S&H Green Stamps

My mom collected them when I was growing up. I used to love it when we'd get a booket filled and could go to the S&H store and pick out something like a blender or a toaster.

Redeemed them for a set of Encyclopedia Britannica with a bookcase to house them. There were other things, but this is what I remember the most.

OP, did you point and laugh at the people who collected/redeemed them? You sound wonderful.

OP, have you must been an charming child, laughing at all the poor people. I see you haven't changed and are still a privileged little prick.

We did the stamps and we weren't poor.

It was fun.

I always wanted a parakeet cage from the catalog.

I never got it and after bird sitting later in life, Mom was right.

My Grand-Aunt Betty used to give my mother her Raleigh coupons to add to the ones my mother was gathering from her packs and cartons of Belairs.

So many wonderful things in the catalog! Oddly, I don't recall all the items my mother ordered with her treasure trove.

But I do remember that Aunt Betty died with cancer and my mother died with COPD!

Oh, as a child, I loved pasting them into the books.

S&H Green Stamps. Also, Top Value Stamps. I also remember visiting a relative in another state and they had very cool Plaid Stamps which were red and black. At 7, I was much impressed.

Children are not skilled with delayed gratification. Going to the redemption store was always stressful. If you didn't have enough books for what you wanted... there was not way around it. More time. More waiting. It was so thwarting!

I remember you could actually turn them in for money.

I, too, loved pasting them into the books. Probably some kind of oral gratification in that! R6 is correct. There was delayed gratification in knowing you had to wait to redeem until you had enough books. There was also the negotiation process so everyone agreed on the goal or bartered for the next goal.

R7 Not in my area!

[quote] I used to love it when we'd get a booklet filled and could go to the S&H store and pick out something like a blender or a toaster.

Oh yes, I remember this too. My parents bought a percolator, a Proctor-Silex or Farberware, I believe.

They had that damn percolator for years. When I started to drink coffee, around age 15, I was appalled at the swill that thing produced so I saved my after school job money and bought them a Mr. Coffee for Christmas, which made very good coffee.

Not long after I moved out of the house at 19, I came back one night for dinner and that god awful percolator was back on the counter. Being the little coffee snob I was, I demanded to know what happed to the Mr. Coffee. Somewhat sheepishly, my parents admitted they preferred the percolator coffee, and they'd only been using the Mr. Coffee because I'd spent 'so much money on it'.

I stomped out to the garage, rescued the Mr. Coffee and took it home with me that night, and my parents continued to use that old stainless steel percolator, bought with S&H green stamps, until they died. I gave it to Goodwill and for all I know it's still percolating away, making bad coffee, in someone else's home.

I imagine actual rich people used them too, only they had whoever did their grocery shopping take care of them and let them know when there were enough of them to choose something out of the catalog.

R10 My 90 year old mother kept her percolator for years. We gave her drip pots, French presses, Keurigs...she loved that perc! Now that I'm an EG, I understand: We like what we like. Don't judge.

I think you're right, R11. Send the help to do the grocery shopping. Order them to save the stamps and paste them into the books for you.

Then, when the holidays come around, give them the books they filled and tell them, "Merry Christmas! Get your self something nice."

Another poster here who loved pasting the stamps into the books, Blue Stamps and Plaid Stamps, we never shopped groceries wherever they did Green Stamps.

The gift I most remember obtaining was a set of 4 stackable fiberglass TV tables with their own wheeled cart that could be placed against the knotty pine walls of the den. They had a wonderful mid-century design on them, sort of like an abstraction of satellites in earth tones.

This would have been around 1960-62, I think. Those tables were the rage back then and a perfect platform to place and eat your Swanson's TV dinners (Salisbury steak!) while you watched The Flintstones. We used them for years. Eventually, by the mid-70s, they were deemed quite tacky. But oh they were so practical and easy! I wonder if there's some modern equivalent?

[quote] I imagine actual rich people used them too

When I was in college, back around the time the earth was just cooling, I took a marketing course where they citied statistics that people with higher incomes clipped coupons at a greater rate than people with lower incomes.

As another example, the professor said to look at the cars at Costco v cars at the 7-Eleven. At Costco you see Mercedes and BMWs, whereas you'd see beat up Datsuns and VWs at the 7-Eleven.

Rich people like to hang onto their money

i loved pasting them into the books, esp when with the odds and ends and making them fit , like a puzzle.

[quote] My Grand-Aunt Betty used to give my mother her Raleigh coupons to add to the ones my mother was gathering from her packs and cartons of Belairs. So many wonderful things in the catalog!

Yes. If you saved up enough coupons you could get an iron lung!

r8

Was this you?

I remember the family saving up S&H Green Stamps to give to the family member with a child graduating from high school in order to get a full set set of Samsonite or American Tourister luggage for the graduate.

