1 Cent - Canal Villere Food Stores New Orleans, Louisiana

Canal Villere Food Stores was a regional grocery chain operating in the New Orleans area during the mid-twentieth century, and like many American retailers of the period, it issued its own fractional paper currency — trade tokens in note form — to handle small-denomination transactions that metal coinage made inconvenient at the checkout. These merchant-issued scrip pieces occupied a gray area: not legal tender, but functionally accepted within the issuer's own stores.

New Orleans had a notably active local scrip culture, partly rooted in the city's long history of privately issued currency substitutes dating back to the antebellum era.