Cold Wars: Right to Repair needed for McDonald's Ice Cream Machines

[asquirrel]

Summary

The need for Right to Repair extends even to McDonald's Ice Cream machines. A franchise requirement to use a specific Taylor ice cream maker gives Taylor a monopoly and McDonald's doesn't care because the franchises bear the burden of the cost, rather than McDonald's itself. The company that made and sold a tool to help the problem gets shuttered.

 

Quotes

Quote

That the food-equipment giant Taylor sells the McFlurry-squirting devices to McDonald’s restaurant owners for about $18,000 each, and yet it keeps the machines’ inner workings secret from them. What's more, Taylor maintains a network of approved distributors that charge franchisees thousands of dollars a year for pricey maintenance contracts, with technicians on call to come and tap that secret passcode into the devices sitting on their counters.

The secret menu reveals a business model that goes beyond a right-to-repair issue, O’Sullivan argues. It represents, as he describes it, nothing short of a milkshake shakedown: Sell franchisees a complicated and fragile machine. Prevent them from figuring out why it constantly breaks. Take a cut of the distributors’ profit from the repairs.

 

My thoughts

Technically not my thought, but: The problem with right to repair, and the fact that you don't own anything, is already so far ingrained in society that the meme of "Just don't buy Apple" doesn't work. Even business-to-business contracts are infected with this cancer. The real way to make progress with Right to Repair is to make it, effectively, impossible to have a large business that even has the kind of leverage needed to pull off such a monopoly. But, I'll settle for schematics, board views, and access to component-level parts.

 

Sources

 https://www.wired.com/story/they-hacked-mcdonalds-ice-cream-makers-started-cold-war/

[TheCoder2019]

The darn McDonalds ice cream dispensers are always broken. I don't expect much

[Skiiwee29]

<-- Moved to Off Topic -->

 

While we can all agree it sucks to go try and get an ice cream cone or McFlurry and the ice cream machines always seem to be broken, this doesn't fall into the "Tech News" category. 

[TheCoder2019]

22 minutes ago, Skiiwee29 said:

always seem to be broken

It's always time I go to eat, and it's that 1 in 100 chance they aren't broken