Other Financial Ephemera that is Sometimes Confused with Depression Scrip
Certain kinds of financial ephemera should be referenced in any description of Depression Scrip, since they appeared during the same time period even if they were not issued to actually circulate as local money. Such pieces are incorrectly identified as Depression Scrip often enough that they warrant identification.
Auction Scrip
Close cousins to Depression Scrip are the various forms of auction scrip, so called because it was paid out by a community’s merchants as a customer premium, to be redeemed at festive auction events where the goods for sale could be bid on and paid for only with the scrip. Some examples of Depression Scrip were actually designed to function this way. For example, Clear Lake, Iowa designated February 24, 1933 as "Corn Day", when Corn Money was paid out to local farmers in exchange for some 12,000 bushels of their harvest. Farmers were asked to spend their scrip earnings with local merchants that same day; when the corn was later sold for at the market price, the cash proceeds went towards redeeming the scrip.
Auction scrip events were a common form of business boosting throughout small towns in the early 20th century United States.
Premium Coupons & Certificates
Also widespread at this time were the premium coupons and certificates of retailers like the United Cigar store chain and its premium marketing affiliate, the United Profit-Sharing Corporation. During the 1920s and 1930s, the latter managed premium marketing plans for a variety of business clients, many of which had their own customized coupons printed. Although only redeemable through United Profit Sharing catalogs, such pieces were often well-executed and had the look and feel of currency.
Two examples in particular of premium certificates commonly mistaken for Depression-era local money are Poll Parrot Shoe Money and Sattler-Script. Poll Parrot notes were issued in a range of denominations for many years by the International Shoe Company of St. Louis, Missouri. These notes were redeemable for a selection of children’s toys at participating shoe stores. Sattler-Script dated from the early 1950s. These rather handsome notes were issued and redeemed by the Sattler’s Department Store of Buffalo, New York, an iconic fixture of that city’s shopping district.
Other distinctive premium certificates at the time included those put out by the venerable Larkin Soap Company (also Buffalo, NY) and the mysterious Anagram Systems, Inc. of Batavia, NY. During the 1910s and 1920s, a number of premium plans sought to link consumer spending to the creation of savings accounts at local banks. The most prominent of these was the Stork System of Savings, along with the Merchants Daily Savings Club and the Northwestern Bankers and Merchants Check Company. Such plans involved the issue of ornate, small-denomination checks that customers could accumulate and then redeem to establish savings accounts (especially for their children’s education) at local banks. Although all quite collectible in their own right, none of these instruments really had anything to do with the Great Depression.
Political Scrip
Finally, it should be noted that the politics of the New Deal generated a variety of parody and propaganda scrip that was meant to score political points, rather than to circulate. “Sincliar” Dollars attacked the 1934 California gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair; likewise, California’s “Ham and Eggs” pension plan referendum of 1938 was satirized by the EzeeMunny Certificate. President Roosevelt’s economic policies were the target of the 1936 New Deal Sound Mazuma.