The interwebs seem very, very concerned over Mac and Don's supperclub's ability to provide an awful excuse for "ice cream" in the world's worst cone. Stop the madness. Touch grass and eat real food, nerds.
Look, I'm addicted to sugar fat and salt okay.
Don't feel bad. Biology programmed you to prioritize it because it's calorically dense and rare in nature, therefore important to survival and the propagation of your genes. The fact that it's become widely available and cheap is not a matter of failure in individuals, but rather an example of the success of our species and civilizations.
Or something. Idk. Junk food is yummy. The key is moderation.
I feel for Americans and their broken McDonald’s ice cream machines… McFlurrys are bomb af
It's almost never broken. I have only been turned away for a broken machine one time ever, and McFlurries are more or less a monthly treat.
Sorry to break the internet meme, but I'm pretty sure this isn't all that common.
Fortunately there is objective data: https://mcbroken.com/
It's probably locational and possibly the time of day. Since I understand cleaning them are a pain, certain locations may not prioritize it properly, or the downtime is always when you would go. The one by me for example has been down all of the 10+ times I've asked for something, but I know family members have gotten some ice cream there, so it's not like permanently busted or anything.
The documentary on it explained that the cycles are timed to ensure proper cooling, and not warming too much for too long for sanitary reasons, so if an employee over filled the milk by a small amount the machine would sense the extra process time and default to needing a dump and clean. There was that raspberry pi device that would bypass that but for obvious reasons mcdonalds repair company lobbied against it.
Even when it works, it's still not ice cream.
By broken, they mean we were too lazy to clean it today.
It is less about being "lazy" than it is about being understaffed and the ice cream machine having a very labor and time intensive cleaning process.
I know this is The Internet, but could we maybe not shit on overworked and underpaid labor? Since, that is the whole point. Corporate McDonald's and the companies with contracts to maintenance those machines actively want all of your ire to go to the 19 year old night shift manager rather than actually question the fundamental problems with this setup. And a lot of the issues plaguing this are the same that plague you in your comfortable home.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/80215/whats-inside-that-mcdonalds-ice-cream-machine-broken-copyright-law is a good article on these issues and why it is, like most things, a problem of lobbyists and corporate interests. That you chose to blame on the workers.
It only gets more frustrating when you learn how franchising works too. The pseudo "owner" of a location doesn't have much say in anything in particular and doesn't have much of a budget to do the right things with because they spend everything to have the names, logos, ingredients, recipes, and specific equipment, and there are very tight specs to fall within that can get inspected at any time. So it's clear that the "owner" should hire enough staff and pay them enough to attract good workers who will make it possible for you to buy a mcflurry, but that "owner" probably pulls 60-90 hour weeks for only about double the rate of what their lowest paid employee makes. They tend to get suckered in because it looks so good on paper but it's so much worse than it seems. They thought they were signing up to be capitalists and instead they just become a slightly different tier of exploited laborer with much higher stress because of personal investment in the failure or success of the location. They're effectively indentured servants. The standard workers at least have the freedom to say fuck you and go get a different job without actually losing anything.
If a franchise unionizes, I think that it should be collective for all of the laborers to have security against the corporations ratfucking interests. Corporations want us to demonize their proxy lightning rod location "owners" but we should see through that bullshit.
I only regret, that I have but one upvote to give this post.
So this "joke" is still funny in 2024 huh?
From what I was told about my local McDonald's:
The reason is that people flip when they're told "we're cleaning the machine right now" and demand the ice cream immediately, so they say it's out of order so customers don't question it. Cleaning the machine takes a long time so they try to have it done before their shift ends. So a lot of times they stop serving ice cream after midnight, sometimes even after eleven. Not every location does it at the same time, but there are predictable patterns the machines "breaking"
