The Story Behind Too Good Treats in Downtown Commerce
Randy Starks will tell you he was never supposed to be the guy behind the counter. He spent forty years in pharmaceutical sales, built a career, raised a family, and figured retirement would look like something a little quieter. Then he and his wife Karen opened a popcorn shop in downtown Commerce, and now he’s the one greeting kids on bikes and training high schoolers.
Too Good Treats has been open since November 2017. Walk in and you’ll find close to thirty-five flavors of popcorn lining the back wall, hand-chopped ice cream on a frost top, chicken salad sandwiches, soups, jumbo cupcakes, and jars of old-fashioned candy sold by the pound. Randy describes it as a old fashioned candy store, the kind of place where a kid can ride up on a bicycle, pay in pennies, and stand on a Coke crate to watch someone write their name in caramel sauce.
That part is real. When a young customer steps up to the ice cream counter, one of Randy’s workers will write their name upside down in caramel so it reads right-side up from the other side of the counter. It’s a small thing, but it’s also exactly the point.
An Idea That Became Theirs
The shop actually started as someone else’s idea. Karen was working for a Commerce family that owned close to thirty businesses, handling everything from HR to payroll. Her employer had more building than he needed and asked Karen to figure out what could fill the extra space. She and Randy started talking one night, and somewhere in that conversation, a popcorn store came up.
Randy thought through the math pretty quickly. If Karen ran it as part of her existing job, she’d take on all the responsibility with none of the reward. “If we’re gonna do that,” he told her, “we ought to consider doing it ourselves.”
The building they found in downtown Commerce came with something useful: a 2,000-square-foot loft apartment above the shop. They renovated it, started renting it out, and the rent from upstairs covered the mortgage. That one decision changed everything about how the business could survive. Randy and Karen both kept their full-time jobs for years after opening, letting the store build itself while a rotating crew of high schoolers and college students kept the doors open.
It worked, mostly. Randy is honest that running a business without being present created problems. When he finally retired in July, he came in full time, and things got a lot better.
Learning the Ropes He Built
Not long after the shop opened, a man from Randy’s church asked if Too Good Treats could give a job to someone Randy knew from the same congregation. The man had never worked anywhere before, and Randy wasn’t sure how it would go. He had a visual condition that made standard text difficult to read, though special glasses that blocked out the spaces between lines helped him focus on the words themselves. He was also deeply introverted.
Randy started him on popcorn bagging, and Daniel, Randy and Karen’s son, took him under his wing. Over the next few years, something shifted. The man who had never held a job learned to manage people, grew comfortable in the store, and eventually left to work at Kimberly-Clark in Paris, then moved on to Campbell’s Soup.
Then he came back.
His mother wanted him to finish his degree, and Randy hired him again. By then Randy was still working full time in pharmaceutical sales and needed someone he could trust to run the shop. That man became assistant manager and handled nearly everything. When Randy finally retired, he made the same deal he’d make with anyone he valued: stay until I’m settled, and I’ll make it worth your while. The man agreed.
Within three weeks of Randy being full time, he was gone. He trained Randy on the way out, then moved on to a career at the U.S. Post Office.
“I feel good about the fact that, for whatever reason, God pushed us to hire him,” Randy said. “So he could better himself.”
Randy was proud of him. He still is.
Making It Work
Too Good Treats has never been the kind of business that makes anyone rich. Randy is straightforward about that. Popcorn has a thin margin. A bag that sells for four dollars might have three-fifty tied up in it once you count payroll and ingredients. Several other popcorn stores across Northeast Texas have opened and closed since 2017. Randy names them: Sulphur Springs, Tyler, Clarksville, Garland. None of them are still open.
Too Good Treats is still open because Randy and Karen hustle for it. On a typical spring or early summer weekend, they might be packing up the truck for Wylie’s Bluegrass Festival or heading to Nacogdoches for the Blueberry Festival, Randy’s favorite one-day event of the year. They bag a few hundred bags of popcorn, set up a booth, and sample it to anyone who walks by. Randy has been in sales for four decades. He knows that if someone tries it, they’ll usually buy.
They also do fundraisers, which have grown significantly in the last year. They ship orders to schools and organizations and put the customer’s own logo on the label. A Commerce school gets a Commerce tiger on the bag. A florist in White House sells their popcorn under the florist’s own name. Randy handles the shelf-life timing carefully: savory flavors last four to five weeks, coated ones four to five months, so he waits until the last possible moment to make and ship the savory orders.
