You know the routine. You pull up at any McDonalds craving a shake and before you can get the word out, the drive-thru speaker crackles, “Sorry. Shake Machine’s down.”
Well, all that may change soon after the Federal Trade Commission ruled that McDonald’s franchise owners have the right to fix their own Taylor frozen desert machines.
For years, McDonalds banned owners from calling in anyone but Taylor, the company that makes the machiines, to make sense of all the senseless lights and codes that pop up when something goes wrong – the stuff that takes the shake machines down. The problem is (of course) customers get upset and drive-thru employees get yelled at. It’s been happening for years.
Apparently, some machine repairs through Taylor have taken up to 30 days since there are so many dead machines out there.
The owners took the Golden Arches to court to argue that they have a right to call in anybody they want to get their machines to work the way they should.
The National Restaurant Association estimates that fast food restaurants lose close to $1,000 every day their machines don’t work.
The problem has become so great that new companies have popped up with high-tech products that allow fast food owners to monitor and fix the machines remotely.
So next time you go to the Golden Arches (or any fast food location, really), think about how the U.S. government saved your shakes.
