Recipe Station

So here's what Seventeen magazine found during its investigation. As it turns out, maintaining the machines is more complicated than one might think.

The machines require lots of maintenance.

“Cleaning these machines takes HOURS,” Becca Jansen, a former McDonald's employee of five years in Missouri, told Seventeen.com. “I mean it, these old machines can take 4 hours to clean. The reason? It has a preprogrammed cycle that it must complete, and if it senses you did something wrong, it will start over.”

Not just anyone can clean the machines, either. Only certain specialized employees are taught how to clean or fix them, and these employees typically work regular 9 to 5 hours. If a machine breaks at 7 p.m., it probably won't get fixed until the next afternoon.

The machine hasn't been turned on.

At Becca's store in Missouri, the ice cream machine typically wasn't turned on until around 10 a.m. If a customer asked for an ice cream or milkshake (which is made in the ice cream machine) before then, she would tell them she couldn't serve it at that time.

Or, as Becca put it to me on the phone, “It's just too damn early in the day to make ice cream.”

Or the machine was just turned off.

When I asked Seventeen.com's fashion assistant Kelsey Stiegman, a former McDonald's employee of four years in Illinois, about this situation, she explained that the employees weren't always 100 percent straightforward with customers. Particularly on slow nights, they might turn off the machines early.

“They probably say they can't make the drink because the machine is cleaning,” she told me. “If the store closes at 11 p.m., they might start cleaning it at 9 if things are slow, and so they don't want to dirty it again. If they say it's broken, it's probably because they cleaned it already so they're making an excuse that the customer will understand.”

The machines can malfunction when the weather is hot.

You probably don't feel your best when it's a zillion degrees outside in August. Neither do the machines.

“If the weather outside is too hot, this can impact the ice cream machine's ability to keep the shake mix at the required inner temperature,” an anonymous former McDonald's employee told Seventeen.com.

Wow!

We had no clue it was such a major operation to keep those machines up and running. Maybe we should call ahead before we head to McDonald's for a latte.

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Article Source: Delish

Photo Source: Creme Brulee McFlurry, McDonald