The AG's opinion with regards to credit card service fees was essentially that you legally in Texas could charge an unspecified fee, as long as it was disclosed and itemized, but that the fee could NOT be directly correlated to credit card use versus not using a credit card.
They defined an applicable and legal
discount program as one that would discount the price of an item or a percentage off the total for using cash/debit as opposed to credit as legal. Which is how the Spec's "10% off for using cash/debit" is allowed. You have a set price for items, and under the normal checkout you pay that price regardless of method, but cash and debit are given 10% off the total, as item discounts rather than fee refunds/credits.
The program that Shipley's and a small number of other merchants use doesn't work this way. You're charged for your items and then a fee is added on, but then removed for only certain items. There's no discount to listed prices, which was what the AG's opinion was.
Now the AG's opinion on the matter was for credit cards, as we outlawed those fees in 1985 (I believe) and that pre-HB3068 this method of fee prevention and disount-program-legality didn't apply to debit cards.
Now that HB 3068 *has* passed and is effective, the bill's authors have said that they wrote the law to grant the same protections from fees that have existed on credit card accounts to debit card accounts. If you take that at face value, then the same protections would prevent the program being used from being legal, since the fee is directly tied to using a debit card and the fee refund is not correlated to the price or discount of items, but is the refund of that line-item fee.
That's at least my interpretation of what's going on with HB 3068.
AG's office opinion on discount programs
https://www.oag.state.tx.us/agency/weeklyag/2006/1106cc_faqs.pdfhttp://kutnews.org/post/smaller-texas-banks-stand-gain-ban-debit-surchargehttp://www.dallasnews.com/investigations/watchdog/20130627-the-watchdog-texas-merchants-who-charge-extra-for-credit-debit-purchases-face-more-than-a-warning-letter.ece