FREE: Alabama Sales Tax Token

Merchants had to pay sales tax to the state on the total amount of sales made by the merchant during each days sales. You can imagine that if the sales tax rate is 3% and a child buys a 10c piece of candy there is no way to collect the three-tenths of one cent. If you rounded down that meant that the merchant could not collect anything for the tax. If you rounded up the state was gaining 7 tenths of a cent on every 10 cent sale. You can see that if the merchant sold 100 pieces of candy he was loosing 30 cents a day in tax revenues to the state, so the token was born. This allowed the merchant to take 11 cents for the first piece of candy and give change back in mills. The next time you wanted to buy a 10c candy you could present the merchant with the 10c and a token and complete the transaction. This allowed the merchant to collect the sales tax on each transaction.


A mill is 1/1000th of a dollar or a tenth of a cent. 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. 1 and 5 mills are the most common denominations, but other denominations include: 1/5 cent, 1 1/2 mills, and "Tax on 10c or less."


There are over 500 different sales tax tokens that can be collected from 13 commonly issued states. I include Ohio stamps because most of the collectors do to. There is also anti-sales tax token memorabilia from many other states to collect. Most tokens are inexpensive and fairly easy to come by. All in all over a billion sales tax tokens are estimated to have been produced. Most coin dealers have no idea what to charge for these tokens, Many tax tokens are quite common, and can often be found in coin dealer "junk boxes" for as little as 10 cents. Others tokens are known to be much scarcer, however they too sometimes show up in junk boxes from time to time. A few, such as the New Mexico 5 mill black fiber are truly rare, and worth up to $100.

yes, gave great detail will f/w and if your interested you might see a coin or two of mine coming up or just help me out i need f/w thanks

If you google these you will find some interesting information on these coins. According to google all these coins were minted but were not used and were recalled and all these coins were supposed to be destroyed. I guess not all was since you have one and I have one from another state. Anyway I saw one for sale on ebay last month. f&w could you please fan me back? Thanks

Would you add a GIN? Please :)

have never done a GIN - don't even know what number to put on it for a GIN. Any suggestions?

F&W from ATL too! :)

Well considering that there were thousands of these made, there not real rare but it is cool. So if it was my item I would put a GIN of 300 because I just bought one from Colorado and paid 300 on GIN for it so I would say around 300.

Also these would be used to pay taxes on small purchases... probably a 1 cent tax token would cover back then 10 cents to probably 1 dollar.

Im not an expert though LOL haha :)

whats p/u mean? lol

No Prob lol

F&w