Seriously. It never does
In: Other
They’re complicated machines, and contractually can only be serviced by one company who is slow to respond.
Because they were made by a specific company and that company wouldn’t let employees make repairs and so service techs were at a premium and there ya go.
in my experience as an employee: the machines have a required heat treatment cycle that takes 3-4 hours to complete and must be repeated if it fails (such as if it was left unprepared). as such, early mornings aren’t a time we served ice cream
the display on the machine used a slightly technical language: telling a user what the issue was rather than providing steps to correct it, so many of my crew wouldn’t be able to recognize what an easily corrected fault condition was.
major issues such as failure of the refrigeration system would lock the machine out entirely, and replacing parts or other servicing was above my pay grade.
There are fascinating Youtube videos on it, so I’d recommend looking it up there for the full story, but it’s basically because McDonalds has a deal with that specific ice cream machine company. McDonalds forces all franchisees to only use that machine, and that company specifically designs their machines to require constant maintenance so that they can charge the franchisees money for every technician visit (I believe McDons gets a kickback from this too, but I could be incorrect).
Regardless, this is bad enough that the company has programmed these machines to have stupidly esoteric errors for the most mundane things. For example, if you overfill it slightly, it won’t say “overfilled”, it’ll say “ERROR: technician required” and only technicians have the tool necessary to decode the problem. They used to have an error code (like ERROR 85112: technician required), but then people figured out what the codes meant and stopped calling technicians as often, so they reprogrammed them to not show codes anymore. A guy got fed up with this and distributed a free tool you could plug into the machine to decode all these errors, but the ice cream company sued him too.
TLDR: The company charges stores every time they call a technician in and purposefully design their machines in such a way that technicians are needed constantly. They don’t make money on selling ice cream machines/parts, they make money extorting the businesses to keep calling technicians or lose acces to ice cream.
Ice Cream machines for fast food restaurants are typically all made by the same manufacturer, and oddly only the McDonalds machines have this reputation.
Insiders have revealed that McDonalds Corp has a sort of parasitic relationship with the manufacturer to force their franchises to only buy machines these specific machines that can only be maintained by their own supply chain to generate repair revenue. As you might expect the franchises complain about it relentlessly but head office won’t do anything about it.
When the machine breaks it gives random error codes that can only be read by a certified mechanic, and most of the time it’s because the machine was overfilled, hasn’t been cleaned properly, or has a temperature problem which are all easily resolved, but the staff can’t fix it themselves. You have to call ‘the guy’.
Meanwhile very similar machines installed at a Wendy’s gives an error message you can read, so they don’t have these problems.
It’s also very possible the machine needs to go through it’s daily cleaning cycle, and the staff on shift just don’t want to bother because it’s a giant pain in the arse.
I still think a big part of it is if u got there late they don’t want to clean it so they say its broke
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