Bot Tracks Whether Ice Cream Machines Are Working At McDonald's Across US
Published
A software engineer has created a bot which tracks whether ice cream machines are working at McDonald's restaurants across the US.
Rashiq Zahid was inspired in the summer after he went to pick up a McSundae from a Maccies in Berlin, only to find the machine was broken.
His solution is McBroken, a site which displays a map of the US with every Maccies marked on with either a green dot or a red dot - green means the ice cream machine is working, red means it isn't.
It knows this thanks to Rashiq's bot, which places an order for a McSundae at every restaurant every 30 minutes minutes via the McDonald's mobile app.
The app doesn't allow you to add ice cream products to your basket if the machine at the restaurant isn't working - as such, McBroken allows you to see where you'll be able to grab a McFlurry near you.
The bot places $18,752 (£14,374) worth of ice cream orders every half an hour, though none of these orders are actually placed and no ice cream gets wasted.
Rashiq originally tried to place the orders every minute, but the app detected this was the ordering behaviour of a bot.
McBroken also provides a breakdown of the overall ice cream machine functionality across the country; for example, 11.06 percent of the machines in the country are currently broken, according to McBroken.
I reverse engineered mcdonald's internal api 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 https://t.co/2KsRwAdrMd
- rashiq (@rashiq) October 22, 2020
I'm sorry mcdonald's data analyst I'm afraid I'm ruining your entire mobile conversion metrics for my own personal amusement https://t.co/lYPn0Sj0eu
- rashiq (@rashiq) October 22, 2020
it's incredible to me that a $5 digital ocean box can serve traffic for 200k unique visitors and yet there's startups out there who deploy their landing pages with kubectl
- rashiq (@rashiq) October 23, 2020
Speaking to The Verge, 24-year-old Rashiq said: "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
"I just made it for fun, but people were like, 'Wow, this is the best thing I've seen this entire week.'"
Rashiq even earned the praise of David Tovar, McDonald's VP of US Communications.
He tweeted: "Only a true McDonald's fan would go to these lengths to help customers get our delicious ice cream! So, thanks!
"We know we have some opportunities to consistently satisfy even more customers with sweet treats and we will."
Bravo Rashiq, bravo.
Featured Image Credit: PA
Topics: Food, Awesome, McDonald’s, US News, Technology
