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Comment by evil-olive | Hacker News Reader

> Every two weeks the machine must be torn down and cleaned. It’s slightly complex but all well documented. Once the 14 day marker has been passed the machine is inoperable. It must be cleaned for food safety reasons. If your “cleaner” is out or you just have poor operations you’ll end up placing service calls out of confusion.

This seems entirely reasonable to me. I've heard horror stories about bacteria & mold growth in commercial ice machines from infrequent cleanings.

But...how high is the barrier to entry to becoming a "certified" ice cream machine cleaner? How much training is required, how much does it cost, etc?

In other words:

> Once the 14 day marker has been passed the machine is inoperable.

Who has "admin rights" to reset this "most recently cleaned" timestamp?

Is there any reason why I, if I'm a McDonald's manager, couldn't take the training myself, and be the person who does the every-two-weeks maintenance?

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There’s no real certification. Usually you’d watch the training materials, then shadow someone once, then do it live with someone who trained watching. It’s not hard you just need to have done it a few times.

There’s no admin reset or anything like that. There is a maintenance menu and an admin menu but even in the higher level “secret” menus changing this was never an option. I’ve seen people try and short the main board with a screwdriver to get it to “reset” the date.

It’s a very intelligent machine and when it’s cleaned you need to go through the cleaning “process” in the menu. Wash, rinse, sanitize etc. it monitors the process with various sensors and it being flushed so many times. Faking it isn’t an option, I’ve seen too many people try.

> Is there any reason why I, if I'm a McDonald's manager, couldn't take the training myself, and be the person who does the every-two-weeks maintenance?

I'd go out on a limb and say that it's McDonalds corporate that doesn't trust the franchise owner with the machine, not the manufacturer trying to swindle franchise owners.

Sure. But replace "franchise owner" with "shift manager" or whatever other job title you want.

The question remains - what's the barrier to entry to becoming "certified" as an ice cream machine cleaner?

Is it legitimately a difficult cleaning process that requires an extremely specialized skill-set that only the High Priests of Ice Cream Machinery are able to perform?

Or, as seems likely to me, cleaning the machine is relatively simple, but the ability to reset the "time since last cleaning" setting may be artificially restricted?

If I were the manufacturer of these Taylor ice cream machines, setting them up with a "one of our certified technicians needs to touch them at least once every 14 days, or they stop working" seems like an excellent way to seek rent / generate passive income.

I think the barrier of entry isn't training, it's trust. McDonalds corporate signed a contract with Taylor with the caveat that only Taylor maintain the machines because they trust Taylor to do it correctly and, because the contract with McDonald's is probably enormous, Taylor has a lot of incentive to make sure nobody gets listeria from McDonalds.

It's "artificially restricted" in the same way that I could give anyone a key to my house (duplication is trivial) very easily but I don't.

That’s an unusual usage of the phrase passive income if a tech has to go out and lay hands on the machine.

As I've tried to express elsewhere, it's really not difficult. Anyone can do it given a few hours training.

Suggesting the franchise owner do it or even the store manager is far off from how these operations work in my experience.

Franchisees (Owners) have so much to do. They never "have" to work a single shift after they complete onboarding. While this can take around 9-12 months once most are done they never look back. Owners are tasked with running and growing the business, focusing on their local community and the people element. Any equipment work is not considered a good use of their time.

It has been 20 years, and surely the machines have changed. But it wasn't difficult to learn to tear the machine down. Considering this is a company that often has picture instructions for employees and tends to make things easy to understand, I can't imagine it has gotten more difficult. The store I worked at did this every night after running disinfectant through the machine: The parts we took off were cleaned every night. There were trays to keep the parts organized. These were organized in a way that made them easy to grab for proper assembly in the morning. Occasionally the morning staff had some problems, but those were usually fixed in time for there to be ice cream at lunch.

In other words: Store employees can do all of the basic stuff necessary with the machine.

Again, though, the machines have likely changed (Though they probably work similarly). And if the current machines need cleaned and sanitized less often, employees probably don't do it as often. I'm gonna guess instructions can fix this, though.

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