The REAL Reason McDonald's Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken
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- Опубликовано: 16 мар 2024
- Picture the scene - its a blazing hot summer day, or, maybe even just late lat night and you are restless..you drive out to a local McDonald's drive through only to be told once again, 'sorry, the machine is down'. In fact that situation didn't happen just to you - i happens many times, to many people all over the country! What does it happen so frequently? What is this Ice Cream machine curse that seems t have such a hold on McDona'd's nationwide? Come join us as we get down o what exactly plagues he golden arches to this day!
#mcdonalds #icecream #weirdhistoryfood 
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A former colleague who worked at McDonald's as one of his first jobs told everyone it's because the staff hate cleaning the machine. They'd rather just tell everyone it's broken.
Yep that is why they do it. They’ll set a cut off time and shut down the machine so they don’t have to clean it during closing, and it’s easier to just say it’s broken instead of saying “we don’t want to stay here till 1 in the morning cleaning this thing”.
Get a better machine the fuck
Bingo
That particular model of Taylor doesn't get cleaned in that way.... so somebody is lying....
I have worked there too and was about to comment on the same thing
As a former McDonald's customer service manager the 4 hour cleaning cycle is true of both the Taylor ice cream machine as well as the McCafe machines. We chose to do the cleaning cycle in the over night hours starting at midnight. Sure, you can skip the cleaning but if a restaurant is doing that I can tell you that you don't want anything that machine produces because some real nasty stuff like mold will grow. So during my 5 days a week shift, from midnight to 4am, I was cleaning those machines. My restaurant never had them go down ever because they were cleaned by the book every night.
But the cleaning cycle must really be done every single day?
thanks for actually caring👍
@@frankstrawnation Probably yes. You have dairy products with a high sugar content being churned in there all day. The machine has hot and cold components, so there will be warm spots. Even if there are not visible contaminants, it's best for everyone involved that they are frequently cleaned to clear out constant bacterial growth.
@@frankstrawnation yes, everyday.
Not all heroes wear capes. /Salute
I remember working at mcdonalds back in the day, it wasnt the ice cream machine that was broken. It was the manager
That right to repair law is important
Not at all. Most people don't want to fix their devices, they prefer to buy new ones. This happens because: 1. they don't want to spend their time trying to fix their electronics, even if the repair is not complicated; 2. the cost of the repair is too high if they let the task to be done by professionals; 3. electronics become obsolete too quickly, so very few people want to have devices with five years old or more, even if they're still working properly.
@@frankstrawnation right to repair affects more than just your personal ability to tear down a machine to repair it--it also makes it a requirement to provide any sort of tools or materials needed for third parties to repair it and allows them to in some cases in the first place. Right to repair is important even if you personally will never repair a device.
@@frankstrawnation sounds like corpo bootlicking to me bud. You are saying that having cheaper repair shops shouldn't be a thing?
@@frankstrawnationPull that boot out your throat corpobro
@@frankstrawnationThe right to repair is not only for electronics, what if you want an OEM part for your car and the dealership won't sell it to you unless you fix it with them or their authorized mechanics is a real possibility and that's exactly what Apple, Tesla, John Deere etc and doing, denying you access to the parts you need so the have you under their thumb, the product is never really yours...wake up!
As someone who worked for the clown I gotta say cleaning that machine was a complete pain. Every screw and o-ring and everything else had to be cleaned before being put back in. It was like a 500 piece and sharp puzzle needing to be put back together and it was myself and the main manager who only knew how to clean it, I can't tell you how many times I had to come in early on a day off or vacation just to clean and fix that thing. It was always easier just to tell everyone it was broken
Watching the little montage of cleaning the machine parts brought me back to when I worked at a convenience store that sold slushies.. They were called Frosters (Mac's, now Circle K)
I was one of the people who knew how to clean the machines. After a while it got to the point where we couldn't get the proper products to clean/replace the rings.. Very annoying. We had a four barrel machine. I was told to do one a week. Other stores would sometimes call me to go in and clean their machines.. lol
Then dont work at McDonalds dipshiitt. They are supposed to sell Ice Cream so you being lazy should be a you problem. Not a everyone that comes to McDonalds problem.
