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BREAKING NEWS
October 8, 2007
Don’t Open This Cookie (Disastrous Day Inside)
The messages in fortune cookies are typically vague, banal and optimistic. But some cookies are now serving up some surprisingly downbeat advice.

“Today is a disastrous day. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” reads one fortune showing up around the country.

“It’s over your head now. Time to get some professional help,” advises another.

As the messages, contained in cookies made by Wonton Food in Queens, have spread across the country, some diners have registered their reactions online. As a result, the company has a marketing challenge on its hands.

One blogger, who got the “professional help” fortune, wrote: “I shot the audacious baked item a dirty look and proceeded to eat it. And I hope it hurt.”

Bernard Chow, marketing coordinator at Wonton Food, says he had not set out to insult anybody when he asked his team of freelance writers to come up with some new messages. “We wanted to get some different perspective, to write something that is more contemporary,” Mr. Chow said.

Wonton Food, the largest fortune cookie maker in the country, produces about 4.5 million cookies a day. But, he added, as customers requested more fortunes with actual predictions rather than cryptic sayings, the writers removed their rose-colored glasses.

Mr. Chow characterized the new fortunes as “cautious” rather than negative.
The New York Times


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'Negative Thinking' Sweeps Into Fortune Cookie Market
Category: CULTURAL TRENDS
By: Pete Kendall, October 8, 2007
The academic world is catching on to the power of negativity. “Bad moods and negative attitudes have gotten a bad rap at work,” says a widely cited paper. “Bad moods can play a fruitful role.” The theory of social visioning says that expressions of a new mood can foreshadow the actual trend change. In this case, the clarity of the images probably says a lot about the intensity of the new trend. There’s certainly no mistaking its trajectory.
The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast, August 2007

fortune cookie
In recent issues of The Elliott Wave Financial Forecast (see June, July and August Cultural Trends sections) describe how failure and “negative thinking” have become all the rage – on Broadway, the self-help circuit and in early season episodes of American Idol. People just love public displays of bad singing, drug and child abuse and spirited efforts at self-destruction; thus the 24-hour media fascination with Brittany Spears. People are fascinated because deep inside they can relate. A little cookie that says “Time to get some professional help” is a changing social mood’s way of saying “You’re not cracking up after all.”


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ARTICLE COMMENTS
Drat... they took my idea : MisFortune Cookies
Posted by: Lou
October 8, 2007 04:11 PM



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