Fuck trading stamps! They almost destroyed our family!

It was so much fun sticking the stamps to the books and taking them in to get some appliance!

OP has got a lot to learn about what wealthy people do to save money. The one big difference in someone who comes from old money vs new money is that old money knows how to make it, but more importantly they know how to keep it.

Famous-Barr, a department store in St. Louis, gave Eagle Stamps. IIRC, a filled book could be redeemed for merchandize or cash.

I don't know of any other May Company division, i.e. The Hecht Company, Kaufmann's, May D&F, G. Fox or May California offered them.

Tuesday was double Eagle Stamp day. So if you have to make a major purchase, like an appliance or TV, you'd try to hold off until Tuesday.

OP is literally worse than Hitler.

OP -I don't understand why they were tacky. It is no different than the discount one can receive at the gas station or the two for one sale at grocery stores. It was a promotion. In my hometown, one grocery store had S & H Green Stamps while the other had Gold Bond Stamps. The stores would often have a promotion to give away more stamps with a certain purchase. My mother would put her sight on a new small appliance and then buy groceries accordingly.

I don't remember - were the stamps awarded simply on the total amount of money that was spent at the super market? Or were different values places on certain groceries that yielded more stamps?

OP is just stirring shit and most likely not even upper middle class. She is probably more interested in her food stamps.

R26, they were based on the amount spent. Period. Then the mom behind the register in the gingham uniform with the gingham cap on her head had to rip off the correct number of stamps and hand them to you.

This was a very inefficient way to run a promotion, but before digital... a lot of things were done manually.

Imagine licking Green Stamps in the age of Covid-19.

OP does not know any rich people. They love freebies more than poor people do.

Don't cry for me, OP! We had so much fun sticking them in the books as kids and trying to get prizes. We weren't poor, but we surely weren't rich.

My mother won 5,000 Green Stamps at the grand opening of a supermarket in Cudahy, CA. Thank God they came in the form of "50s," so you could paste one on a page and it was considered full. When she asked me what I wanted from this bounty, my little gayling self asked for either an ottoman or a valet. My father got me a toy truck. I stomped my little feet and whined incessantly, and refused to do my Kitty Carlisle impressions for a month.

In the 90s, I found an old Blue Chip redemption catalog, and was shocked to find how many of our home decor items came from stamp books. So many brass-and-wood birds and sunburst clocks along with glass table grapes!

Nobody had to use them, so you feel sorry for nobody.

Respose to O.P.

Respose to O.P.

I always remember my grandparents letting me buy a badminton set with green stamps, and they always gladly played with me whenever I asked. The store was close enough to walk to.

Man, our world has gone to shit in so many ways.

Hell, my mom got half our camping equipment, an electric skillet that never died, and a blender with green stamps. We used to sit with a couple little sponges and a stack of books and reams of green stamps and rack up $$$ on a rainy afternoon.

I’d just love to run into a certain person who thinks green stamps were “tacky” somehow...and have about a dozen of the other Dataloungers loudly point out exactly what was extremely “tacky” about her. In a bar, preferably. Better watch out, OP! The Green Stamp Defenders are after ya now!

R24 - Is OP Orange "Brokeahontas" Shitler?

[quote]As another example, the professor said to look at the cars at Costco v cars at the 7-Eleven. At Costco you see Mercedes and BMWs, whereas you'd see beat up Datsuns and VWs at the 7-Eleven.

In Dallas there was a strip center on Haskell with a MacFrugal's, Ross Dress for Less and a Target. It was not too far from Park Cities. The lot outside MacFrugal's always had Range Rovers and BMWs.

R36, I’m curious where you grew up. I’m very close in age to you but have no recollection of green stamps.

we got several pieces of living room furniture from Green Stamps

Must’ve been pretty flimsy to sit on if they were made of stamps.

We had an entire drawer in the kitchen devoted to green stamps (loose and the books). I never realized how many things in my parent's house came from the green stamps, until reading everyone's comments about what they got with their stamps, and I knew EXACTLY what they were talking about because we had them too.

R43 ROTFL!

I lived in a middle class suburban neighborhood and everyone collected S&H Green stamps or Gold Bond stamps. Some of the housewives would trade one for the other. It wasn't just for poor people. The OP is just an asshole.

R23 In Cleveland May Co. gave out Eagle Stamps as did a local grocery chain called Pick-n-Pay.

Incidentally, Cleveland is a shithole, but it has nothing to do with Eagle stamps.

We had both Blue Chip and S&H Green stamps in my area (SF suburbs), but the places my mother frequented mostly had Blue Chip.

Didn't any of you bitches collect Buckeye Stamps?

S&H Green Stamps, Gold Bond, and Scotch Plaid (I think that was the A&P).

My family collected (and redeemed) those stamps. My dad was a teacher on a 9-month contract, so that meant no pay from June - September. My birthday is in September, so for many years my birthday gift was from redeeming those stamps. One year was an instamatic camera, another year was a stamp collectors book, another year was a piece of luggage. Very practical gifts for a child in the Sixties.

R23: May Co in Cleveland had Eagle Stamps for decades and Tuesday was double stamp day. May also used them briefly at Strouss' in Youngstown and some but not all May D&F locations in Colorado.

I'm guessing that R47 lives in some sunbelt sprawlburg which is a nice way of saying shithhole.

I love the old percolators especially the Corning Ware stove top ones. My grandma's house would smell divine.

Nearly everyone saved them during the 50s and 60s. And as mentioned upthread, you'd be surprised how wealthy people shop. I had an aunt who knew where the outlet stores were back in the day when there were real outlets that few people knew about rather than phony outlet malls. When an uncle died and his wife needed to go into a rest home, the children found tons of unused small appliances, and many passbooks for rather small savings accounts at savings and loans that had given out small appliances as premiums for a minimum deposit. This was a couple that had a new Lincoln every year when that meant something.

[quote] Didn't any of you bitches collect Buckeye Stamps?

No, but I’ve stamped some browneyes in my day.

I remember watching the checker dial the dispenser to get the proper amount of stamps. With finder OR a pencil.

FINGER, dammit.

[quote]Nearly everyone saved them during the 50s and 60s

I doubt you'd find them in Dorothy Kilgallen's home

OP you could you have used them to buy so many things! A personality, a sense of empathy, maybe even a boyfriend!

Now you're just another mean, tacky, ugly personality gay with pinched eyes and older photos of bad highlights you pray no one has on their phone that they can shame you with on social media.

^^Dayum.

r56 Can you imagine one of today's checkers trying to work that thing? They don't even calculate change anymore.

R56 I remember the dial dispenser! I thought it was so cool! I wanted to be a supermarket checker when I grew up so I could play with that.

R48 I remember Blue Chip stamps

No you didn’t, OP. You grew up poor as filth and your family could only afford to shop in stores that didn’t give stamps. You aren’t fooling anyone...

My family shopped at A&P and my mom collected Plaid Stamps. The things I recall she got with them are a wall clock, a bath scale, an 8-piece dinner plate set, a radio clock, and I perhaps cafe curtains for the kitchen. There was definitely more that's all I recall.

What are S&H Green Stamps?

Look, D.O., if you were a little thriftier, maybe you wouldn't be hungry all the time.

Green Stamps were just the reward cards of their day. You made a purchase at a supermarket, you got stamps that could be redeemed for merchandise. It's no different than airline miles or "Buy 9 coffees, get the 10th free" punch cards.

It was different, because you could collect the stamps from any participating business. I recall that our local gas station gave out Blue Chip stamps. We would combine those with Blue Chop stamps from our grocery store and whatever other business gave them out. Unrelated businesses gve out Blue Chip stamps.

By contrast, the rewards cards today are for one business only (or at least businesses with the same parent company). They are designed to encourage loyalty to that company. Blue Chip or S&H Green stamps were given out by a wide range of businesses.

I have a dim memory of going with my Mom to a Blue Chip redemption center. I don't remember what we got with the stamps. My memory of it is that it was kind of a madhouse, with lots of people. I was a shy, introverted kid and didn't like crowded places.

Trading stamps weren’t for poor people OP. Were the BRADYS poor? Hardly.

Well, they didn’t have a toilet, so....

R56 wow...that brought back memories. I'd forgotten about the "dial a stamp" contraption.

BTW...much to OP's chagrin, this actually turned into a thread praising S&H et al. stamps rather than making fun of people who collected them. Fail OP, big FAIL.

My family in the Midwest Ohio River Valley collected S&H Green Stamps and Top Value Stamps.

My mom used to put my brothers and me in an assembly line to paste them into books. It’s a fun memory. No idea what she crap she got in exchange for them. Probably an electric skillet

Remember when S&H automated the stamp dispensers positioned at each cashier station? The cashier would pull down levers marked by dollar amount and the stamps would emerge at the bottom. As a kid in grade school I was responsible for putting the stamps in the books. I remember studying the gift catalog for hours on end, dreaming of the good life.

We were not poor, but decidedly middle class. My mom would get the S&H Green Stamps (possibly from Grand Union) and Plaid Stamps from the A&P. I was tasked with putting them in the books. Really the perfect job for a budding gay boy. We kept them in a drawer in the kitchen and about once a week I’d put them in the books. I have no recollection what merchandise we redeemed all those books for.

I once got a recorder with our Buckeye Stamps. After about 40 years of nonuse, I finally gave it away. One has to wonder who thought it was a good idea to put recorders in the Buckeye Stamps catalog.

They are now Freshpoints. Go to myfreshpoints.com

Up until October of this year green points could still be redeemed. Now they are fresh points. I have not used them, so I can't report on them.

We redeemed our Green Stamps for sterling silver flatware. We still have it.

R75, did you see R56?

I swear I’m not being snarky, I just wanted to see if that’s what you were thinking of.

R80, thanks, yes that is what I was referencing. (I would duly accept the snark for missing that, but for whatever reason R56's response is missing.)

r72

[quote]We were not poor, but decidedly middle class.

Both poor people, at least have the dignity to admit it. After all even poor people can afford that.

At the Grand Union (New Jersey), they gave out Triple S Blue Stamps. I think we had to drive to Hackensack to redeem them. I don't remember what my parents chose. Maybe a set of TV trays with a turquoise/pink atomic pattern on black. Or were those a gift? All I remember is that the TV trays, which suddenly appeared one night, did not go with mother's green-and-brown Fauxlonial decor AT ALL!

I love a reward deal! Though I'm not sure how I'd feel if I got them for a wedding gift. My mother collected them, but I wasn't very old when they went out (I was born in 1980). And yes. We were poor.

Also: why do milquetoasts make me so horny? Between William Christopher, & Wally Cox... It's a stock character, but I'd love to meet one in real life.

Here's an S & H Green Stamp commercial from 1968!

"That's PETER!"

Like many here, we weren't poor, but we still did the Green Stamps. Being the little baby gay of the family, it was my job to put the stamps in the books.

I remember going to the store to pick out stuff, but can't remember what we actually got. I want to say maybe a crock pot one time?

[quote]And yes. We were poor.

Why would you share something like that?

OK, serious question here: if these stamps programs were so beloved and popular, why did they disappear?

R87, this provides a pretty good explanation.

R87 - Retail stores went to in-house reward programs and reward programs tied to the use of their unique credit cards.

R23 National Grocery Stores in the St. Louis arear also gave out eagle stamps, so that's where my mother shopped.

I loved when the checker used a device just like pictured in R56 to dispense the stamps.

I'd much rather bring back S&H stamps than in-house rewards programs. As many have mentioned, it was actually fun to collect them and "save" towards buying things one might not normally buy for themselves/household.

Shame.

I remember that one of the things that ended trading stamps was the trend toward "everyday low prices." When one chain (it was Lucky in my area) switched to that format and stopped issuing Blue Chip Stamps, people started to realize they were paying higher prices for groceries just to get the trading stamps.

Hey OP, it was literally free stuff. Who legitimately doesn't like free stuff?

[quote]I always felt sorry for the people that had to use them. So tacky.

Funny, I always felt sorry for people who drew their snobbery line at that point, OP.

[quote]I always felt sorry for the people that had to use them. So tacky.

What are you babbling about? People didn't need to use them, they were given when you bought stuff and only idiots would not use them. You were going to buy groceries anyway.

[quote]I'd much rather bring back S&H stamps than in-house rewards programs.

I'd much rather you have gone to school and got a proper job, that affords you the ability to purchase things.

[quote] I'd much rather you have gone to school and got a proper job, that affords you the ability to purchase things.

I’d much rather you’d paid more attention in grammar class. Specifically when they reviewed comma usage.

Comma usage is the least of the issues in that sentence, r97.

People didn't "have" to use them. When you bought groceries, they were just thrown into your bag. You could collect them, donate them or throw them away.

S&H Green Stamps was one of the first "customer rewards" programs, years before credit card rewards. I can only speak for my middle class family but it really felt like "getting something for nothing". I remember we got TV tray tables. (This was around the time the first "frozen TV dinners" were introduced.)

[quote] (This was around the time the first "frozen TV dinners" were introduced.)

And for you kids, they had to get cooked in an oven. None of this microwave for 2-3 minutes bullshit.

[quote]And for you kids, they had to get cooked in an oven. None of this microwave for 2-3 minutes bullshit.

AND, the first generation of frozen dinners had to be defrosted.

This is what I think of green stamps

Slap

But that brownie or apple compote in the old style TV dinners was THE BOMB

A joke from the 60s I overheard: A hurried woman had to pee on the way to her gynecologist appointment. There was no public restroom anywhere, so she had to use the bushes. She grabbed a wad of tissue from her purse and wiped. After her exam, the doctor rolled back on his stool and said to her "I've seen all kinds of hoo-hoos; but never one that gave green stamps".

OP, they weren't like food stamps. They were more like coupons or customer rewards programs which we still have today. We just have a more sophisticated way of doing it now.