Years ago, I was presented with a similar situation. My firm represented a company that manufactured styrofoam products. One of the products was a "six-pack cooler," a little styrofoam cooler just the right size to keep a six-pack of (presumably) beer cold. At some point, someone noticed that the six-pack cooler was being used by sports fishermen to keep live bait alive. Needless to say, they created a new label for the cooler, calling it a bait bucket, and began selling it to sporting goods stores. A large sale was in the works to a national chain to promo the bait buckets as "stocking stuffers" for the Christmas season. Things were looking up until a statutory change in the federal excise tax extended it to bait buckets. The change (I think under the 86 Reform Act) was effective September 30, effectively putting it in the middle of the Christmas season for the manufacturer. I was asked to determine whether the non-taxable "six-pack cooler" was converted into a taxable bait bucket merely because of the change in labeling. The supervisor of the excise tax section in the IRS took a "Pigs is Pigs" approach and said, if you call it a bait bucket, it's a bait bucket, and it's taxable as a bait bucket. The national chain canceled the order.