Jars of salsa stolen from small business owner
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A Valley small business owner is now out of more than a $1,000 worth of product.
Someone swiped the salsa right out the bed of his truck. He thought because of the weight of the cooler, that his goods were safe.
The owner of Mike's Salsa went inside Applebee's, and when he came out, 75 of his jars were stolen from the ice chest in the bed of his pickup truck.
Mike Estevanes owns Mike's Salsa, a company he started during the pandemic.
He sells the jars of salsa at different events around the Valley.
What started as a good sales day for Estevanes, ended in disappointment.
Before heading home late Saturday night, he and a few friends went to Applebee's in Weslaco.
"Luckily my truck wasn't broken into, but they did take practically everything," Estevanes said. "It was a full chest full of salsa, it was a tent, it was chairs, it was equipment for the events, and it's all stuff that gets put back into the business."
He says they took all the product he was supposed to sell the next day at an event in McAllen.
"It was all in the back, with the truck being locked, the bed doesn't come down, so someone had to climb up on the truck and unload like 100 pound ice chest full of salsa onto another vehicle," Estevanes said.
For some people, this may just seem like jars of salsa, but for this small business owner — it is hours of work, and more than $1,000 lost.
"You didn't just take from me, you took from my kids, you took from my family, you took our rent payment, you took our truck payment, you took equipment, you took produce money, reinvestment money, growing money, they took a lot without knowing," Estevanes said.
Without the salsa, Estevanes had to back out of the weekend event, and now he is trying to figure out how he can bounce back from this. He is also thinking about the thieves.
"I don't know if they needed it more than I do, that's where I sympathize with them," Estevanes said. "That's why I hope they got what they needed out of it, but they could've gone about it a million different other ways."
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