Ice cream sounds good all the time, especially after a long day. Of course, being the cheap college student I am, I put all my quarters towards McDonald’s soft serve. I don’t know if it’s just me, but every time I go there – the machine is always freaking broken!
I can’t begin to tell you how many times I’ve been let down by McDonald’s. I mean, sure it’s 2:00am and all the workers are sleepy, but I’ve always wondered if the machine is actually down, or the workers are lazy to make my McFlurry. So… I did a little research about it and this is what I found.
They’re liars. Most of the time the machine isn’t down, but according to a McDonald’s employee from New York, “It’s just hard as f- to clean those things and that’s why after cleaning it, I say it’s broken so I don’t have to clean it again.” In other times, the machine is actually down. Most of McDonald’s ice cream machines are old and need new parts, but this takes time to repair and is hard to reinstall back into a functioning soft serve machine – so instead of fixing it, they just keep it broken. As for cleaning the machine, it’s a mess. “Once every week or two, we deep clean the machine and the chemicals have to run through and pass what’s called a ‘heat treat.’ If it fails, we have to redo it. The machine is just that unreliable,” says McDonald’s manager.
So why does it matter to have a working ice cream machine? Well… have you tried McDonald’s soft serve?! It’s not gourmet and probably not the best quality of ice cream, but it is soft serve and they’re pretty consistent with the taste. I’ve traveled to different countries and tried their soft serves there, and let me tell you – they taste the same everywhere I go. I’m not a fan of McDonald’s actual food, but it’s the best, cheapest and agreeable place you can go when it’s late at night. Their famous vanilla cone has also had an ingredient change, making the formula a soft serve, low-calorie, reduced fat treat.
McDonald’s was voted the “Most Valuable Fast Food” in 2017, and has made over 24 billion dollars worldwide in 22 thousand different branches. About 70% of consumers said that they have purchased their famous vanilla cone in the past year. Although there are no statistics to prove that dissatisfaction of broken ice cream machines, I just know that there are people out there, like me, who get extremely disappointed when the machine is “down.” At this point, there’s not really a solution to getting an ice cream machine to work. If the workers are lazy or the machine is old, McDonald’s only solution would be to start just prepacking ice cream bars with their famous soft serve recipe.