You're confuzzled and have accidentally stumbled around the perl4 compatibility feature for making multilevel hashes from the time before references were available. Since `=>' is really just a fancy comma, what you're really doing is:

++$count{$sale_name, $fy};
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What this is doing behind the scenes is implicitly joining the multiple values together seperated by $; (which is "\034" by default, which very well show up as a strange glyph depending on your font; see perldoc perlvar for more details). What you really want is probably a multi-level datastructure such as a hash of hashes. See perldoc perlreftut, perldoc perlref, and perldoc perldsc for more details.