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Comment by wronglebowski | Hacker News Reader

I always had access to a Taylor manual and a Taylor technician via phone at no cost. Even with machines that were far out of warranty. Troubleshooting was never an issue for me.

I never worked anywhere else with a Taylor machine. Perhaps other companies have better deals or easier to use equipment. I would like to know if Wendy's and others machines operate using the same food safety standards.

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> I always had access to a Taylor manual and a Taylor technician via phone at no cost.

Was that technician for free? Or did your franchise owner pay for it, out of (your) sight? The claim isn't that they do a poor job with technicians, just that they are perversely incentivized to profit from it.

The video also explains there was a (very limited) owner manual, while all the secrets were in the service manual. Which of those did you have access to?

I find it potentially a bit of a low blow to question Wendy's and others' food safety standards.

Did you see the video?

I had access to both. We did not pay for any of it. In fact the Taylor facility in our local market offered free “training” days once a year specifically for McDonald’s employees.

McDonald’s is much more political than people think. The franchise I worked for was very well connected and well represented. It’s possible that this access was something they pushed for or is not well known.

Payment type would also matter. If it’s a flat monthly fee then they’re incentivized to avoid service calls. I imagine franchises and Taylor itself would also vastly prefer such a scheme, as it would reduce cost variation.

I understand that companies like Taylor benefit from income streams being predictable. But as per the video it seems that their revenue model was predicated on having as many incidents as possible, each billed separately.

If you have many incidents, they become statistically predictable again.

Was it at McDonald's? The article specifically says that it's McDonald's machines that require (edit:excessive) maintenance and not the ones used by other companies.

From this comment tree I wonder if the problem is some evil company being greedy, or is it a lack of incentives in McD and franchise owner to update SOP to properly train and assign a worker to properly maintain the machine to keep the machine running to offer ice creams consistently.

Why do they keep an item on the menu if they are not being able to make it reliably?

It's a minor but important part of the profitability picture. While this is much less true today, one of the core concepts was always that McDonald's could execute things at scale no one else could.

Now there's a ton of competition and specialty shops, but in the past this wasn't always the case. A small town might only have one other location where you can get "fresh" ice cream. If you can execute on this machine properly and you have the market to support it they can be huge profit makers.

"Food safety standards" would not result in downtime rising from <1% to over 10%.

>>>I always had access to a Taylor manual

You expect people to RTFM.... come one this is 2021 no one reads manuals any more...

//wish that as sarcasm but the number of times I have seen a solution to a problem that plagued people for weeks be found clearly laid out in the manual for a given product is far to high

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