For most of the 20th Century, Americans who shopped at participating grocery stores, department stores, or gas stations would receive stamps along with their sales receipts. The number of stamps was supposed to correspond to the full amount of the purchases.
Consumers could then take those stamps home, collect them, lick the back sides like a typical postage stamp of the era, and paste them into a free booklet. When a sizable number of points had been accumulated - stamps came in denominations of one point, ten points, or fifty points - the customers could take the filled booklets of stamps to specially-designated redemption centers in exchange for free gifts.
They were known as S&H Green Stamps.
1896: Thomas Sperry of New Jersey and Shelley Byron Hutchinson of Michigan dreamed up the idea of trading stamps. They sold the stamps to retailers, and they maintained the products and storefronts where the stamps could be redeemed.
S&H Green Stamps took off during the Great Depression and they hit their peak of popularity in the 1960s.
S&H mailed out their free Ideabook, which was a roughly 180-page catalog full of potential selections. Beside the image and description of each item was the number of booklets full of stamps needed to acquire them.
The Ideabook rivaled Sears’ Christmas Wishbook for the most coveted catalogue. S&H claimed that at one point they issued more stamps than the US Postal Service.
Popular goods from the Ideabook included towels (2.5 booklets full of stamps), bathroom scales (2.5 books), carving knives, linens, and toys (4 books). But it also listed kids’ bicycles, household furniture, and even kitchen appliances.
Stamp booklets could be taken to any of the roughly 600 S&H Green Redemption Centers across the United States (circa 1960; the number of available stores diminished after that).
The practice could be laborious, however, because it often took a lot of booklets full of Green Stamps (i.e., a lot of shopping) to acquire any worthwhile items. Each booklet could be filled to 1,200 points, but the largest and most expensive goods required an almost impossible number of books. Some people managed to accumulate enough, though.
In the 1960s, my family, like so many others, collected the stamps after we went shopping. We kept them in a kitchen drawer.
The ratio was supposed to be 10 points worth of stamps for every dollar spent. A $50 grocery bill in 1964 (roughly average for a family of four back then) should have netted 500 points - almost enough to fill half a booklet. That wasn’t always the practice, however. I recall harried checkout clerks handing out more stamps than they should have, and on busy weekends they ran out of stamps entirely.
We would take the booklets to the nearest Redemption Center to receive free items. By my recollection, the majority of products were shoddy, not brand names, and mostly crap that ended up in junk drawers.
By the 1970s, the fad of Green Stamps began to die out. However, they still exist, albeit in digital form. ALSO:
Andy Warhol created a work of art entitled S&H Green Stamps (1962) that, as one might imagine, is a canvas plastered with dozens of S&H Green Stamps. The piece resides in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
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