re: McDonald's franchisees can now repair their own ice cream machine

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I would think that the ice cream is not a high-margin item but creates foot traffic to your store which increases the likelihood of upselling into a high margin item such as a 20 oz soft drink.

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They have been sitting on bad PR that could be fantastic PR

And penalized franchises for using the box.

And I can repair all of my own appliances. Doesn’t mean I have the know-how or the tools.

Cool. So now the response will be " sorry we are out of choc,strawberry, etc flavoring.








I'm a Burger King flame broiled whopper person and rarely when I've gone and asked for a shake have not gotten one. Mc D's is

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I see a lot of posts that suggest some are not fully up to the core of the problem. It is not as simple as "now they can fix it".

For those of you who want to get a basic picture of why it has been this way for so long and why the decision is important:

30 minutes but very well done

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Thanks for posting the video, I'll try and make my way through it when I have some time.

The McDonald's ice cream machine has always been an absolutely bizarre business case study. It's not like this has been some recent development. "Ice cream machine is broken" has been a meme for over 25 years now. McDonald's forces their franchisees to use these machines and by all accounts the machines are:
a) incredibly expensive
b) incredibly difficult to clean and maintain
c) incredibly finicky and in need of frequent repairs
d) can only be worked on by one specific company (until now) who takes forever to service them

So my question has always been... why does McDonald's choose to use these specific machines? The ice cream it makes tastes no better or worse than what you can get at Wendy's, Sonic, Red Robin, etc. Why can every other fast food company manage to make decent ice cream with machines that actually work while McDonald's chooses to use these apparently magic machines that will only work under the most optimal of conditions and cost their franchisees tons of money to operate?

It's not like McDonald's is a stupid company. You don't become the most successful fast food restaurant in the world by having the best food, you become the most successful by being bigger, better and more efficient at things like supply chain management, streamlining workflow processes, improving automation, eliminating disruptions, etc.

So why continue to use these remarkably inefficient machines that result in high expenses while missing out on valuable revenue for no real reason?

My only guess is that McDonald's receives an incredible amount of money from the company that has the contract to manufacture and service these machines so they chose to continue using them knowing that the corporation will be receiving all of that income while the costs and headaches of maintaining the machines gets passed onto the franchisees. It seems an incredibly unethical (and possibly illegal??) thing to do, but I've never been able to think of another reason for it.

And the E Coli

Also heard John Deere will be losing their right to repair case. Farmers will finally be able to fix their tractors again.

I would pay $0.25 more an hour to the courageous worker that wants to keep that machine running for me

You send them to Home Depot