Remember trading stamps? I recently learned that the Green Stamp company never actually went away. The stamps are still around, in virtual form, as “greenpoints” which you can use to buy stuff. But the amazing thing (to me) is that they’ll still honor the original stamps from 80 years ago. Just mail them in and they’ll convert them to shiny new greenpoints at a 1:1 ratio.
I never had any trading stamps (way before my time, gramps.) I just thought it was interesting that a relic of a bygone era survives into the information age. I’m sure there are legions of Little Old Ladies out there with a thousand books of stamps in their attics, just waiting to be cashed in for a new Radio Flier.
My mother used them to get me a nice ax for my birthday when I was 10 years old. I went into our woods and tried to cut down a medium sized tree with it. I was about half-way done well and swung hard and glanced off the tree but hit my left knee just fine. I had to do a long army crawl back to the house leaving an impressive trail of blood all the way into the house. It was off to the emergency room and 2 months in a cast. Twenty-six years later, I still don’t have feeling in my left knee so I have mixed feelings about Green Stamp nostalgia.
When I was 10 or 12 I got the same axe from Green Stamps. Didn’t manage to hurt myself though not for want of trying. I wonder how many fingers & knees Green Stamps did for over the years?
There was a staff report about green stamps that explains what they are, how they worked, etc. I vaguely remember the S&H signs on stores and gas stations, and my mom having a partially filled booklet or two when I was a kid.
My dear Aunt Katie worked at our local Green Stamp store for 20 years before it went out of business. From what I remember from the catalog it would take virtually forever to amass enough stamps to acquire something good.
My mother saved up enough of them to get us a canoe. We had some good times with that canoe, though it led to a weird nightmare when one of the paddles mysteriously disappeared in a lake in Canada. ( I dreamed a colony of ancient Romans lived under the lake and were kidnapping people.)
In the area I grew up - or possibly in the stores my mother shopped at – we got something called Plaid Stamps. Same concept, different color. I remember we got a hand mixer and a waffle iron from them.
I ran across this and I remember every single item on the page. Arrgh! - Charlie Brown noise, but you probably knew that. I was trying to find the gold color Green Stamps that were bigger and worth more.
I seem to remember a weird printing machine that was attached to cash registers at various stores that gave away stamps. The machine a had a dial like a rotary phone and the cashier would dial in what you spent on the purchases and the stamp machine out spit out the appropriate number of stamps to reflect the value of the items you bought.
I remember them from when I was a kid. My mom also says that I used to take scraps of paper when I was “playing house” when I was a toddler and they were green stamps and other scraps of paper were food stamps. I also had something I used as fake lysol that I “sprayed” everything with, because of visits from my dad.
