See If Any McDonald’s Ice Cream Machine in USA Works With This App
One of the cruelties of life is not being able to order ice cream when you want ice cream. And that’s especially true if it seems like the soft-serve machine at your local McDonald’s is always pasteurizing itself when you want something – or perhaps even an ice cream sandwich .
Software engineers come to the rescue. Rashik Zahid today unveiled a web application that uses the McDonald’s API to organize – reverse-engineered , of course – to query every McDonald’s in the United States. Assuming the store has correctly indicated that ice cream is not available and its ice cream machine is not working, this will appear as a small red dot on the McBrocken map:
Heck, Zahid even built a stats field into McBroken so you can see how different cities compare in ice cream uptime. (Sorry San Francisco.)
Zahid said his system works, queuing up orders worth nearly $ 20,000 every minute. Do not worry; he doesn’t put them down or cancel them over and over, which is why no McDonald’s employee has yet to dip their heads in a deep fryer due to Zahid’s machinations.
Several different Twitter and Product Hunt users have tested Zahid’s app by going into their local McDonald’s and looking at what they can order. For the most part, the app has been tested. Of course, there will be rare cases where the ice cream machine does not actually work. Or, if you’re lucky, you may find that the offline ice cream machine has since been reincarnated, and that McDonald’s simply forgot to celebrate the change on its side.
As for how long this little tool will be around before McDonald’s finds out about it and disrupts its functionality, well, I would order ice cream sooner rather than later.
Real Conversation: McDonald’s should just implement such a feature nationwide. Considering how many damn McDonald’s restaurants have in any area, it would be nice to know that you can get exactly what you want to order, even before you get there – provided that you do not place a mobile order in advance. This seems like an obvious addition to a McDonald’s app or website.
And if you’re talking about McDonald’s or ice cream, there is even an interesting sociological commentary that can be drawn from Zahid’s mashup: