During the 1960s and ’70s, if you asked most people what publication had the largest circulation in the United States, they would probably have guessed it was the Sears or JC Penney catalogs. And while both those retailers mailed out millions of copies, it was, in fact, the S&H Green Stamps redemption catalog that reached the most people and had the largest print run of any periodical in America (and quite possibly the world).
Anyone born before about 1975 probably remembers a drawer somewhere in the family home that was over-stuffed with sheets of green, blue, orange, or other-colored trading stamps, given out by retailers and redeemed by consumers for all sorts of merchandise. If you lived in a decent-size town, you could travel to the local redemption center and pick up your merchandise, or order it by mail through a catalog distributed by your local grocer or department store. Below is an S&H Ideabook from the early ’70s.
In my own family home, many lamps, appliances, TV tables, and sporting goods came from the local stamp redemption center, often after marathon pasting sessions around the kitchen table. Here, Mrs. David Dunkley of Colorado poses for an S&H Green Stamp advertisement with her daughters Cathy, Christie Sue, and Virginia amid a room-full of items purchased with trading stamps.
You could get almost anything from the various stamp companies that sprouted up around the country. There were dozens of different stamp schemes, though the S&H (Sperry & Hutchison) Company was the largest, followed by Blue Chip. Here are a couple catalog spreads from a vintage S&H catalog, along with a sheet of S&H Green Stamps.
Most of the trading-stamp programs worked the same way. Merchants purchased the stamps and gave them to customers as an incentive to pay cash, based on a simple formula (1 stamp for every 10 cents spent, or similar). Consumers saved up the stamps by pasting them into booklets, then redeemed them for merchandise. Here are sample stamps from Sav-O, Plaid, 3Star, Wisco99, Merchants and Blue Chip, along with some sample booklet pages.
Some stamp companies were local, some national, and others were set up to benefit a specific merchant or category of merchants. All were designed to produce customer loyalty in a market where prices and service may have been very similar. Here are books from S&H, Blue Chip, Thrifty Green, King Corn, United, and Thrifty Orange.
The stamp companies are long gone, and with only one exception, those stamps kicking around the kitchen drawer or hiding in the glove box of your rusting Corvair are now worthless. However, S&H is still an active company with a digital equivalent of green stamps called Greenpoints. You can still redeem your S&H Green Stamps by trading them for Greenpoints at Greenpoints.com.
There is also an interesting tie between trading stamps and a current Wall-Street favorite, Berkshire Hathaway. A young Warren Buffett, impressed with the cash reserves of the Blue Chip Stamps Company, began buying shares of that firm in 1970 and by 1983 owned a controlling interest. All trading stamp companies held a certain amount of money aside on their balance sheets to pay for future goods that consumers might redeem. But many stamps were never redeemed and there was always a certain amount of this reserve considered “float” that could be used for investment purposes.
Buffett used the reserves at Blue Chip to purchase several companies that have come to define Berkshire Hathaway, including Wesco Financial and Sees Candy. And though the primary business of Blue Chip faded quickly after the economic recession of the ’70s and a move by retailers toward low-price competition (and away from gimmicks like trading stamps), Berkshire Hathaway (and Buffett’s) fortune was partly constructed using the glue of Blue Chip’s trading stamps.
My mother still lives with a number of items acquired by redeeming trading stamps (we were pretty much a Blue Chip family), and I often think back to catalog items I coveted as a child. In our house the stamps were considered family currency and almost always went to buy something everyone could use, or perhaps a wedding or birthday gift for a neighbor. By the time I was old enough to substantially collect my own trading stamps, the field had dried up.
Do you have memories of pasting stamps into booklets at the kitchen table, or of a favorite item acquired with trading stamps? Did you lick the stamps directly or use a sponge? Please share your memories by using the comment button
This article was last modified on May 18, 2023
This article was first published on April 18, 2008
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