1 Cent - Hamideh Super Mart Chicago, Illinois

Hamideh Super Mart was one of thousands of small ethnic grocery retailers operating in Chicago during the late twentieth century that issued their own scrip to handle fractional change — a practice with roots in the Depression-era "trade tokens" of the 1930s but which persisted quietly in immigrant-owned retail well into the 1990s. Private merchant scrip of this type occupied a legal gray area: not technically currency, but functionally used as such within a single store or small neighborhood network.

Paper cent scrip from individual grocers is almost never formally cataloged, and surviving examples are genuinely uncommon — not because they were rare in issue, but because nobody kept them.