FRITO-LAY
CONSUMER RELATIONS
ATTN: JANE WAKELY, CHIEF CONSUMER & MARKETING OFFICER & CHIEF GROWTH OFFICER AT PEPSICO
PO BOX 660634
DALLAS, TX 75266-0634 3/31/26
| Ron Arbuckle
Dear Ms. Wakely,
I’ll get straight to the skinny here: Your BAKEN-ETS HOT’N SPICY pork rinds are too crunchy. Not the sensation in my mouth. No, in terms of “mouth-feel”, they’re perfect. It’s an issue with volume really. They crunch too loudly. Even if I let one soak in my saliva for a minute, as soon as my teeth make contact with the bubbly, crunchy exterior of the rinds, the sound reverberates past my clenched teeth out and throughout my bedroom. And it really wouldn’t be an issue to me, I don’t hear too good these days. It’s my wife. My beautiful-wife. She’s trying to sleep. And my trying-to-sleep-beautiful wife has very sensitive ears. Hell, I’ve got subtitles on Parks & Rec right now so she can sleep peacefully with her two eye masks on to block out the light of the TV. And I just want to finish my late-night snack, but it’s disturbing my light-sleeper-beautiful-deserves-a-pearlescent-Escalade-but-she’s-married-to-a-poor-but-hard-working-man wife sleep. You have to understand, I’d do anything for her. I’ve changed careers three times by thirty, moved across the state to be closer to her family, and even adjusted the volume of my own sneeze to accommodate her sensory sensitivities. So please, it doesn’t seem like too much for you to adjust your pork rinds to be less crunchy if it genuinely helps your customers with hyper-sensitive-hearing-light-sleeping-beautiful-deserves-all-the-riches-that-money-can-buy-married-to-men-who-would-move-literal-mountains-to-make-her-fall-just-an-iota-more-in-love-with-him wives sleep just a little more soundly. I know you’re kind of attached to the “pork” and “rind” parts of the product. Understandably so. It’s in the name after all. So can’t quite deviate from pig skins per se. I get that. But have you considered raising quieter pigs? Maybe raising them in sound-proofed paddocks? Perhaps a machine could be devised that takes a small needle and pops every bubble in the crackled chicharron. These are just ideas. I’m not very good at science. You should really consult my half-awake-studied-science-in-college-where-we-met-and-fell-in-love-over-a-decade-ago-before-we-married-and-she-mothered-my-two-incredible-children-beautiful wife. She knows the science stuff real good. Maybe you could just hire her to handle it. Pay her a million and one dollars a year plus benefits and perks. That would really solve our money problems and my asking-me-to-type-quieter-while-I-write-this-letter-beautiful wife could become a sleeps-soundly-and-can-afford-to-plant-trees-on-our-land-and-buy-more-horses-and-eliminate-all-our-debts-so-we-can-live-unencumbered-by-the-crushing-weight-of-making-ends-meet-for-the-basic-comforts-of-life-beautiful wife. Yeah, let’s do that. Two birds, one (quieter) pork rind.
Thank you for your attention to this matter,
Ron
A former minister, then machinist and now accountant,
Ron Arbuckle lives in Oklahoma with his wife & two kids on their family farm. After secretly writing it over the last two and a half years for his wife, Ron recently self-published his debut novel, A Matter of Design, and is currently working on a second novel while exploring poetry and other short forms of literary expression. His micro-fic and poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Trash Cat Lit, Michigan City Review of Books and Hidden Peak Press.