Fortune cookies offer advice of a different kind

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, New York, 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."

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Bernard Chow, marketing coordinator at Wonton Food, said 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 our fortune cookies to be a little bit more value-added," Chow said. "We wanted to get some different perspective, to write something that is more contemporary."

Wonton Food, which describes itself as the largest fortune-cookie maker in the country, produces about 4.5 million cookies a day. The company made headlines in 2005 when 110 people won almost $19 million in the Powerball lottery after playing a "lucky number" sequence from the back of a Wonton fortune.

Wonton has a catalog of 10,000 fortunes, and about a quarter of them are in rotation at any given time. It introduced 600 new ones several months ago, including about 150 in the popular fortune-telling category. Other message categories are humor, motivational sayings, riddles and translated Chinese idioms.

"They can't be offensive, got to be positive, and rated G," said Derrick Wong, vice president for sales at Wonton.

But as customers began to request more fortunes with actual predictions rather than cryptic sayings, the writers removed their rose-colored glasses, he said.

"It's very hard to come up with more fortunes," Wong said. "Some people may not like them."

Some consumers complained; others searched for meaningful explanations.

Chow characterized the new fortunes as "cautious" rather than negative, and said he had received complaints about only two messages so far. One was the "disastrous day" note. The other said: "Your luck is just not there. Attend to practical matters today."

Wonton plans to remove those two from circulation, Chow said, adding that he welcomes customer feedback about the others.

"I got some people saying that you're making people think, and that's good," he said. "But I have people writing to me saying that it's not positive enough."

Most people who receive one of the downbeat fortunes do not take them too seriously. Karyn Turnbull, 33, an education software designer in Austin, Texas, said her fiancé had been warned about a "disastrous day" when they celebrated their engagement at the Chinese restaurant where they had their first date.

"He laughed and said if he had gotten them before, he might not have proposed," Turnbull said.