The "Remembering S&H Green Stamps" Story

It was an ordinary day.  On my way out of the "Family Style Restaurant" in Lititz, Pennsylvania after having breakfast with the retired teachers and staff from the high school where I used to teach.  As I walked toward the entrance, I noticed to my left a wooden rack that held small magazines and newspapers.  There was one of my favorite local publications, "The Fishwrapper", which is published by Little Mountain Printing and whose mission is to uphold the principles taught in scripture.  The 8 1/2" x 11", 16 page monthly publication has all kinds of neat short stories as well as puzzles and plenty of advertisements.  

A sample of an S&H Green Stamp

After getting home I leafed through it and there on page 13 was a story about S&H Green Stamps.  Boy, did that bring back memories from long ago.  I can remember pasting Green Stamps in the "Saver Book" for my mom after she would get home from the grocery store or pasting them in the book when my dad would come home from the gas station.  S&H Green Stamps were trading stamps that were popular in the United States from the 1930s until the late 1980s.  They were distributed as part of a rewards program operated by the Sperry & Hutchinson company that was founded in 1896 by Thomas Sperry and Shelley Byron Hutchinson.  In the 1960s the company claimed they issued three times as many stamps as the U.S. Postal Service.  

A booklet for keeping your stamps.

You would get the stamps at gas stations, department stores and supermarkets and could redeem the stamps for products in their catalog or at the local S&H Green Stamp Store.  There were other companies that distributed stamps, but S&H was the biggest by far.  The stamps were green in color and came in sheets that had an adhesive on the rear and perforations to tear them apart if needed.  The free collection booklets had 24 pages to them and needed 50 stamps to fill each page.  Every year the company would produce a book with hundreds of products in it that you could use your stamps to purchase.  I guess my biggest memory of the stamps though would have to be handing them out when I worked at the Acme Supermarket from 1960 to 1965 while a student in high school and college.  

This letter I found online really brought back
memories from the past.  It was the letter that
the Acme Supermarket chain would send to
property owners telling them about collecting
and redeeming S&H Green Stamps.

I operated a cash register to check out customers and had to dispense S&H Green Stamps to every person who made a purchase.  Boy, was that a big pain in the butt.  One of the worst parts of the job.  I believe you got one stamp for every dollar spent.  You spent $50.00 you got 50 stamps or enough to fill one page in the collection booklet.  You must remember that in the early 1960s that if you spent $50.00 for groceries, you walked out of the store with quite a few bags of groceries.  I can remember most customers spending $25 to $30 for their weekly groceries.  Well, the stamps and the redemption stores eventually disappeared, but we still get rewards at the grocery store in the form of a voucher for a free turkey at Thanksgiving or a voucher to get money off gasoline at the gas station or a certain % off the bill for a certain amount spent.  Easier for the supermarket clerks not to have to count out stamps to hand out and easier for the children of the shoppers who required they paste the stamps into the booklets if they wanted to eat supper. And …. the taste of that glue was terrible!  Oh, the memories!  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.