Bot orders $18,752 of McSundaes every 30 min. to find if machines are working

[Karlston]

Bot orders $18,752 of McSundaes every 30 min. to find if machines are working

Know before you go... drive-through milkshake style.

Enlarge / This 2019 photo was taken in Poland, but McDonald's main virtue is that you pretty much know what you're getting with it anywhere in the world.

Michal Fludra | NurPhoto | Getty Images

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Burgers, fries, and McNuggets are the staples of McDonald's fare. But the chain also offers soft-serve ice cream in most of its 38,000+ locations. Or at least, theoretically it does. In reality, the ice cream machines are infamously prone to breaking down, routinely disappointing anyone trying to satisfy their midnight McFlurry craving.

 

One enterprising software engineer, Rashiq Zahid, decided it's better to know if the ice cream machine is broken before you go. The solution? A bot to check ahead. Thus was born McBroken, which maps out all the McDonald's near you with a simple color-coded dot system: green if the ice cream machine is working and red if it's broken.

 

The bot basically works through McDonald's mobile app, which you can use to place an order at any McDonald's location. If you can add an ice cream order to your cart, the theory goes, the machine at that location is working. If you can't, it's not. So Zahid took that idea and scaled up.

 

"I reverse-engineered McDonald's internal ordering API," he explained when he launched the tool, "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."

 

The data-picture painted by the bot is weirdly fascinating. At the time of writing, for example, just under 10 percent of McDonald's ice cream machines are broken nationwide. But in New York City, it's almost 24 percent. It's also a solid 20 percent right now in Seattle and about 14 percent in the Washington, DC, area.

...why?

The Verge interviewed Zahid about his project once his tweet announcing it took off.

 

He started the project examining McDonald's locations in Germany, where he lives. He biked around Berlin, physically visiting McDonald's locations to see if McBroken's data was correct. After it passed that test, he expanded to the US. He also found out shortly after launch that the one-minute time frame was too quick—the app pretty quickly pegged him as a bot and cut off access. Trying to add a McSundae to the cart every 30 minutes, however, keeps McBroken up to date and appears to meet the McDonald's app's human-seeking standards.

 

This is not the first time a customer has tried to develop a technological workaround to McDonald's corporate problems. In 2017, a woman named Raina McLeod created an app to track if McDonald's ice cream machines were working. As McLeod explained to BuzzFeed at the time, she created the app "after a late night Oreo McFlurry craving went unfulfilled due to the ice cream machine being down."

 

McLeod's app, however, relied on crowdsourced data and therefore only worked as well as the would-be ice-cream buyers using it. By going directly to the source, McBroken can keep its data both more accurate and more up to date.

 

For its part, McDonald's does not seem particularly upset about Zahid's project. The company has long acknowledged that its ice cream machines are a weak spot in its lineup. On Twitter, company communications and government relations executive David Tovar applauded the effort. "Only a true McDonald's fan would go to these lengths to help customers get our delicious ice cream!" Tovar said. "So thanks! We know we have some opportunities to consistently satisfy even more customers with sweet treats and we will."

 

In the meantime, according to a Business Insider report from last week, franchisees are taking the matter into their own hands and seeking their own solutions to make sure ice cream machines are working more often.

 

Are McDonald's broken ice cream machines the most urgent problem facing humanity? No, of course not, not by a long mile. But in a year like 2020, we have to take the little joys where we can, and a tool that can save you from disappointment before you're in the drive-through line can make life better in a small, measurable way.

 

 

Bot orders $18,752 of McSundaes every 30 min. to find if machines are working

 

[Karlston]

Meet the 24-year-old who’s tracking every broken McDonald’s ice-cream machine in the US

Check it out the next time you’re craving a McFlurry 

Photo by Romy Arroyo Fernandez/NurPhoto via Getty Images

We’ve all been there. You’re craving a McFlurry, or a Shamrock Shake. You drive to McDonald’s, excited to fill yourself up with cold and sugary goodness. But when you finally make it to the counter, you hear those dreaded, devastating words: “The ice cream machine is broken.”

 

A few hours ago, a 24-year-old software engineer launched McBroken, a website that aims to end such incidents once and for all. The site displays a map of every McDonald’s location in the US, denoted by clusters of dots. Locations with a working ice-cream machine get a green dot; locations without one, a red dot. A column on the right compiles statistics — currently, 7.54 percent of McDonald’s ice-cream machines in the US are broken, as are 15.22 percent of those in New York.

 

Rashiq Zahid came up with McBroken over the summer. In July, he visited a McDonald’s in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin and attempted to order a McSundae from a touchscreen kiosk — but no ice cream was available. He attempted to order from the mobile app, but was similarly thwarted. His trip had been for naught.

 

“I was like, there must be something that can be done about this,” Zahid said.

 

So he built a bot.

McBroken displays a map of every McDonald’s location in the US.

Zahid started with the McDonald’s mobile app, which already lets you place an order at any McDonald’s location. It works like shopping on Amazon or Grubhub — you add the items you want to a cart, and pay when you’re ready. But if your chosen location doesn’t have a working ice-cream machine, you can’t add any items containing ice cream to your cart — they’re marked as “Currently unavailable.”

 

“I love poking around in different apps and just looking at the security features and the internal APIs,” Zahid said. “I am pretty familiar with how to reverse-engineer apps. I was like ‘Okay, this should be pretty easy.’”

 

Click a dot to see when it was last checked.

 

Select an address to zoom in on its location.

 

You can also check in on what appear to be fake test locations.

 

It turned out to be harder than he’d thought. Initially, he created an API that attempted to add a McSundae from every McDonald’s location to its cart once every minute. The app figured out what he was up to and blocked him — “It was like, you can’t do this, you look like a bot,” he recalled.

 

After a night of trial and error, Zahid figured out the magic time frame. Now, his bot attempts to add a McSundae every 30 minutes. If the bot successfully adds the item, it lets McBroken know that the location’s machine is working. If it can’t, the location gets a red dot. (A Twitter user claiming to be a McDonald’s employee has confirmed that the method works.)

Zahid first tested McBroken in Germany, which has around 1,500 locations. He biked to every location in Berlin, placing manual sundae orders to determine if his bot was returning the correct information. It passed with flying colors. Today, he’s expanded to the states.

 

“I was like, this would be pretty interesting for Germany, but it would be amazing for the US, which is basically the capital of McDonald’s,” Zahid told The Verge.

 

Within 20 minutes of its launch, McBroken received 10,000 visitors. It ran sluggishly at first, and eventually crashed. “I’m running this on a server that costs $5 a month, so it was bound to crash,” Zahid said. After an hour of troubleshooting, which involved offloading some traffic, Zahid now assures me that the site “works perfect.”

 

But he’d intended the tool to be a joke — and is shocked to hear that people find it legitimately useful. “I just made it for fun,” said Zahid. “But people were like ‘Wow, this is the best thing I’ve seen this entire week.’”

 

Who knows if McDonalds will end up shutting this operation down — but David Tovar, McDonald’s VP of US Communications, seems to be in support. “Only a true @McDonalds fan would go to these lengths to help customers get our delicious ice cream!” he tweeted this evening. For now, keep an eye on McBroken to prevent McDonald’s from breaking your heart.

 

 

Meet the 24-year-old who’s tracking every broken McDonald’s ice-cream machine in the US