Sugar, Cream, Corn Syrup, Natural Flavor, Mono And Diglycerides, Cellulose Gum, Guar Gum, Carrageenan, Vitamin A Palmitate.
tl;dr the company Taylor manufactures the ice cream machines to fail without any explanation or diagnosis process, then charge wildly exorbitant fees to fix them, and cut McD’s in on the profit. Some franchises found ways around this and McD’s just ordered them to stop. So the franchises just leave them broken as often as possible.
It is less about being “lazy” than it is about being understaffed and the ice cream machine having a very labor and time intensive cleaning process.
I know this is The Internet, but could we maybe not shit on overworked and underpaid labor? Since, that is the whole point. Corporate McDonald’s and the companies with contracts to maintenance those machines actively want all of your ire to go to the 19 year old night shift manager rather than actually question the fundamental problems with this setup. And a lot of the issues plaguing this are the same that plague you in your comfortable home.
ifixit.com/…/whats-inside-that-mcdonalds-ice-crea… is a good article on these issues and why it is, like most things, a problem of lobbyists and corporate interests. That you chose to blame on the workers.
It only gets more frustrating when you learn how franchising works too. The pseudo “owner” of a location doesn’t have much say in anything in particular and doesn’t have much of a budget to do the right things with because they spend everything to have the names, logos, ingredients, recipes, and specific equipment, and there are very tight specs to fall within that can get inspected at any time. So it’s clear that the “owner” should hire enough staff and pay them enough to attract good workers who will make it possible for you to buy a mcflurry, but that “owner” probably pulls 60-90 hour weeks for only about double the rate of what their lowest paid employee makes. They tend to get suckered in because it looks so good on paper but it’s so much worse than it seems. They thought they were signing up to be capitalists and instead they just become a slightly different tier of exploited laborer with much higher stress because of personal investment in the failure or success of the location. They’re effectively indentured servants. The standard workers at least have the freedom to say fuck you and go get a different job without actually losing anything.
If a franchise unionizes, I think that it should be collective for all of the laborers to have security against the corporations ratfucking interests. Corporations want us to demonize their proxy lightning rod location “owners” but we should see through that bullshit.
lemmy.sdf.org
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