During high school and summers in college, I worked in a grocery store that gave out Green Stamps. I well remember that big machine with the dials - two of them, the outer one for increments of $10 (spit out 10-point stamps) and the inner for $1 (spit out 1-point stamps). I also remember that customers that didn’t want them would just tell me to “take them home and give them to your mother.” Mom got a lot of stamps that way. When our local Green Stamp store was closing up she got, if I remember correctly, a lot of sheets, a toaster and a coffee maker.
Yes, it is in the form of body deoderant now.
what?
Grenn Stamps were officially “S&H Green Stamps” in CA too, so I think that was the national branding for them.
We also had an upstart competitor called “Blue Chip” stamps. As you’d expect, the stamps were blue.
I remember when they first brought out the higher valued $10 stamps. This became important after a weeks’ groceries finally got to be more like $15, and giving out (or getting) 15 $1 stamps was unwieldy. Much simpler to get a single $10 and 5 $5s.
As iI remember it, S&H fell on hard times around 1963 or so, and Blue Chip rapidly overtook them. Blue Chip in turn had pretty well died out by 1975, and maybe as early as 1970.
Crap! I actually picked up two full books of those at the flea market a few weeks ago, showed a friend, laughed as we remembered our grannies collecting them, and then put them down and walked off! They were marked a dollar or two, as I recall. If I get out there this weekend, I’ll see if they’re still available.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,861709,00.html
1955 article re: stamps
I remembered the song “gold bell gift stamps free at wrigley’s”, got to wondering about gold bell stamps since I remember the S&H Green Stamps in particular.
Woah, you’ve penetrated a recess in my memory bank that hadn’t seen the light of day for quite some time. Those stamp books were like gold to my sister and I because they were the only currency we could ever use to buy fun stuff. We didn’t have much money and the folks were pretty frugal but with S&H we’d aquire something frivolous, so yeah, green stamps rocked.
We had an S&H store in town too, a place you could go redeem them instead of through a catalogue. I remember getting a ping pong table and what a big deal that was because it required some extraordinary length of time to accumulate enough books.
Note that the maximum amount that the grocery clerk can dial for you purchase is $20.90!
I was a cashier in high school. Those machines are meant to be used in increments so you just dial them out no matter how much the purchase price is. We also had double Green Stamp day on Wednesday so some people got an awful lot of them for one visit to the store.
I remember these. What was the business model for these things? I assume that the store bought the stamps from S&H, and then benefited by attracting more customers.
Anyone know if that’s correct?
Here you go: S&H Green Stamps - Wikipedia
Here’s a 2001 staff report.