slim pickins

vanoldschool · Sep 6, 2009

Slim Pickins yesterday, 64 lincoln the two marbles and the wa state tax token, Heres Some more info on tokens. Sales tax tokens were made in great quantities starting in 1935 in order to give change for sales taxes. 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 1961, and people basically decided not to worry about fractions of a cent.

Bavaria Mike · Sep 6, 2009

Nice hunt and not so slim! I don't think the Zincolns started until 1982ish, any penny before is copper, they should be separated, cash in the Zincolns and keep the coppas. HH, Mike

rmptr · Sep 6, 2009

I guess it was a slow adventure, but I really enjoy the tax tokens...

Ha! Ha! Just another way to pluck the goose !
Tax is upon the merchant, part of cost of doing business.
When the merchant puts it on the sales receipt, he's showing you he has passed that portion of what he pays directly to you... You can refuse to pay him for it. (Ha! Ha! I know guys that do so!)
Sometimes the merchant will go for it, most of the time he won't.
Local biz here occaisionally have 'tax sales' in which they advertise they will pay all the tax over a weekend, or something. Nothing wrong with that if their markup is high enough to cover another almost 10%.

That "62 zincoln" is actually a copper coin. They weren't mostly zinc until mid '82 IIRC...

So it might be worth 2 1/2 face value as scrap !

A new one, for me, was a post around here at Tnet about Zamak.
Add a little alumium and something else to a melted zinc penny hoard to get an ingot that can be custom machined easily.

Have fun ! it's probably not legal to do so, but most things aren't if they are fun !
rmptr