He Vents So That You Don’t Have To

For Wilber Winkle (a.k.a. John Homans, a mild-mannered 32-year-old insurance claims rep from Tampa), it all began when Hershey, without warning, started removing the almonds from Wilber’s beloved 5th Avenue candy bars. Wilber just “snapped,” as he puts it.

Off went a letter to Hershey Foods. That was in 1993. And though Wilber was not mollified by the company’s explanation that it had dumped the nuts to add more milk chocolate, he was delighted to learn that the laptop is mightier than the sword.

In the years since, Wilber has written to Denny’s to complain about waitresses who refill his coffee mug prematurely, thus destroying the sugar-cream-coffee balance, and to Underwood to ask that it remove that little red devil on the can, as it gives him nightmares.

He took Pepsodent to task for the “tiny” little warning on the tube that toothpaste shouldn’t be swallowed, having calculated that in 30 years of brushing he’d swallowed the equivalent of 18 tubes. What, he asked, did they intend to do about the 7 pounds of toothpaste “floating around in my system”?

Wilber’s tongue-in-cheek correspondence has been compiled in “Wilber Winkle Has a Complaint!” (Bancroft Press, 196 pages, $12.95). Is Wilber, the subtitle asks, “Consumer Advocate or Nut With Too Much Time on His Hands?” In any case, he tackles the issues that, as Homans says, “you won’t see on ’60 Minutes.’ ”

Such as cupcake icing that sticks to wrappers and ice cube trays that won’t release ice. As might be expected, corporate letters of reply tend to be heavy on consumer rep lingo, such as “customer feedback is very important to us” (which, says Wilber, means “they asked me to respond, even though I have no idea what you’re writing about”).

Sometimes Wilber tweaks for tweaking’s sake. He wrote to a bank asking if pennies had to be rolled heads-up, asked a casino in Atlantic City to check its chip lost-and-found for $164 in chips he’d left in the men’s room, and asked promoters of a “Walk England” tour if he could bring his pogo stick and “hop around everywhere.”

He initiated an ongoing correspondence with Wendy’s, complaining that a manager had hassled him for taking eight free drink refills, letting his whole family drink from the same cup, and filling 34 tiny containers with catsup for one burger.

Carnival Cruise Lines got a letter inquiring if it could accommodate Clyde, Wilber’s 278-pound gorilla. (No, but “we hope that you can make arrangements to have Clyde stay with someone so that you can enjoy [your] cruise.”) When he asked Cunard Lines if it is mandatory to use silverware in the dining room, it was suggested he have his meals in his cabin.

Chrysler Corp. declined his offer to be its first human crash test dummy for $1,000 a gig plus medical insurance. When he told M&M; / Mars that he’d given them the idea for blue M&Ms; and wanted a “thank you,” he instead got a letter from a fancy Park Avenue law firm.

It’s the rare consumer service rep who shows a bit of humor. When Wilber asked Brunswick Corp. to make him a giant bowling ball to roll over his mother-in-law, his $10 down payment was returned with the suggestion that he take her to lunch instead and patch things up. But L’eggs was not amused to learn that Wilber freaks out everyone at the office by pulling its pantyhose over his face: “We feel at this time this is not the direction we want to pursue with our hosiery.”

Those wishing to share their own complaints with Wilber, or to learn of his latest caper, can find him at https://www.wilberwinkle.com.