Fair enough, but this certainly seems like the sort of problem that should have been fixed years ago if there was incentive to fix it. Instead, there seems to be incentive to not fix it.
There certainly is enough circumstantial evidence to take a closer look at what is going on.
I will be very interested to see what the FTC investigation turns up. Maybe it’s just incompetence on the part of McDonalds and Taylor, and maybe there is someone personally profiting off of this issue.
Unless your boss told you to write error messages designed for the techs to be able to read, not for the customers.
Yes and no. Yes, planned obsolesce and requiring only specific techs to be able to fix things, for a charge, is annoying. The flip side is that they’re just going to charge more for the product. If the ice cream machine costs $3000 as it is, maybe they’d charge $6000 for a similar one that’s fixable by the end user and designed to last twice as long.
Whether it’s Taylor or Honda or Whirlpool or HP or Apple or whatever, they’re planning on making certain amount of money per unit sold, whether it’s upfront for a ‘better’ product or it’s over the course of the life of the product through service contracts, repair work, having to replace it regularly etc.
Or a bonus for creating a user interface that generates a profitable revenue stream.
Undercover Boss did a episode at Rallys. The burgers are cooked in a computer controlled machine. Cooking time is controlled almost to the second. It became apparent the employees hadn’t been properly trained to use the machine.
The undercover boss blamed the manager. Now I’m wondering why the machine was so confusing to operate. The menu interface was badly designed. The machine shouldn’t require extensive training to cook burger patties.
I’m sure McDonald’s and the other companies use similar machines.
In which case I would expect franchises to instead buy their machine from a rival company that only cost $4000 and was also reliable and repairable by the end user. And if they don’t have the option of doing that, or of using a third-party repairer who has managed to come up with a way of repairing the machines despite the manufacturer’s measures, then it sure looks like an exercise of the sort of monopoly power the FTC was created to stop.
If the FTC goes forward with the investigation, is it going to be against Taylor for not allowing franchise owners to fix their own machines or McDonald’s corp for requiring the franchises to buy those machines? Both?
The investigation should be into both.
As far as any sanctions, that would depend on what they find.
My personal hope is that the FTC slaps both with multi-million dollar fines and forces McD’s to let every franchisee buy whatever ice cream machine they want, on the company dime. Or even to not have a machine at all and just take those items off their menus. Fat chance of that happening, of course. But it would be nice.
With the glaring exception of Burger King.
Seems like that would start to blur the line between a chain, franchise and an independently owned restaurant.
If I owned a McDonalds, but got my own ice cream machine and it made ice cream that was clearly different than all the other McDonalds, that would be an issue.
I’m not saying that McD Corp shouldn’t have to face the FTC if they were, say, getting kick backs from the ice cream machine place and the individual owners were suffering because of it. But, on the other hand, if owning a restaurant, even a franchise restaurant, becomes to expensive, they can always close up or sell it to someone else (if that’s allowed).
A brother and sister that I know each own a Dairy Queen in my area. A few years back DQ required a ton of upgrades (IIRC, about 30k worth) on the owner’s dime. The brother is still in business, the sister decided it was a good time to close up. And now that I think about it, she got lucky to, it was right before covid hit. She must have been thrilled to not have had to spend 30k just to have an empty restaurant.
Coda to a massive scandal: Two Kraft executives charged in accounting scheme
Kraft Heinz and two of its former high-ranking executives settled charges with the Securities Exchange Commission, which found the company engaged in a “years-long accounting scheme” involving falsified supplier contracts.
Just laying this out for the people who think someone is making money off of this.
McDonald’s has its own in-house technicians who are trained by the factory to safely service the machines to diagnose error codes and handle repairs and preventative maintenance internally.
The manufacturer is also huge on operator training for all owner/operators who have the equipment and make time for it. Many problems stem from operator error and ignoring PM routines.
That completely contradicts the information given above (unless the situation has changed recently). Taylor provides the service techs. They are not “in-house” and the franchisee must pay Taylor directly and after calculating McDonald’s “cut” of their sales.
Also (at least, according to the prior information), training isn’t even enough to be able to repair (really, just reset) the machines: One also needs special equipment made only by the company. And when someone else managed to make a cheaper (i.e., not extortionate) device that does the same thing, franchisees were prohibited from using it.
Even if “McDonald’s” has its own in-house technicians, they wouldn’t be in-house for the franchisees. A large franchisee might be able to get their own employees trained by the factory if corporate can - but that wouldn’t work for a franchisee who owns only a couple of locations. That person is going to have to pay either McDonald’s Corp ( if your info is correct) or an approved Taylor distributor for service.
This is an interesting article. The one thing I can’t figure out is how/if Taylor prevents trained technicians from opening their own unauthorized repair shops - or if they rely on the warranty being voided if an unauthorized repair shop works on the machine.
Possibly a combination of the techs don’t want to do that because they’d be jeopardizing their job (and possibly open themselves up to lawsuits from Taylor, depending on their contract) and techs that already do just that and keep their mouths shut about it.
Where are you getting this contradictory information from?
Perhaps a combination of non-compete agreements, and restricted access to the tools and diagnostic equipment necessary to do the work.
I still can’t grasp why Taylor is preying only on McDonald’s franchisees and not on those of the other fast food chains. (As said earlier in the thread, McDonald’s as a corporation can rip up a bad contract or let it expire.) What incentive does Taylor have to play fair with the other fast food chains? That might be the key to the mystery.
(And yes, to my regret, I watched the whole damn video.)
Your post assumes that someone at McDonald’s corp isn’t getting kick backs from Taylor.
Other restaurants could have told Taylor they’ll just find someone else to buy their ice cream machines from if they’re going to require constant, expensive service calls for such simple problems like needing to be power cycled.