Posted on 02/17/2024 11:59:52 AM PST by DallasBiff
Do you remember when a trip to Grandma's meant going through her drawer filled with S&H Green Stamps so you could lick 'em and stick 'em into those little booklets? Green Stamps were offered in certain regions beginning in 1896 but they were most widely distributed in the U.S. from the 1930s to the 1980s, with a peak in the 1960s and '70s.
Did you know you can still redeem any you might find lying around? Yep. S&H is still in business, only altered for a digital world. Read on to learn how to redeem them
(Excerpt) Read more at al.com ...
Indeed. We were a Blue Chip family
I remember S & H stamps. We’d get them from one of the grocery stores. Can still remember the clerk tearing the stamps from a big sheet of them. I think one of the last things I got with Green Stamps, were some bathroom towels. At the time, I didn’t think anything about the quality of them, but by my standards today, they were thin and crappy.
probably takes so many now to “win” a badminton set that you’d be poisoned from the amount of stamp glue that needed to be licked ...
Mom used to have a little yellow plastic cookie jar full of S & H Stamps and the booklets to stick them in.
One day Mom said to us kids our job was to fill all the booklets.
It was fun as my brother and I made a race out of who could fill the most.
Fun, until the glue on the stamps, which wasn’t the tastiest, began being a bit sickening and we went slower and slower as our tongues got coated with the stuff.
Even Kool aid couldn’t get the gunk off our tongues. Although a shot of whiskey would do the trick nowadays.
The look on our faces must have convinced our mother that we done enough for the day and let us go outside or watch TV.
And no, I don’t remember what she redeem the stamps for but I do remember those stamps and the little yellow cookie jar with displeasure!
Anybody remember the Jewel Tea Company? A traveling salesman would come to your house, and bring with him samples of things that were available to purchase. My mother was a sucker for stuff like that. She also sold Avon products at one time when I was young...50’s/60’s.
Yep, remember those too.
back in the day, i remembered A&P grocery stores being small, dimly lit and grimy ...
Imagine conceiving the idea way back in 1896 of a loyalty program with stamps you lick and put into a book. People would have thought you were crazy!
Frankly, I hate sales and loyalty programs. Just give me your best price! Safeway and Albertsons (owned by Safeway) are the absolute worst. There is the regular price. The price for “members.” The special digital coupon price where you have to “clip” a coupon in the phone app. Don’t forget to “clip” it before you arrive at the register, too. There are the specials that appear in the print flier starting on Wednesday that don’t seem to be in the special “member” prices or in the digital coupons.
Half the time their promos don’t work, either. They had Atlantic Salmon “SALE” signs all over the meat department pitching $4.99 per pound. It rang up at $10.99. I had to fight tooth and nail to get the $4.99. I had to walk the cashier back to the meat department to show here the 20 different “SALE” signs they had plastered all over the place. She had to get the meat department manager to ring up the correct price. The line got real long and people were really PO’d at the wait. Even the miserable cashier was mad at me for not just going with the $10.99.
It’s all way too much bother except I do it now that I’m retired and want to save a few bucks.
I still hate shopping and I HATE loyalty programs.
LOL!! I think all mothers used their kids to lick and stick the stamps. Mine did too.
In the 50s there were towels and washcloths as premiums in laundry detergent boxes. And featured dishware purchased at a discount weekly at the grocers. 1 piece for each 5 dollars spent perhaps?
Gas stations gave out a glass with each fillup.
I have a tiny copper kerosene lamp that was a gas station premium my father brought home.
Premium gifts....
After gas prices went way up and you might face an Out of Gas sign after waiting in a long line, a female comedian said: “I tried to offer the gas station guy a lovely set of kitchen towels and 4 matching steak knives but he wouldn’t budge.”
Had a neighbor who ran (President of) Green Stamps. On snow days I plowed their driveway in northern NJ.
I laughed out loud.
Those were the days weren’t they?
There was an A&P grocery store in Lake Forest off Lem Turner, by Pic-N-Save.
I remember it being a nasty place................
I remember King Korn stamps as well as the S&H.
These stamp programs taught people how to save. You had to save up enough stamps to get the thing you wanted. Now if you want something you just put it on your credit card.
This was the same time frame that the big, fat, telephone books used to dump onto our doorstep with a section for white pages (local residences) and yellow pages (local businesses).
Of course, way before the internet and smart phones was even a concept.
You could excude your residence from the white pages but that was rare, usually you wanted to be in the phone book during those days.
Also, during the 1970s, the supermarkets would have a promotion for a set of encyclopedias. Usually the Funk & Wagnalls edition. Sometimes the Americana (if it was an upscale supermarket).
Anyway, the idea was that the supermarket would introduce a new volume each week, removing the previous week's volume, encouraging you to go to the supermarket often.
So the situation developed around 1975 that I was collecting every volume of the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia by going with my mother shopping, as she filled the cart with Underwood Deviled Ham, slabs of sliced Kraft American cheese, Hood milk, Starkist tuna, Jello, Prince macaroni, Wonder Bread, and other such staples of the time.
I would make sure we got the latest volume each shopping trip and upon return to the house, I would place it proudly on our bookcase at home, hard by the Zenith TV with the remote control that never once worked properly, forcing me to get up and adjust the vHold, or the channel and volume upon my father's demand while he was watching F-Troop, Bewitched or some John Wayne western movie. My father had a huge crush on the Bewitched woman, Samantha, who was nothing like my mother at all. My mother was more like the mother-in-law on that show.
Anyway, we went on a vacation that summer of 1975 for two weeks so I totally missed out on getting the Funk & Wagnalls volume that went from Me-No. So if I wanted to read in that encyclopedia set about Montana or Nigeria, I was completely out of luck.
Those were rough times. The 1970s. Though I did get an Archie's 45 single out of a box of Corn Pops cereal.
Never did remember what we got with the green stamps. But I was put in charge of filling up those books by putting my saliva on the stamps and sticking them in.
I’m feeling so bad for some of you kids. I guess we were wealthier than some of you. We had a sponge.
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