The Peculiar Truth about S&H Green Stamps
Published in
3 min readJul 2, 2024
- For most of the 20th Century, Americans who shopped at participating grocery stores, department stores, or gas stations would receive stamps along with their sales receipts. The number of stamps was supposed to correspond to the full amount of the purchases.
- Consumers could then take those stamps home, collect them, lick the back sides like a typical postage stamp of the era, and paste them into a free booklet. When a sizable number of points had been accumulated — stamps came in denominations of one point, ten points, or fifty points — the customers could take the filled booklets of stamps to specially-designated redemption centers in exchange for free gifts.
- They were known as S&H Green Stamps.
- 1896: Thomas Sperry of New Jersey and Shelley Byron Hutchinson of Michigan dreamed up the idea of trading stamps (Sperry & Hutchinson, ergo S&H). They sold the stamps to retailers, and they maintained the products and storefronts where the stamps could be redeemed.
- Green Stamps took off during the Great Depression and they hit their peak of popularity in the 1960s.
- Sperry & Hutchinson mailed out their free Ideabook, which was a roughly 180-page catalog full of potential selections. Beside the image and description of each item was the number of booklets full of stamps needed to…
