Seriously. It never does
In: Other
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.
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