There is clearly a market for a ice cream machine that is built around the idea of ease of maintenance and cleaning. A machine with so many parts that is not only hard to clean and to put together is **at best** a maintenance nightmare as we have seen but a massive health hazard waiting to happen.
“What kind of secrets are they telling the ice cream?”
😂😂 I had a hard time recovering from that comment. Why would you say that?!
"... or maybe go to Dairy Queen" truer words have rarely been spoken
Diary Queen uses the same type of machine
@@massmike11 yeah but they actually keep theirs working
@@massmike11theres works dipshiitt.
@@user-qb9fv3bf2d not only rude, but incoherent.
LOL for reals they always have it running, so its mcdonalds issue
Worked at McDonald's for 6 years. The restaurant I worked at had 2 ice cream machines and from what I remember only once we had one of the machines down for a week or so due to waiting for parts.
From what I remember, the machines had 2 cleaning schedules:
- Daily cleaning, which was done by the cleaning team afterhours when the restaurant closed
- times/programmed cleaning that was done like weekly or so. The machine would warn when it was time for the deep clean.
But since we had 2 machines (one would serve drive-thru only and the other the rest) there was never down time
Weird to imagine, but McDonald's corporation doesn't have diners as customers, but rather franchisees, and they have an antagonistic relationship trying to squeeze it as much profit as they can. Whether the restaurants succeed or fail is up to the franchisee. If they can't make it in the biz there's dozens of prospective dupes willing to be conned into dumping their savings into franchise fees.
Yeah but outside the US franchises though, that might be a tad more different. If not completely different.
This might shock you, but opening a business does not magically entitle you to success lol
Its not only McDonald's it's growing swathes of the economy
It's two huge corporations scratching each other's backs.
A frosty sounds good right about now! I'm not sure who Wendy's works with, but seriously, McDonald's and/or Taylor needs to change. Having machines no one can fix but the manufacturer's own repairmen isn't right. Thanks for sharing this!
Wendys uses mostly Taylor models.. not the same one as McDonalds though. No idea why theirs never seem to break down, I am regular Frosty consumer and I've never once encountered a "broken" frosty machine at a Wendys in my entire life.
frosty always broken too...dairy queen rules on this
I work on these. Half the time its because the manager has the auto heat cycle, that cleans it every 24 hours , set at a ridiculous busy period as opposed to like2:00 a.m. when it would make sense. This takes 3 hours. Or if its "broke" in the daytime could be beaause its being broken down and cleaned as it is done every 2 or 4 weeks which takes about 2 or 3 hours..
I work on those also,every 14 days is when it has to be completely taken down and washed if nothing else happens before or one of those managers doesn't screw it up.They can be sensitive machines and if it is set to be serviced by a tech from a contractor,it is set for cleaning every 28 days...and the techs do a really bad job at maintaining them.
1. It's proprietary tech. 2. Only licensed maintenance understands the error codes and how to remedy things. 3. The repairmen make big bank every time they're called out to repair a machine.
Easy fix for me. I no longer even consider going to McDonald's if I want ice cream or a shake. Plenty of other places to go that don't waste my time on a gamble.
Yeah places like braums
I’m only a simple engineer, but if a machine is offline for 4 hours, maybe have two machines?
Hey hey hey, you can not come in here using common sense like that 😂
At $18,000 each, that's an expensive redundancy to have, especially considering ice cream is a low profit item for McDonalds.
@@Hathurand probably no space for a second
I'd think a better fix, would be a better designed machine that's easier to clean.
@@laurenmp7486But then the store could do it themselves and Taylor couldn't charge extortion-rate fees to fix it. It's not in Taylor's interest to make it easy to clean or fix.
