1 Cent - Met Food Stores New York

Met Food Stores was a regional supermarket cooperative operating primarily in the New York metropolitan area. This cent denomination scrip belongs to a category of merchant-issued paper common among American grocery chains during the mid-twentieth century — used as change tokens or promotional currency when coin shortages or register efficiency made small-denomination metal impractical. The issuer and face value together suggest this circulated at checkout, not as a collector's piece.

No federal prohibition applied to this type of scrip provided it didn't explicitly imitate U.S. coinage or currency — a legal distinction the grocery industry navigated carefully.