Does anyone miss Green Stamps?
Does anyone remember Green Stamps? We’ve had about 30 years now to do without and to forget the Green Stamps, but I’m recalling that in the 1950s and 1960s, S & H Green Stamps were a big thing. The grocery stores and others would offer Green Stamps as a premium or extra value on purchases you made there, giving you a certain number of stamps according to how much you spent. The stamps could then be exchanged for merchandise by ordering from the Green Stamp Catalog or by going to the Green Stamp store. My wife and I are having difficulty remembering where we lived when we had a Green Stamp Store nearby. The store may have been in Brinkley, in east Arkansas, or Van Buren, or Russellville, or Searcy. Pea Ridge never had a Green Stamp store, and I don’t remember one in Rogers or Bentonville, but maybe Fayetteville?
Green Stamps were a huge enterprise in the 1960s, in the real heyday of trading stamps. I understand that Sperry and Hutchinson, the firm that offered the Green Stamp program, was printing three times as many stamps in the 1960s as was the U.S. Postal Service. As a customer of a store that gave Green Stamps, you kept a Green Stamp book at home, and after each shopping outing you would glue the new stamps you had received into the book. A full page of Green Stamps made 50 points, and if you filled the whole book, that came to about 1,200 points. A significant purchase, for example a food mixer, might be valued at several books of Green Stamps. Participating in the Green Stamps rewards required a certain diligence, patience and stick-to-it-iveness.
Our first set of dishes as a married couple came from Green Stamps. As I recall the Green Stamps catalog, the offerings were primarily housewares, but there was quite a variety of items you could get by trading in your Green Stamps. I remember toasters, silverware, cups and drinking glasses, kitchen utensils, bedding, pillows, electric blankets, towels, washcloths, throw rugs, clocks, radios, decorative items for home decorating, pictures and picture frames, wallets, money pouches, a whole raft of things! I remember that in the Green Stamps store, the clerks became as speedy and efficient at thumbing through and verifying stamp books as our bank tellers are at counting out dollar bills.
The whole idea of Green Stamps was to encourage people to become regular customers at the stores that offered the stamps. You were being provided “extra value” by the Green Stamps. Some stores tried to make their program more attractive by advertising that they gave extra Green Stamps, or that “You get more Green Stamps for every dollar you spend” here at our store.
I understand that S & H Green Stamps were invented in the 1890s, but they really came into widespread popularity in the 1930s and 1940s, and peaked in the 1960s. There were other competing stamp companies also, as well as S & H. I recall “Top Value” stamps, which some stores offered, and I think even “Shurfine” had trading stamps.
Even today we still have “promotions” used by the stores to make us feel like we are getting extra value when we shop with them, or by the airlines with their “frequent flier miles” programs. Some might think that the Green Stamps program sounds like a lot of trouble to keep up with, gluing in all those stamps, and so on. But when I compare it to the extremes some will go to today to find coupons with which to get better prices, I think I might just prefer to go back to the old Green Stamps!
Back in the days when Saturdays were “big going to town days” in Pea Ridge, not only did our stores do the trading stamps, but sometimes there would be whole town promotions, supported by all the merchants, and everyone would put in their names on tickets they received through purchases, and on Saturdays there would be a big “drawing.” There were sometimes cash prizes, sometimes merchandise prizes, like “Win a new TV!” In my whole life I don’t remember ever winning anything at the drawings. But they were big events, and exciting, and the old downtown would be full of people.
I think the Green Stamps faded away in the 1980s when the country went through recessions. The economy got so that stores felt they had to cut back on their promotions, and the items in the Green Stamp Store came to “cost” too many books of stamps, and more and more people concluded that the stamps were more trouble than they were worth. It was an interesting era, and the Green Stamps have pretty much gone by. However, I understand that a few places over the country still do Green Stamps, and that if you have some old books of Green Stamps in a box on a shelf somewhere, they may still have some value, even today.
••• Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at joe369@centurytel.net, or call 621-1621.