Michelin: what are we even doing anymore?
CEO stuffing his face with a cordon bleu: We make fucking tires!
I always wondered what the story was.
Not too long after the automobile started gaining popularity, they started releasing a sort of driving guide, basically cool road trip ideas to get people using their cars more. Part of this guide was rating restaurants. After a while the guide part fell off, but the restaurant ratings stuck around.
Until today when nobody remembers the guide but the restaurant ratings are the most prestigious awards in the entire industry.
Is this about the Michelin Stars?
Yeah.
No, this is about the Firestone… huh…
…
Son of a bitch…
It was also updated every year and you got one with a new s set of ties. So an extra incentive to get a new set of tires every year.
A part of this was that they wanted people to drive far so they’d have to replace their tires more often.
Michelin wanted people to drive more, because people driving wore out their tires meaning more tire sales for Michelin. They created a travel guide that included a star system for restaurants that were worth travelling to, eventually settling on the 3 star system where 1 star was worth a stop along your route, 2 stars was worth a detour along your route and 3 stars is worth a dedicated trip to eat at.
Which everyone always gets wrong, since there’s apparently a deeply ingrained cultural misconception that a restaurant can achieve up to five Michelin stars. Even Ratatouille got this wrong (although possibly deliberately), with the implication that Gusteau’s was a “five” star restaurant, its downgrading to four is the event that caused Gusteau himself to lose his will to live, and afterwards it was downgraded again to three. Which is already the maximum. Either Gusteau’s was just originally so good it broke the scale, or it was the sole and singular haute cuisine establishment in all of Paris that was not ranked by Michelin for some reason.
The various hotel ranking schemes have a one-to-five stars scale, though, which is probably what most people conflate the Michelin stars with. Unlike the Michelin ratings there is no central or consistent authority on hotel rankings so they’re pretty arbitrary to begin with and to a certain degree just a marketing ploy.
The 5 stars of ratatouille might have been an anachronistic shorthand of good quality based more on how so much of what the average person is familiar with is a 5 star rating system (think product reviews on Amazon, app reviews on Google play/app store, driver ratings on Uber etc)
Like, I imagine people have an understanding that Michelin stars are a thing but don’t know what those stars mean other than more stars is more gooder. And to muddle it up even more in the present day a single chef can have more than 3 stars because that chef owns multiple restaurants. (See British shouty chef’s 17 Michelin stars)
Yes, and possibly also so they can’t get sued or have to license the Michelin name somehow if they can point to the fact that their stars are clearly not the same thing.
I once saw a plaque that claimed the hotel was a “6-star”. It was a nice hotel, sure, but it made it clear those “stars” mean very little.
it isn’t this for sure but it is very much advertising gone good
Michelin tires would put out road maps with advertisements and they started to include destinations with restaurant reviews in them, that was like the biggest critical review that a restaurant could get back then. So they took it really seriously
True story. ☝️😉
Before reading the last panel, I thought this was about a chef pissed off about a Michelin review so he decides to review their tires.
Bam! And all of a sudden it became an origin story.
🖐️ 😎 🤚
A lot better than the original Origin Story.
This is my favorite one so far! 😂
Thanks. 😊
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