Your narration is gold!
Could you do a video about Arbys? Or Hardee’s?
They already did Arby's 3 months ago.
Sure ok
I worked at McDonald's 2 different McDonald's in 9 years. The ice cream machine wasn't taken apart everyday to clean. It was fully cleaned on Sunday mornings. It has a heat mode that it goes in every night for about 4 hours. It heats up the machine to pasteurize the mix. If you don't have the mix filled to the line inside the top where you add the mix then it won't come out of that cycle. If you don't have enough in it then it won't cool back down probably. It's the same if you put to much. So you have to put the right amount in there and start that cycle again. Most of the time if that is taken care of it'll work. Most people can't figure that out.
Thank you for pointing that out.I work at McDonalds as a maintenance person and I have told the very same things to so many managers and crew people over time,I just skip doing it anymore and just tell them,"Ok,just leave it alone,I'll get it going again before I go home."
The issue with the machines is not that they go down, it's that the error codes are specifically engineered to not be worth a damn and force a service call to the local Taylor maintenance guys. The 3rd party device at the heart of the lawsuit did nothing more than give a proper diagnostic code to let you know exactly what was wrong with the machine. Effectively, the McDonalds ice cream machines output is like the check engine light on the car, while the Kitsch device was the equivalent of the meter that the guys at Autozone use to diagnose the problem. Taylors sells ice cream machines to multiple fast food places in the US, and the others don't have this problem specifically because they do not have an exclusive maintenance agreement with Taylors and so their machines throw useful diagnostic codes.
I've done maintenance for McD's for the last couple of years. At my home location i break down and clean the machine every two weeks. It's not bad once you get the hang of it, but takes about 3 hours. Our machine has only been down a couple of times for like a day or two in that time. I've heard though that there's many locations aren't quite as good about keeping there machine clean.
True,I clean the machine at my location as a maintenance person also,and sometimes have to help other locations and the other stores do not know what they are doing or they just let it go and dump it off on a technician($$$) or someone like me to get theirs clean and functional again.
A+ video!
Awesome explanation of the problem, very interesting!
There's a whole documentary about this machine on RUclips, it's really interesting.
Well as someone who has worked at a McDonald’s in my teen years, if you saw the inside of those machines you would never WANT ice cream from McDonald’s again
I worked at two different ones, in 2014-15 and 2016-8. The inside of those machines are absolutely disgusting...
Or the cheese
@@timbrummer7401 you mean the cheese that doesn’t melt? I always found that bizarre
@@jupitermichaels Yup, I remember that all too well. It was bizarre as hell. I would work opening and see stacks of cheese left out by the night crew and see that it was a little soft but kept it's shape
@@timbrummer7401 and shiny! Don’t forget how shiny and plastic-y it looks 🤣😂🤣😂
"Shrek's load" 😂
"Shrek shake" say that five times fast
I was always so confused hearing these stories because over ehre in Europe, I never once recall a situation when the ice cream machine would be broken
I guess it doesn't happen in Europe, then.
probably because europe is, hopefully, far less of a coprorate ruled dystopia than america
That cut to Shrek nervously laughing was gold lmao
I remember one time my Lyft driver told me that she picked up a district manager at McDonald's and he explained to her the reason why those machines always break down because they the way they build these machines are so sensitive that they break down easily.
Also happy Saint Patrick's Day enjoy your shamrock shakes
I am a qualified lesbian
McBroken
As a teen I worked at MCD’s and I both took apart and put back together the ice cream and shake machines and yes if you put them together wrong or forget an O ring they won’t work and you have to take them apart
2 a.m. is always the cutoff time for the ice cream and shake machines. 🤪
I live in austria and in my 23 years on this planet i never once have witnessed a broken ice cream machine. But funnily the ice dispensers for the drinks are often broken.
in Europe, McDonald's franchisees probably get the approved Italian machine.
