Trading stamp
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Trading stamps are small paper coupons given to customers by merchants. These stamps have no value individually, but when a customer saves up a certain number of them, they can be exchanged with the trading stamp company for other merchandise.
The practice started in the 1890s, at first given only to customers who paid for purchases in cash, to reward those who did not purchase on credit. It grew with the spread of chain gasoline stations in the early 1910s and then the new industry of chain supermarkets in the 1920s, and merchants found it more profitable to award them to all customers. Trading stamps were at their most popular from the 1930s through the 1960s.
An example of the value of trading stamps would be during the 1970s and 1980s where the typical rate issued by a merchant was one stamp for each 10ยข of merchandise purchased. A typical book took approximately 1200 stamps to fill, or the equivalent of US $120.00 in purchases.
In the United States, the most popular brand of trading stamps was "S&H Green Stamps", sometimes informally simply known as "Green stamps". Other larger brands included Top Value Stamps, "Gold Bond Stamps", "Plaid Stamps", and "Blue Chip Stamps"; "Texas Gold Stamps" were given away in their namesake state mainly by the HEB grocery store chain.
Merchants would pay a stamp company for the stamps, and then would advertise that they gave away stamps with purchases. The intent of this was to get customers to be loyal to the merchant, so that they would continue shopping there in order to get enough stamps to redeem it for merchandise.
Often customers would fill books with stamps, and take filled books to a stamp company store to redeem it for items. Books could also be sent to the stamp company in exchange for merchandise via mail order.
At the start of the 1960s, the S&H Green Stamps company bragged that it printed more of its stamps each year than the number of postage stamps printed by the US government.
It is generally presumed as a result of serious inflation starting in the 1970s trading stamps became less common as merchants discontinued offering them as a means to cut costs. Their role has been subsumed by rewards programs offered by credit card companies.
[edit] Modern cultural references
The plot of a well known episode of The Brady Bunch ("54-40 and Fight", 1970) revolved around the children bickering over what to do with all of the trading stamps they had collected (many of which Alice had saved up). The boys wanted to trade them in for a row boat, and the girls wanted a sewing machine.
The musical parodist Allan Sherman had a song "Green Stamps" (to the tune of "Green Eyes," on his album Allan in Wonderland, 1964) in which the singer describes buying immense quantities of unneeded groceries in the desire to collect trading stamps.
