20 Cents - Ultramar Convenience Store 55 Bécancour, Québec

Canadian convenience store tokens printed on paper — locally issued scrip intended to keep small change circulating within a single business — were common in rural Québec during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when coin shortages and the transition away from the penny made exact-change transactions genuinely inconvenient. Bécancour, a municipality on the south shore of the St. Lawrence assembled from eleven merged parishes in 1965, had exactly the kind of dispersed, car-dependent population that made a corner dépanneur both essential infrastructure and a natural place for this kind of informal monetary improvisation.

Ultramar's retail network in Québec frequently anchored these combined gas station and convenience formats. Whether this scrip was issuer-authorized at the corporate level or a purely local initiative by the franchise operator is unknown.