This small box, which is maybe 1.5″ x 2.5″, is inscribed, “Austin’s old cuff buttons. I gave Garrett the best ones. “Mother””. The box contains mostly broken and mismatched cuff links and buttons.
There were also two “Consumer’s Tax” tokens in there. I found this regarding these 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).
That seems like an awful lot of extra math to do for less than pennies but it goes to show the value of money, even a penny, in those times. These days we wouldn’t even be bothered to stop to bend over to pick up a nickel, let alone a penny.
Heirloom Disclaimer – I have done my best to identify either the owner or purpose of an artifact based upon either direct knowledge, notes, or context. If unable to identify, I will provide as much information about the item as I am able.
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