meirl
Thursday, 13 Mar 2025
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Guinness Records are by a beer company to settle bar arguments
If you give people a reason to drive somewhere (a fancy restaurant for example), they wear out their tires faster and have to purchase more (Michelin) tires.
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Fun fact, D-Day soldiers used Michelin maps
Reality is stranger than fiction right?
Often it’s also simply a case of a passionate person within a company, having earned enough credits or by virtue of being the boss, being allowed to leverage the company’s resources to pursue something they feel is interesting to do. Economists and managers like to pretend companies are these hyper-rational entities driven purely by greed, but some of the most interesting lateral jumps made by companies can be traced to one person going rogue and deciding the world would be more delightful by diverting a tiny slice of the company to a tangent. And we’re probably all better for it.
Of course afterwards you hear these great rationalizations like “people buy more tires if they drive across the country going to restaurants”, but that is fabricated after the fact… there would have been a million other ways to stimulate driving, none to do with restaurants. The fact they chose this boils down to one person saying “wouldn’t it be great if…?”
“Use our tires to visit places that we recommend you eat”
well the history of michelin is in france. I found an old ad and it was for bicycle tires
Yeah the star rating originally comes from these definitions
One star: “A very good restaurant in its category” // worth a stop
Two stars : “Excellent cooking, worth a detour”
Three stars : “Exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelin_Guide)
Wtf this is the first time I’m hearing this after a literal lifetime of watching gordon ramsay and consider my mind blown
It’s because it’s meant to be part of a travel guide. It’s silly, but the idea is that the tire company has data to suggest restaurants that are “worth” different levels of travel, and they took this role very seriously instead of just trying to sell tires.
every time i tell my mum this she fights me tooth and nail that its fake lmao
My boyfriend who’s a car guy heard me watching some food show and asked what the car company had to do with cooking. It was my time to shine. I have a whole spiel on the creation of the Michelin guide. Bless that man, he seemed genuinely interested in what I was rambling on about.
Right, next you’ll be telling me that Guinness World Records is actually the same company as the beer one.
Those are CHOICE tires.
🧉🦄👌🏽
In almost an hundred year it has become pretty based at least in France.
My great grandma used to work for the Michelin guide and went to England multiple times to try out restaurants across the country.
Fun fact : she had her “Michelin retiree card” that granted her free tires for the rest of her life.
If you’re bad, you get frowny clouds from Goodyear
Same
Well I guess it is worth mentioning that it came in very early 1900s when pneumatic tires just appeared and their durability wasn’t nowhere as good as now. Releasing guides with restaurants ahead was part of advertising how far you can travel with your car equipped with Michelin tires. There were really few cars in that time, you had to be rich, technical and adventurous to go in far distances with your fresh motorwagen
Michelin is also largely responsible for all of the wars in Vietnam. Brasilian rubber was very, very expensive, because Brasil was the only place it grew. So the British stole rubber trees and planted them in Malaya and then the French conquered their own Asian country to grow rubber…
It actually makes a lot of sense to me. Who makes tires? Michelin. What are tires used for? Traveling. When you travel around where do you eat? The places Michelin recommends to travelers. That’s actually how it started the Michelin star rankings were put onto a map that was specifically made so motorists could find places to eat. The places with high Michelin stars stood out and got more business which resulted in a positive feedback loop of quality. That resulted in the current system which had moved away from the places for travelers to eat and instead being a show of high quality. This is my favorite type of history. Just tracking how different non animate things evolve from what they once were to what they are currently.
Or the beer company recording records
One of my favorite moments last year was watching the shambolic, poorly produced Michelin award announcements for Texas, in which a giant inflatable Michelin Man (aka the [Bibendum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelin_Man)) greeted the winning chefs on-stage. Surreal.
Its so that youll drive to those places with your tires
Equal and Opposite reaction to realizing dove soap and chocolates are not the same company
This thread is blowing my mind
“That’s too dumb even for our society.”
…
“No way.”
My grandparents gaslit me into thinking they were different things. You just reminded me about that over ten years ago. Anger.
Adam made a quite good video on it.
https://youtu.be/gsHnfeS1UgQ
As I remember it they did this in part at least because the star rating of hotels was done by the AA (a British breakdown and insurance company)
wait. wut.
really?
The Nobel price was started by a doorbell company to humiliate people still living in primitive huts
WAIT? It IS the tire company?! I was right all along.
Are you still fucked up? Do you need someone to talk to? A hug?
Sheep will sheep. I hate this timeline.