Nuked You’re craving a McFlurry, or a Shamrock shake. When you make it to the counter, you hear those dreaded, devastating words:’the ice cream machine is broken’.
Mcbroken is a website that aims to end such incidents once and for all. 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 visited a McDonald’s in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. He tried to order a mcsundae from a touchscreen kiosk – but no ice cream was available.
‘there must be something that can be done about this,’ says Zahid.’I was like, there must have something to be done,’ he said.
The McDonald’s app 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. If your chosen location does n’t have a working ice-cream machine, you ca n’t add any items containing ice cream to your cart.
He created an API that attempted to add a mcsundae from every McDonald’s location to its cart once every minute. The app blocked him -‘you ca n’t do this, you look like a bot’.
A bot attempts to add a mcsundae every 30 minutes. If it ca n’t, the location gets a red dot.
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.
Germany is the capital of McDonald’s, says Zahid. Zahid says it would be’amazing’ for the US.
Within 20 minutes of its launch, mcbroken received 10,000 visitors. It ran sluggishly at first, and eventually crashed. After an hour of troubleshooting, Zahid now says the site’works perfect’.
