[Ashanmaril]

I thought I read from a McDonald's employee at some point that most of the time you go at night and they say the ice cream machine isn't working, it's actually some automatic cleaning process that the machine performs on itself every night.

[ehutch79]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDEtSlqJC4

Supposedly the whole operation of the machines is obtuse and error prone on purpose.

[blensor]

I saw a documentary about that once. It's not actually the regular cleaning process but the machine has very finnicky way of determining if the cleaning process worked (it has to do with the temperatures that are reached during the cleaning). And if one step during that process does "fail" the whole cleaning process has to be restarted which the staff will do in the morning when they come back (not sure how that works with 24h restaurants). Blocking the machine from use for hours

[keneda7]

Its also worth noting the cleaning process for McDonald seems to be different than other companies that use the similar machines. The documentary I watched (youtube) pretty much accuses them of purposely making the McDonalds machines fail cleaning by setting unrealistic requirements.