Because most every McDonalds location is now open 24 hours, there is no downtime to clean and service the ice cream machines properly, as had been the case for decades when the stores were closed overnight.
Also because of being open for 24 hours, there are other important cleaning tasks that do NOT get done as regularly or as thoroughly as they should be. Such as complete scrub downs of grills and work surfaces and the filtering or changing of the fryer oil on a regular basis. EWWWWW...
Where are you? Most McDonald's are closed at night. Like, at least 90%.
Why does a McFlurry cost $5.59? A sundae is $4.19? Even a plain old vanilla cone costs $3.49. I remember when the cone was on the dollar menu and it actually cost a dollar or less. At those prices I don’t care if they ever fix the machines, I’m not buying.
Corporate greed and corrupt politicians on both sides letting these greedy soulless corporations do whatever they want
Enough people with more money than sense keep buying them at those prices, so McD's makes money.
If the machine is working, it's filthy.
Oh god I maintained all the McDonald’s ice cream machines in my city. That thing takes 4 hours to clean and smucks would always find a way to screw it up. The amount of times I’ve come to fix it and it’s filled with cheese… but yeah the codes are not that complicated and I used to have them memorized.
The only thing worse than a broken McDonald's ice cream machine is discovering when you go to 7-11 that the Slurpee flavor you're craving isn't ready to be dispensed.
Or when you have to wait in line for the rotisserie chicken at Costco
For decades ive wished there was a way to boycot Taylor serviced businesses.
I worked at McDonald’s in the late 80s and our machine was usually “broken” as well because nobody wanted to clean or put it back together!! If it wasn’t reassembled a certain way it wouldn’t work and you’d have to tear it all down and start over, so yeah it just sat broken…
Ronald and Hamburglar know how to run those machines. McDonald's has had problems ever since they got rid of those two.
I never thought the ice cream machines in McDo's had this serious problem
Thanks for useful and valuable video as always ❤❤❤
I've been having good luck with the McFlurry machine lately. Got one the past 4x I've visited :D
Everyone else: iced cream machine woes
Me: I just want a PLAIN McChicken.
DQ has superior milk shakes
Truth
5:10 - Wow, McD's created the first Shamrock Shake. Happy St Paddy's! 🍀
Neither clovers nor leprechauns are mint flavored, mint ice cream and drinks were around for a long time before McDonalds marketing put them together.
Great video, well researched too. There's a documentary about the McD ice cream machine, it's super interesting.
I always just assumed staff hated cleaning the machine and/or it took a long time so they just left it for somebody on the next shift to deal with... and they wound up leaving it for the next shift... and so on
Imagine if Ray Croc's multimixers were broken as much as Taylor's ice cream machines. He probably would have never gotten his foot in the door at McDonalds.
They know full well they can't sell what they can't provide to the customer. Why McDonalds continues to put up with Taylor long after Croc is gone I don't know.
Oddly enough, McDonald's ice cream machines in the Philippines are working perfectly. Maybe Ronald should hire Filipinos ONLY to work the machines. 🍦
Filipino Mechanics!
Interestingly, Im in the mainland US and we dont have this problem at any of our McDonalds either. It was an Arbys that didnt have problems, then did for the better part of 20 years when the new store manager arrived. Machine was ALWAYS broken. Oddly when they got a new manager the machine started working again.
Hooray! The Narrator is back! 😊
I managed a McDonald's here in South West London many many years ago, actually i left them in 2009 so it was a good while ago now.
From what i recall, now I'm not sure if this is still the case, i can't imagine it's changed too much, but from what i remember those machines were an absolute nightmare to clean, it was always a 1-2 hour job and it was just easier to tell people the machine is off/broken than to serve ice cream until closing, then stay behind for 1-2 hours to clean that damn thing.
The reason why McDonald's machines are broken and are not repaired is because the deal that they have with the company who makes the machines. That deal pretty much boils down to that company is the only supplier and repair company for those machines. Also it comes down to the cleaning cycle for those machines as well. Its a deal that has kept that company in business for the last 50 plus years. Its a bad deal.
