Attention McDonald’s lovers! A very frustrating question may now finally have an answer. Fans of the fast-food chain McDonald’s love everything from the kid’s happy meals to the dollar menu. But there is one McDonald’s item that is even more famous than the popular clown mascot, Ronald McDonald.
I am talking, of course, about the McDonald’s ice cream machine. This is a machine in all McDonald’s restaurants that is well known for being broken all the time. It seems that someone has finally gotten fed up with not knowing if the McDonald’s ice cream machine will work though.
Source: foodandwine.com
Rashiq Zahid, a 24-year-old software engineer, decided to change this when he was unavailable to order ice cream from the company over the summer. In a tweet, he explained ” “I reverse engineered McDonald’s internal API and I’m currently placing an order worth $18,752 every minute at every McDonald’s in the US to figure out which locations have a broken ice cream machine.”
Zahid created McBroken.com, a website that shows a map of the United States and has a dot for each and every single McDonald’s location in the country. The dot will be red if the ice cream machine is no longer working.
This information also gets updated about every 30 minutes, which is how often each location updates depending on whether ice cream items show up as available or not. There is also a box on the website that reveals the overall percentage of broken machines. Major cities are also ranked by the percentage of ice cream machine outages in the area.
Also, David Tovar, McDonald’s VP of U.S. communications and government relations, even tweeted his support for the website by saying, “Only a true @McDonalds fan would go to these lengths to help customers get our delicious ice cream! So, thanks! We know we have some opportunities to consistently satisfy even more customers with sweet treats and we will.”
Source: eater.com