iFixit tears down a McDonald’s ice cream machine, demands DMCA exemption for it

My theory is the McD corporate strategy is based on real estate values. They buy the very choicest corner lots in decent neighborhoods and hold them while the burger business simply pays the bills and the estate taxes per location, and they do very intensive deep dives into how to keep their property values high. Based on this, cheap ice cream would put enough actual ice cream and sweets stores out of business that it would affect the area, so they make sure consumers can’t rely on it.

The actual story is that there’s a minimum level of complexity involved in a tear-down of a machine used to process dairy.

Employees don’t get a bonus for doing the cleaning, so it’s in their interest to declare that the machine is broken.

Former McDonalds employees have explained this to me when I brought up this story.