Tax tokens made change pockets jingle even louder

From Oct. 24, 2008:

So, the other day at church, a friend showed me a small copper-colored coin that was a bit bigger than a shirt button and a bit smaller than a dime. He wanted to know what it was. On one side were the Arizona state seal and the words “Arizona State Tax Commission.”

On the other side was a 1-cent mark and the words, “To Make Correct Change for Sales Tax Payments.”

My friend had come across it while pursuing his hobby of collecting pennies.

As you may have guessed, it was a sales-tax token.

In the 1930s, many states and even a few cities started charging sales taxes on just about everything to help raise money for their cash-strapped Depression-era governments.

However, some of them ran into problems trying to calculate the tax on things right down to the last mill, a mill being one-tenth of 1 cent. Say you bought a 10-cent paperback and the sales tax was 3 percent. The sales tax was three-tenths of 1 cent.

So 12 states — Arizona, Alabama, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah and Washington — came up with the idea to use tokens in various denominations.

Among them was the mill.

Now when you bought your 10-cent paperback, you would give the clerk 10 cents and three 1-mill tokens.

You could also give the clerk 11 cents and get your change in mills, if that’s what you preferred.

Arizona began issuing brass tax tokens in 1937. People weren’t crazy about them because it meant carrying around all those extra coins.

The tokens remained in use until after World War II, and the law regarding them stayed on the books until 1954.

The tokens turn up fairly regularly in junk shops and in baskets on coin dealers’ counters.

As near as I can tell, they are seldom worth more than a dollar or two.