You’ve got a hankering for an Oreo McFlurry, a yen for a chocolate milkshake, an urge to slurp a seasonal Shamrock Shake, but you roll up to McDonald’s, and the notoriously finicky ice cream machine is down — again — putting the chill on your craving.
Mood check? McGrouchy.
It’s become a commonplace of modern American life: McDonald’s soft-serve machines are seemingly always broken, thanks to complex components, a high-heat bacteria-killing cleaning cycle that locks the machine if a glitch occurs, and a legal requirement that only a technician from the manufacturer may conduct repairs.
The Action Network, a sports analytics and media platform, just released the findings of a study that tracked the status of McDonald’s ice cream machines for six years in almost 500 cities across all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Nationally, machines were McBroken about 10.4 percent of the time, but that number varies dramatically by geography.
In Las Vegas, the odds are worse than the national average — machines are down 14.4 percent of the time. In Henderson and North Las Vegas, getting that McFlurry is a safer bet, with machines broken 10 percent and 8.2 percent of the time, respectively.
Where it’s worst and best
In other parts of the country, the Mickey D’s soft-serve situation is significantly dire.
The top-ranked city, Cleveland, Tennessee, in the southeast part of the state, sees machine outages almost 47 percent of the time, followed by Albany, Georgia, at more than 42 percent, and Gulfport, Mississippi, at almost 40 percent. In Cleveland, successfully ordering ice cream drinks is basically a toss-up.
Mississippi is the worst state overall (34 percent downtime), followed by Oklahoma (32.4 percent) and Alaska (30.5 percent).
Elsewhere, the odds of chilling are much better.
In Ashland, Kentucky, the lowest-ranked city, machines are on the fritz only about 2 percent of the time, with McDonald’s in Yakima, Washington, and Germantown, Maryland, reporting outages a bit less than 3 percent of the time. Minnesota (11.5 percent downtime) and Wisconsin (12.7 percent) have the best statewide performance in the country.
Visit here for the full findings, including tools to search soft-serve McHeartbreak (or not) by state and city.
Contact Johnathan L. Wright at [email protected]. Follow @JLWTaste on Instagram.