You know when you go to McDonald's and try to order a latte or a milkshake, and the employee behind the counter delivers the devastating news that the machine is broken? It sucks — and the incident seems like it happens way more often than it should.
After attempting to order the McDonald's Pumpkin Spice Latte and getting shut down one too many times, I turned to the Internet to see if I was the only one who was having trouble. It could be possible that my local McD's had faulty machines. But pretty quickly, I realized that I wasn't alone. I started asking around and found that everyone I knew had at least one annoying story about the McDonald's machines being down.
Hmmm. So it wasn't just me. This is a thing.
I set out to call 25 different locations, spanning everywhere from the McDonald's two blocks down the street from Seventeen's office in New York to a franchise next to a mall in Hawaii. During each call, I asked if the McCafé machine and the ice cream machine were in service. Here's what I found:
Of the 25 locations surveyed, the McCafé machine was currently out of order at just one place, the one I happened to visit on the reg in New York. But the ice cream machine (which I had never tried ordering from) was out of service at five out 25 locations: in Orlando, FL; Columbus, OH; Hobbs, NM; Boulder, CO; and Honolulu, HI. That's a 20 percent outage — not an insignificant number.
Employees also mentioned that the ice cream machine had recently been out of order at an additional five locations: in Washington, DC; Belle Chasse, LA; Kansas City, MO; Bend, OR; and San Francisco, CA.
Why are the machines down so often?
First up, I asked McDonald's directly what was going on with their faulty machines. No response. (This post will be updated if they get in touch.) Next, I asked three former McDonald's employees what the deal was. Here's what they had to say.
The machines require lots of maintenance.
"Cleaning these machines takes HOURS," Becca Jansen, a former McDonald's employee of five years in Missouri, told Seventeen.com. "I mean it, these old machines can take 4 hours to clean. The reason? It has a preprogrammed cycle that it must complete, and if it senses you did something wrong, it will start over."
Not just anyone can clean the machines, either. Only certain specialized employees are taught how to clean or fix them, and these employees typically work regular 9 to 5 hours. If a machine breaks at 7 p.m., it probably won't get fixed until the next afternoon.
The machine hasn't been turned on.
At Becca's store in Missouri, the ice cream machine typically wasn't turned on until around 10 a.m. If a customer asked for an ice cream or milkshake (which is made in the ice cream machine) before then, she would tell them she couldn't serve it at that time.
Or, as Becca put it to me on the phone, "It's just too damn early in the day to make ice cream."
Or the machine was just turned off.
When I asked Seventeen.com's fashion assistant Kelsey Stiegman, a former McDonald's employee of four years in Illinois, about this situation, she explained that the employees weren't always 100 percent straightforward with customers. Particularly on slow nights, they might turn off the machines early.
"They probably say they can't make the drink because the machine is cleaning," she told me. "If the store closes at 11 p.m., they might start cleaning it at 9 if things are slow, and so they don't want to dirty it again. If they say it's broken, it's probably because they cleaned it already so they're making an excuse that the customer will understand."
The machines can malfunction when the weather is hot.
You probably don't feel your best when it's a zillion degrees outside in August. Neither do the machines.
"If the weather outside is too hot, this can impact the ice cream machine's ability to keep the shake mix at the required inner temperature," an anonymous former McDonald's employee told Seventeen.com.
Or the machines might be working, but there isn't enough mix to make anything new.
For items that require mixes (that includes milkshakes and ice cream), employees need to have the mix in stock in order to make the product, obviously. But if they run out of product, their training dictates that they should say the machine is out of order.
"The reason we say [the machine] is down and not that we've ran out of the product, as far as I can understand, is because if we advertise a product, the customer expects us to have that product (rationally so)," the anonymous employee explained. "So I guess it harms the restaurant's image more to say we don't even have the product that we claim we have than to say one of our machines is down, which isn't something you have much control of and it sounds more reasonable."
Working in food service isn't easy, and it's not fair to get upset with your local McDonald's employees if they can't make a specific item right away. It's not their fault if a machine is out of service. Turns out these things are legit high maintenance.
And hey, as I just learned: if you really have your heart set on a certain drink, just call ahead to check if the machine is working before you drive all the way over there.
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