How Trump’s McDonald’s gig highlights a crucial battle for our rights
Donald Trump’s shift at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s caused a McFlurry of excitement online — with fans playfully naming him the leader destined to solve the country’s most vexing fast-food frustration.
“He’s gonna fix America’s ice cream machine,” went one typical post on X, alluding to the oft out-of-order frozen treat dispensers — which a recent $900 million lawsuit places at the center of a vast corporate conspiracy.
The chain has long been infamous for the frequency with which its soft-serve makers are on the fritz — so much so that in 2020, enterprising ice cream-lover Rashiq Zahid created McBroken, a website that tracks the status of McFlurry mixers in all 13,509 McDonald’s in the United States.
Shakes down
At this writing, 14.72% of McDonald’s ice cream machines across the country are broken. That includes 14.29% of all Dallas locations, 18.75% of Seattle’s, and a chilling 32% of New York’s.
Many disgruntled franchise owners place the blame squarely on McDonald’s — and the company that makes most of the machines.
Until 2017, all McDonald’s franchises were required to buy an ice cream maker made by the Illinois-based Taylor company; today, they have a few other options, but Taylor still controls most of the market.
While Taylor makes soft-serve machines for other chains, the $18,000 C602 model it sells to McDonald’s is made specifically for the Golden Arches — and requires a nightly four-hour cleaning cycle.
PC load vanilla
If anything goes wrong with that cycle, operators of the machine receive a vague error message and are forced to try the cycle again. If they can’t get the machine working, they must order an expensive repair from an official Taylor technician.
In 2018, food services conglomerate Middleby acquired Taylor. Its financial statements from that year reveal that 25% of its revenue comes from service calls and repairs — leading many disgruntled franchise owners to speculate that the company makes its machines breakdown-prone on purpose.
In 2020, two entrepreneurs formed the startup Kytch in an attempt to put maintenance back in the hands of franchises. Kytch sold a small computer that attached to Taylor ice cream machines and “translated” confusing error messages into detailed and user-friendly troubleshooting information — often allowing the operators to fix the machine themselves.
Franchises loved it, but soon, executives at Taylor intervened. In late 2020, they sent an email to franchises telling them not to use the device, claiming it could maim an employee by starting the machine remotely during cleaning. Kytch denied this.
Sales dropped, however, and Kytch soon closed up shop.
Iced out
Kytch founders then served Taylor with a $900 million lawsuit, claiming the company employed corporate espionage to obtain a Kytch unit, then reversed-engineered it to make its own competing product — with an eye on driving Kytch out of business rather than solving McDonald’s ice cream woes.
While Kytch and Taylor have apparently reached a settlement, the case remains tied up in a dispute between Kytch’s former law firm and its current one.
Meanwhile, website iFixit did a teardown of one of the soft-serve units — and has teamed up with nonprofit Public Knowledge to file for an exemption with the U.S. Copyright Office allowing people to repair the Taylor machines — as well as other consumer and commercial devices — on their own.
The case also brought renewed attention to iFixit’s advocacy for state “right to repair” laws, which secure the right of the consumer to repair products he or she has purchased without restriction.
As the media continues to cope and seethe over Trump’s viral stint as a fast-food worker, it seems to have reopened discussion about our essential property rights — and the efforts of corporations to take them away.
Not bad for 15 minutes spent slinging fries.
