In Texas, there is no sales tax on grocery/food items. Backroads Bakery, Inc. sells fried pies. These have long been classified as non-taxable food items, however, at least one of their retail sellers are charging sales tax on the fried pies to retail customers. Backroads claims to have 80 stores selling their fried pies, so if all 80 stores are collecting sales tax, this is a massive amount of taxes being collected from customers on an item that is non-taxable. Sarah Lively, Justin and Mindy Scrivner are the owners/employees of Backroads Bakery, Inc.
On another note, their website backroadsbakery.com expired earlier this year and the domain was grabbed up by a Canadian website poacher who buys domain names hoping the rightful owners will pay extortion to get their domain back. So Backroads got the dot net domain instead. It would only have cost them less than $10 to renew their dot com domain, but like many small business owners, they grossly underestimate the value and power of a website. The general consensus, even in the 21st century, is that a website isn't important and isn't taken seriously. However, their old site is still partially viewable in web archives and I took note that they say that customer satisfaction is their number one goal. The reason I'm posting this complaint is because I emailed them several months ago inquiring about sales taxes being collected on their items. I got no response. This tells me that their "the customer is number one" slogan isn't taken seriously either. Lots of business people like to say it, but not many actually follow through when something comes up.
This complaint is what happens when you don't take customers seriously and are not concerned that they are being cheated. The next step is filing a complaint with the Texas Comptroller.
One more thing, no other store in the town I live in charges sales tax on fried pies. This is because they know the tax law and abide by it.