The REAL Reason McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken

>So, the end result of having a soldered fuse was exactly the same as a socketed one: it was successfully repaired. I don’t see the justification for the extra BOM item. You joking? You realize houses and cars have socketed fuses that can be replaced almost turnkey. This is a simple solution to build into the product a UI that let's the user know a socket was blown and allow the user to replace a fuse like replacing a AA battery. FUSES are designed to fail and be replaced. Making those FUSES inaccessible is ALSO a design choice because it's contradictory. There was a point in time where every phone had a replaceable battery. You think that replaceable batteries disappeared because companies wanted to save costs? Sockets for batteries have been part of the design philosophy for consumer products for decades, the fact that these sockets are removed from phones is not a cost saving measure. This issue is much more widespread than you think: [this video]

> The real problem is that McDonalds corporate forces franchisees to buy a crappy version of the machine that generates huge income for Taylor Wendys also uses the same vendor with a better machine, which is where this starts to look malicious rather than incompetent. The broken machine is one specifically made for McDonalds. In general, this is anti-consumer in two different ways - you don't give me ice-cream with the apple pie and whenever it breaks, you throw away a couple of gallons of the mixture to be safe. There was a deep-dive into this from Johnny Harris[1], which dug through the manuals for the machine, sales projections from Taylor and why McD franchisees are easier marks for this than others (the revenue volume is huge). [1] - [this video]

I had a look at what machines they use here in Australia and they seem to be similar to Taylor machines that they showed being used in the USA (this video: [this video] ). However, they almost always seem to be working without issue. If they are almost the same machine (would be for 240v) then I guess I’m glad that whatever is going on in the USA hasn’t reached here. Now the frozen drinks machines (slurpee, slushie, slush puppies) are down a lot more often but even then it isn’t down as much as the ice cream machines in the USA. But talking about McDonald’s McFlurry - in the USA do they still flurry it with the blending mixing spoon? They used to do that in Australia but now a McFlurry has no flurry and instead it’s just a plain sundae topped with Oreo crumbs or mini m&m’s.