The website, which uses a bot to automatically attempt to place an online order for ice cream at every McDonald’s in America every 20 to 30 minutes and measures the results, reveals that at any given time over the past two months, somewhere between 5 and 16 percent of all US McDonald’s are unable to sell ice cream. So perhaps it’s no surprise that many McDonald’s restaurants’ ice cream machines seem to be as often broken as not. Taylor sells a machine with these technical demands to businesses where they’ll ultimately be run by a bored teenager whose fast-food career is measured in weeks. “Shamrock season is a big fucking deal,” O’Sullivan emphasizes.) Patrick’s Day–themed mint-green milkshake that boosts shake sales as much as tenfold. (Especially, O’Sullivan explains, during “shamrock season,” when McDonald’s offers a St. The result can be hundreds of dollars in sales immediately lost. The machine’s automated nightly pasteurization process, rather than make life easier for restaurant managers, has become their biggest albatross: Leave the machine with a bit too much or too little ingredient mixture in its hoppers, accidentally turn it off or unplug it at the wrong moment, or fall victim to myriad other trivial errors or acts of God, and the four-hour pasteurization process fails and offers a generic, inscrutable error message-meaning that the machine won’t work until the entire four hours of heating and freezing repeats, often in the middle of peak ice cream sales hours. The machines are “very, very, very finicky,” one McDonald’s franchisee’s tech manager says. A single one out of place or missing can cause the machine to fail. (Taylor denies obtaining Kytch devices but doesn’t deny trying to gain possession of one or that a Taylor distributor did ultimately access it.) The lawsuit will likely be only the first salvo from Kytch in a mounting, messy legal battle against both Taylor and McDonald’s.Īll these components of a Taylor ice cream machine have to be disassembled, cleaned, and lubricated every two weeks. The Kytch couple tells WIRED they’re planning to file a lawsuit against some McDonald’s franchisees who they believe are colluding with Taylor by handing over their Kytch devices to the ice cream machine giant and allowing them to be reverse-engineered-a violation of the franchisees' agreement with Kytch. And McDonald’s has gone so far as to send emails to McDonald’s franchisees, warning them that Kytch devices breach a Taylor machine’s “confidential information” and can even cause “serious human injury.”Īfter watching the efforts of McDonald’s and Taylor to decimate their business over the five months since those emails, O’Sullivan and his cofounder are now on the counterattack. Taylor recently unveiled its own competing internet-connected monitoring product. At one point, Kytch’s creators believe Taylor hired private detectives to obtain their devices. The result, once McDonald’s and Taylor became aware of Kytch’s early success, has been a two-year-long cold war-one that is only now turning hot. What's more, Taylor maintains a network of approved distributors that charge franchisees thousands of dollars a year for pricey maintenance contracts, with technicians on call to come and tap that secret passcode into the devices sitting on their counters. (Take a moment now to search Twitter for “ broken McDonald’s ice cream machine” and witness thousands of voices crying out in despair.)īut after years of studying this complex machine and its many ways of failing, O’Sullivan remains most outraged at this notion: That the food-equipment giant Taylor sells the McFlurry-squirting devices to McDonald’s restaurant owners for about $18,000 each, and yet it keeps the machines’ inner workings secret from them. Thanks to a multitude of questionable engineering decisions, they’re so often out of order in McDonald’s restaurants around the world that they’ve become a full-blown social media meme. And this opaque user-unfriendliness is far from the only problem with the machines, which have gained a reputation for being absurdly fickle and fragile.
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As O’Sullivan says, this menu isn’t documented in any owner’s manual for the Taylor digital ice cream machines that are standard equipment in more than 13,000 McDonald’s restaurants across the US and tens of thousands more worldwide.
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