Wholesale accounts round out the picture. There’s a buyer in Sulphur Springs, one in Oklahoma, two in Arkansas, one in Athens, one in Emory. They order every month or two, a case at a time.
“We haven’t made anything yet after nine years,” Randy said, and then laughed. “But we’re doing enough to stay open.”
Summer at Too Good Treats
Come summer, the frost tops do a lot of work. Too Good Treats runs two of them, and when a crowd rolls in at the same time, Randy will come out from the back with a sample cup of sea salt caramel popcorn and start working the line. It keeps people happy while the ice cream catches up. Sometimes the cooler of cold drinks empties out faster than anything else, which Randy considers a good problem to have.
Kids ride up on bikes. Families come in from A&M Commerce. Dr. Rudin, president of the university, stops by for cheddar popcorn. A city council member comes in for the sour balls on the candy aisle. Randy knows what regular customers want before they reach the counter.
For anyone who has never walked in before, Randy has a quick orientation ready. He’ll point out the candy side versus the chocolate side, explain they’re priced differently and need separate bags, walk them through the popcorn flavors, offer a sample of whatever sounds good, and then ask what they came in for. He’s not pushy about it. He just wants people to know what’s back there.
More Than Popcorn
Randy and his son Daniel are storm chasers. That is not a sentence most people expect when they walk into a candy shop on the Commerce square.
It started when Daniel was nine or ten and a bad thunderstorm scared him so badly that a friend’s dad called Randy to come get him. So the next time a storm rolled through, Randy put him in the car and drove into it, pulling up radar and explaining what they were looking at. Daniel got hooked. By high school, the Commerce police chief would pull him out of class during weather emergencies to help staff the operations center. These days Daniel is the communications director for the City of Greenville and runs a Facebook page with thousands of Northeast Texas followers, going live with radar and maps during severe weather. He was named Citizen of the Year at the Chamber of Commerce banquet, an honor his mother Karen had won twenty years earlier.
Beyond the storms, this is a family that shows up for Commerce together. Randy has served on the school board for thirteen years. He announces for the high school football, basketball, and volleyball teams and runs the game clock for the Southern Conference. Karen works the scoreboard, and Daniel handles the ESPN-style replays. Randy and Karen also sing together in the Northeast Texas Choral Society, rehearsing in Sulphur Springs every Monday night and performing two concerts a year.
“If we have a hobby as a family,” Randy said, “it’s college sports and the high school.”
The Legacy He’s Working Toward
Randy hopes someday they won’t need the weekend vendor circuit to make payroll. Online orders and fundraising have both grown in the last year, and he’d love to see that side of the business expand enough to give them their weekends back. He and Karen could still run the shop during the week and actually experience a Saturday without a booth to set up in another city.
He also thinks about the employees, maybe more than anything else.
“I don’t yell or get angry with them, even when they mess up and cost me money,” Randy said. “I’m laying the groundwork for them to develop good work habits and to be ethical.”
He’s seen it pay off in the people who left and went somewhere better. That’s the measure he keeps coming back to. Not the margin on a bag of popcorn, but whether the kid who came in not knowing how to do anything left knowing how to do something.
For customers, he wants something simpler: for Too Good Treats to be the place that felt like a good time, where everybody was kind, where a little kid stood on a Coke crate and saw their name written in caramel, and thought the whole thing was pretty great.
A Visit Worth Coming Back For
Randy had just told me his favorite part of owning Too Good Treats was watching kids ride up on their bikes, sometimes paying with nothing but a handful of pennies, when the door chimed. A boy rode up on his bike, walked in, made his purchase, and asked Randy point blank if he owned the place and if Too Good Treats was hiring. Randy told him to come back in two years, once he turned sixteen. It felt like watching the story happen in real time.
Before I left that day, I bought a bag of cinnamon roll popcorn for myself, a bag of sea salt caramel for my husband Troy, and a Fru Fru Berry craft soda for the drive home. The popcorn did not last long, and Troy is officially a fan now. A few days later, I came back with Troy and our granddaughter so everyone could pick out their own candy and ice cream. I got the Butterfinger Fanatic, and it did not disappoint.
About Too Good Treats
Too Good Treats is a locally owned candy shop and popcorn store located in downtown Commerce, Texas. They offer more than thirty flavors of popcorn, hand-chopped ice cream, chicken salad sandwiches, soups, jumbo cupcakes, and candy and chocolate sold by the pound. They also offer popcorn bars for events, fundraising programs for schools and organizations, and wholesale orders with custom labeling. Online orders ship nationwide.
Website: toogoodtreats.com
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Located in downtown Commerce, Texas
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