Headline, The Hill: "FTC looking into broken ice cream machine at McDonald's."
As I understand capitalism, economic competition with competitors should address this issue, either by drawing customers away from McDonald's franchises (I haven't set foot in one in years, though I am not a big consumer of fast food of any kind), or else by convincing McDonald's to invest in more functional technology.
Perhaps people have switched away from McDonald's over this issue, but the capitalist pressures haven't made them change their technology. As the article points out, the corporation mocks its own machinery on Twitter.
Could be ice cream was never that big a part of their success story, and they figure it's cheaper to take the hit than to pony up for more functional machines. Perhaps a nice taxpayer-funded investigation of their private business practices will lay clear the source of this national scourge. Thank goodness we have whole agencies of experts employed to do this important work.
I caught some of the backstory from semi-reliable sources. We shall see. In contrast to Chik-Fil-A and Wendy's, McDonald's has ice cream machines that have obscure coded readings about what is going wrong with the machine. They have to wait for the company to send someone on a service call. If you try to do it yourself they will say you have voided the warranty. The supplier of the machines makes 25% of its revenue on service calls and so has little incentive to change this. There is apparently some copyright issue with the machines that makes it hard to wriggle free.
ReplyDeleteIf laws are being broken then the investigation is justified. If some regulator just thinks it all doesn't look right, however, then the market should take its long effect.