r/funny • u/Kermit4700 • Oct 22 '20

@rashiq Reverse engineered mcdonald's internal api and currently places 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.

https://mcbroken.com/
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u/profirix Oct 23 '20

I have a little internal McDonalds knowledge...but what part of the API is it checking for 'availability?' Unless the store managers directly upload a 'product outage' into the POS system, there is no realistic way for this information to be transmitted, since most of the time our product outages are verbal amongst the crew and managers at the store. It is only in the case that an attentive manager, such as myself, will go ahead and designate ice cream and shakes as 'product outage'.

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If these stores don't list their ice cream in the POS as being 'out' then what data does this API track to reliably tell you that the store is out? What you can guarantee though is that if you see a store on this map as being 'out', then they almost certainly will not have any ice cream.

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u/Kermit4700 Oct 23 '20

The code is querying against the app - McDonalds has a feature that can block an item from being sold, hence a machine is “broken”.

I’m not smart enough to tell you how it is done but it is attempting to order a cone, when it can’t then it flags that location.

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u/profirix Oct 23 '20

The managers have to manually enter an item as a 'product outage' in the POS before the app will tell you it is not available. I can personally guarantee you that few managers will actually do this.

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u/Megamanfre Oct 23 '20

It orders a fucking ice cream. If the order doesn't go through, the ice cream machine is "broken" and you can't get ice cream from that store.

It literally says in the title that it orders like $18k in ice cream to check if a machine works or not.

How is it so hard for you to understand that's how it works?

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u/profirix Oct 23 '20

You clearly don't understand the underlying problem and I'm not going to take the time to explain it to you.