They shouldn’t have those machines or ice cream on the menu at all for that matter.
So exactly what the video just said? Uh and this isn't WHY they break now is it?
Dude just watch the whole video
Seems like the judge for that Kytch lawsuit got McBribed. Seems clear cut that they stole the idea, but McD's has more/bigger lawyers and $$$. Great video and "Best Narrator Ever!"
When I worked for McDonalds in 2020, the franchise I worked for was still under the legal contract with Taylor and unable to hire others to fix the ice-cream machine. It really was a nightmare to clean. Only one Manager was allowed to do the process. If it had to be cleaned on her day off, tough luck, no icecream sales that day.
I always found it funny Ray Kroc, a milkshake mixer salesman ended up with McDonald's and now the ice cream hardly work at a lot of locations.
Makes you wonder what he'd think of that in current day.
Funny thing, went to Burger King a few days ago and there was a sign on the door saying their ice cream 🍨 🍦 machine wasn't working either. Good thing I wasn't going there for that. The spicy chicken nuggets were good though.
he'd probably think it's a kroc of shit
haha just playing on the name here
@guyk768 I think he would sooner react to his biography movie about himself first before thinking about his franchise.
@@dutchdykefinger Good one.
Same thing happened to a taco bell near me. Their 'hot cinnabon coffee' machine would always be 'broken' on certain shifts, and then miraculously work on others. Went on for a solid two months like this until the manager no longer worked there. Then the machine has never broken since that time.
It needs to be cleaned everyday. I used to work at McDonald's for almost 4 years. Our machine was always working. I hate this meme.
I worked at a McDonald's from 1982 to 1984! Our Machine in Pittsburgh PA Never Broke Down! We did our own Preventative Maintenance and Cleaning!! IT is disturbing that I hear about All the breakdowns Now!????
I don’t think I’ve had a McDonald’s shake since the 80s. I remember it being so think the straw would cave in trying to drink the thing. Triple that thickness would just be a block of ice!
Used to manage a McDonald's. A well known trick on days where we were mad busy and a tonne of ice creams were being sold (usually good weather on a bank holiday) was to 'accidentally' put it on a cleaning cycle.
“A spoonful of Shrek’s load” is an insane sentence 😭😭
I want McDonald's to bring back the egg nog shake.
Cleaning them is such a process it was just easier to say it was broken while it was being cleaned so people didn't keep asking when it would be ready
Ron McClellan didn't invent shit. The McFlurry is a knockoff of Dairy Queen's Blizzard.
Watching this on St.Paddy's day
My closest McDonald’s just has a sign almost semi permanently on the door saying the ice cream machine is broken. Been on there for months.
When I worked at McD's in the 80s, we took our machine apart every night and washed it inside and out. (I should know. I always volunteered to start the dishes because I was a closer and I wanted to get the F out of there.) By Godfrey, our machine worked every day I was there. When I go there now, I don't even bother to ask.
Fun fact: Mark Knopfler composed and performed a song about Ray Kroc called "Boom Like That!"
What is the awesome trumpet and flute jazz music at 3:06?
8:55 Taylor Kitsch?
They need to have two machines with different cleaning schedules.
I feel like you guys did a video on this before. I knew about Taylor already.
Figures that corporate bs like a monopoly would be the reason. Hardly hear this problem outside the US. Spent a long time in Europe and SEA, never once denied ice-cream at any time of the day, because the machine was "broken".
Tastes the same.
Also, because last week was shamrock shake week and they had it working for one day, but kept the shamrock signs signs out for three weeks
One of your best. Many zingers!
What do I think? I think it's amazing that at 4:32 - 4:36, the city of Moreno Valley, CA is shown on the map since the city, only officially incorporated in the 1980s, is typically overshadowed and omitted from maps in favor of/by its neighbor city, Riverside, CA (the county of Riverside, CA's capital city.)
Btw, the Hasbro Company has a similar "no outside repairs" policy for its NERF lineup of foam-dart blasters, which is causing similar outrage by consumers who wish to make repairs to their purchased and worn-through-use blasters instead of having to buy a brand new one, especially the more expensive/higher-end blasters.
(edit: word omission)
And today only the well off can even afford an ice cream treat at McD anymore without going into debt.
Saw a news story a few days back that a court case was a lost to Taylor and saying that Taylor only repairs was illegal. You have a right to repair your own stuff. Although the McDonald's machines are custom to them so if anyone else can repair them remains unknown.
I was a maintenance guy at mcds a couple of years ago and it is a pain to clean almost 2 hours so manager would say while I was cleaning it that it was broken.😅
As a ex McD's employee, I can tell you why without even watching the video...
"I ain't cleaning that machine today." - Simple answer.
But what is the problem in cleaning these machines? Is about the chemicals used for the task? Is something dangerous or extremely complex? Or is just tedious?
@@frankstrawnation Well, you bust your butt all day pumping out orders, do you think someone wants to spend 3-5 hours cleaning the thing at closing when they have the rest of the store to clean as well?
It is a long process, you have to take it appart and clean a million little pieces, run it through a cleaning cycle, reassemble and so on. It is just a added hassle.
On top of that, the machine makes a sticky mess everywhere, syrups, ice cream, milk, toppings, ect... That stuff gets everywhere, behind the machine, on the floors, countertops, and just adds to the hassle of the daily maitenence.
Short answer is they are being cleaned.
I worked at mcds and have put machine together and apart many times. Always worked.
Thanks for this! 🍦
I worked back at McDs in the late 90s/early 00s. In my 3 years there, I think the machine broke about four times. I wonder why the machines then worked better than the machines now. No computer screen, if nothing else.
I went to a local McDonald's and they had the shamrock shake and on their kiosk it was unavailable but the employee said it was in its cleaning process and was just 15 minutes away from finishing up the entire process. I waited and they let me know it was done and ready to go. So I ordered what was the first mcflurry fresh from a just cleaned mcflurry machine 🤌🏻🤌🏻 the shamrock shake was nice.
I remember having to clean that thing. I hated it
I missed the entire grimace shake promotion because I ended up in the hospital for gullain barre syndrome and the paralysis that came with it I’m still mad to this day about it
I've read that the FTC is seriously contemplating a major lawsuit against both Taylor and McDonald's--one that could cost both companies potentially *BILLIONS* in fines.
Ha! I don't eat at any fast food place. Dont trust what's in the food and also don't even trust who is making it!
I miss when McDonald’s used to have salads and soups and wraps
The icecream sundae cups were huge back then
It was always funny to me to see the memes on the internet. I've worked 3,5 years in 2 Mc's as a student, it was never out of service lol
The Flurry was a thing before McDonald's bought the rights to it. Flurry was in convenience stores in midwest in late 80s & early 90s.
They never been broken for me
This channel covers the most important life topics 😁😊
Have a small McDonalds Kiosk in my local mall that only sold Ice cream. Had 3 machines and I thought two were backups XD
The statement "there is only one place to go when craving a shake" is INCORRECT. what a burger has shakes and they for real are open 24/7.
Taylor also makes the machines for Dairy Queen....they are hardly ever broken.
We get the Cadbury cream egg McFlurry in Canada, too. It's just caramel sauce and chocolate, though (unless they have changed it). Very disappointing.
I don’t know were the idea that they have a huge number of parts. It takes longer to run the parts through the dishwasher than to take it apart and put it back together.
this video coming the day after McDonald's takeut machines and stuff going down, is some neat timing.
Taylor makes the best machines to be had. The machines are not broken. They don't want to properly clean them. McDonalds custom flavor system they bolt on it makes it much more difficult
Do one on McPizza!
They existed, I had a few. If you pretended they weren't supposed to be pizza, they were pretty good!