NPR.

This is the indicator from Planet Money.

I'm Stacey Bannock-Smith, and I'm Brittany Kernen.

And I'm here to get to the bottom of the question that has been on everyone's mind.

You know what it is.

Why are McFlurry machines always breaking?

So McFlurry's, if you have not had the pleasure of eating wine, they are these delicious

frozen treats from McDonald's.

And it's basically like a, if you took a cup of soft serve vanilla ice cream and you

mixed in some kind of candy like Reese's Pieces or Oreos or something like that and then

removed like 50% of the ice cream density.

And these soft serve ice cream machines are so broken, so often it's become almost like

natural law.

According to TikTok at least.

Someone on Twitter even speculated that in the multiverse there are McDonald's in

another dimension where the ice cream machine is the only thing that works.

I want to go to there.

So basically there are just all these conspiracy theories out there.

And I sort of always wrote it off as like nothing.

This is video journalist Johnny Harris.

The McFlurry story came onto his radar last spring.

When I got an email and they said, Hey, I've got information on this.

...