[RedDevil]

Cent means 'a hundred' in Latin and French.
The cent is derived from the French word 'centime': one hundredth.
That it is in fact 1/100 of a dollar makes perfect cents.

Paying with coins that are only powers of 10 is impractical. You'd need 18 coins to pay for something that costs 99 cents. So adding coins that are double or half the value of a power of 10 is handy as it vastly reduces the number of coins needed.

Then there's the effect of the market tailoring prices to the available coins.
When we still used the guilder in Holland, we had nickels, dimes and quarters just like the US. Shops often tranched the prices at quarter level. One of the biggest shopping firms, the HEMA, had all prices rounded to the quarter. You simply did not need dimes and nickels there.
Now we have the Euro and all coins step up in 1-2-5 sequences. The system changed, the shops adapted. No more quarters, no more pricing bias at quarter level.