gift card

Scrip is any substitute for currency which is not legal tender, and is often a form of credit. Scrips were created as company payment of employees and also as a means of payment in times where regular money is unavailable, such as remote coal towns or occupied countries in war time. more...

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When U.S. President Andrew Jackson issued his Specie Circular of 1836, due to credit shortages, Virginia Scrip was accepted as payments for federal lands. Other forms of scrip include subway tokens, arcade tokens and tickets, and \"points\" on some websites.

Scrips have gained historical importance and become a subject of study in numismatics or exonumia due to the fact of the wide variety and abundance of them.

History

Company scrip was a credit against the accrued wages of employees. In the United States, where everything in a mining or logging camp was run, created and owned by a company, scrip provided the worker with credit when their wages had been depleted. These remote locations were cash poor. Workers had very little choice but to purchase meals and goods at a company store. In this way, the company could place enormous markups on goods in a company store, making workers completely dependent on the company, thus enforcing their \"loyalty\" to the company. While scrip was a de facto form of currency, employees were rarely paid in scrip. Additionally, while employees could exchange scrip for cash, it was rarely done so at face value. Scrip in this context was valid only within that area or town where it was issued. While store owners in neighboring communities could accept the scrip as currency, they rarely provided a 1 for 1 exchange. This was to avoid the risk of having coins/currency that were worthless anywhere else.

In nineteenth-century Western Canada, the federal government devised a system of land grants called scrip. Notes in the form of money scrip (valued at $160 or $240) or land scrip, valued at 160 acres or 240 acres (65 hectares or 97 hectares) were offered to the Métis people in exchange for their Aboriginal rights.

Scrip as a de facto form of currency within the setting of the mining or logging industry was discontinued around 1952. This was not due to the \"right to seignorage\" or the right for a country to mint currency without its being violated.

Scrip is also related to the stock market where companies pay dividends in the form of scrip rather than paying actual currency. It is also a written document that acknowledges debt.

After the Great War and Second World War, scrip was used in Germany and Austria; detailed accounts are in Notgeld.

Modern use

Scrip is now issued in the form of gift certificates, or gift cards. The two are essentially the same, except that the cards automate the checkout and accounting processes. Cards usually have a barcode or magnetic strip, which can be processed through a standard electronic credit card machine.

Read more at Wikipedia.org