Periods of U.S. history have led to the use of substitutes for federally issued currency. During the Great Depression of the 20th century, it was the turn of the sales tax token, as described by Tom Koch in the May 1965 issue of Coins under the title, “Remember Those Sales Tax Tokens? Everybody’s headache in the depression ’30s, they’re now gaining friends among collectors.”
“Thirty years ago, the question of making change for a lowly one-cent piece seemed neither ludicrous nor funny to millions of merchants and consumers in more than a dozen of our United States,” Koch wrote. “Rather, it signaled a fumbling through pockets, purses and cash register drawers for what certainly must have been the most unpopular medium of exchange in the nation’s history, the sales tax token.
“The inconvenient and usually ugly little tokens were, like the laws that necessitated them, a phenomenon of the great depression. In those years of economic crisis, the much publicized New Deal had its counterpart
