Philip L. Smith

<return address withheld>
February 17, 1990

Philip L. Smith
Pillsbury Co.
200 S. 6th St.
Minneapolis, MN 55402

Dear Philip Smith:

After much research I was able to track down who to write to about my complaint. It seems that your company Pillsbury owns Burger King among other things. And it is about Burger King that I wish to complain.

I don’t fully understand the motives behind you saying in your television advertisements for that restaurant (Burger King), "sometimes you just got to break the rules." First of all, whose rules are you "breaking", your own? Somebody elses? An industry standard? The federal governments?

Secondly, even if you are breaking the rules, don’t you think it is better to break them on the sly and not tell anybody? This could save all the harm you are causing by telling everyone in two ways:

1. people will think your company is dishonest (how can I trust the food you serve if I think you are hiding something?)

and

2. aren’t you encouraging breaking the rules by making it seem alright to your viewers? (if people think that a great American institution such as your restaurant (Burger King) is proud of breaking the rules, then won’t they feel that it is alright as well? Won’t they think its okay to casually steal pens from the office? To cheat on their income tax? To sell vital national secrets to the Russians? To compromise their religious and political ideals? The list goes on!)

Now that you can see that this ad campaign is obviously disruptive, won’t you consider changing it or dropping it? If you changed it to "sometimes you just got to bend the rules", wouldn’t that be a little easier for our American public to swallow?

A frequent patron,

Phil Saunders

P.S. I like your fries the best of all, but don’t you think you could go a little easier on the salt content (sodium: a national problem)?