Token Help
EJB
Posts: 640
...A friend of mine was involved in the restoration of a bar in Washington state, when they moved the bar under it was some change ( 20s 30s 40s) and a handful of tax tokens. I was given the tax tokens and my question is how were they used. Some are alum some are plastic, and one says good for purchases under 14 cents, one has a date (1941) any help would be appreciated......Thanks... 
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Sales tax resulted in the final price of items having fractions of a cent.
For example, purchase of a $1.25 item, taxed at 3%, would cost $1.2875, or $1.28 and 3/4c. What to do?
Rounding up to $1.29 would result in a "unfair" profit to the seller of 1/4c, but rounding down would be unfair to the seller by reducing the profit by 3/4c.
The solution was to provide tokens denominated in fractions of a cent, or "mills" (1 mill = 1/1000 of a dollar, or 1/10 of a cent). So in the above example, the customer would pay $1.29 and receive 2.5 mills in tax tokens as change.
If the next purchase came to $3.4325, the customer could pay $3.43 plus the 2.5 mills in tax tokens.
As you can imagine, people did not like having to carry a second set of coins, and to further complicate matters, different states issued different tax tokens.
The use of tax tokens declined and was finally discontinued in the sixties, because people basically decided not to worry about fractions of a cent.
Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may not owe.
"Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value---zero."----Voltaire
"Everything you say should be true, but not everything true should be said."----Voltaire
<< <i>Didn't the federal govenment ban the production of sales tax tokens because people started using them as money? >>
In 1935 the secret service banned their production and use because they were in essence coins
and were being issued by the states. Somehow Ohio was able to get around this ban and contin-
ued using their tax stamps until the 1960's.