Trade Token Vs Coupon -- How Do You Define Them?

I view a coupon as something that provides a discount off the price of something, but on its own it does not have a value.

I see a token as something that does have a certain value and can be used to help pay for an item at its regular price.

From memory, although I probably have one or two examples somewhere, a company called VENS issued brass tokens "Value one coupon"
What was that about?

If in doubt, go to a dictionary. Coupon, voucher, token-these are synonyms. I think that in practice the distinctions are often a bit fuzzy. If you take any given object, I think that you might have trouble placing it in one category vs. another.

Example:
1. A trade token that says: good for $1 at participating merchants until December 31, 2018
2. A newspaper coupon that says "good for $3 off your next purchase at store X" expires december 31, 2018.

These are functionally identical. Why is one a token and the other a coupon, if these are in fact distinct concepts?

What we have here is that the kind of objects we collect may be easy enough to categorize, but the larger category like token or coupon, without any other qualifier, may be too fuzzy to be useful.

Even if a newspaper clipping is a token, rather obviously doesn't mean that you have need have any interest in collecting it.

So maybe we just shouldn't get too hung up on such words.