My wife and two other couples rented a beach cottage for the summer and we all pooled our stamps and those of our parents to outfit the place including a badminton set, horseshoes and a dart set.

My mom saved Green Stamps. There was another brand as well, but I don’t remember the details.

In elementary school we bought US Saving stamps. 10 cents each. You glued them in a book and when you filled a book you could exchange it for a US Savings Bond. I never filled a book.

As an adult I did purchase adjusting interest US bonds thru payroll deduction for a while and accumulated a nice nest egg to be squandered on satisfying the whims of my intended.

Ha ha ! The olden days when being thrifty was a virtue and saving for a rainy day the go-to action.

My mother was an avid Green Stamp saver. I used to lick them for her. However, there were times she would have big sheets of them and would use a damp sponge to put them in the booklets. Christmas presents, bedspreads…so many things. Although I can’t remember specific items other than those beautiful silky bedspreads, a Betsy-wetsy doll and a serving tray hotplate, I remember going to the big store in the town nearby (town bigger than ours) where she would redeem her stamps and we’d bring back the goods.

PS Do TV dinner trays still exist ???

My Mom used them to purchase items, but she let me put the stamps in the paper booklets. She would put a small bowl of water on the kitchen table, so I could would wet my finger to apply the water to the backs and put them in the books, as she did not want me to lick the backs as dirty hands would have handled them and did not what the substance from the stamps ingested. Then around 1980, they were being discontinued and the store I was working, HART’s in Columbus, Ohio, had a GREEN STAMP ‘store’ inside that closed and I was part of of a team that worked for extra part-time money to verify each booklet had the correct stamps, booklets counted, and then bundled into groups.

Yes I remember them well.. Coming home and filling the books. The
wet sponge and putting them in thier place in the books.. I still have the
small metal box fan my mom got at the S&H Green Stamp store all those
years ago..and it still works…

Just for nostaglia and to age myself I was telling hubby I also remember how
gas stations use to give away like glasses and dishes and you would keep
going to the same station over and over to get your full set of of glasses
or dishes…

I also still have some actual sugar ration coupons that were my Grandma’s
from the war..I will save them they might come in handy someday.

My mom and I cashed in multiple books of S&H Green stamps for a beautiful man’s watch which was a gift for my brother Ron as he entered Ole Miss. He graduated from the School of Pharmacology being on time.

I remember the stamps and the books. My parents were smokers and I do remember the stamps wrapped in the back of a carton of cigarettes. My oldest sister remembers furnishing her first child’s room from S&H. She particularly recalls a red and white gingham giraffe clothes tree.

I remember hearing my mother tell my father more than once, “be sure to gas up the DeSoto at the gas station that gives out the green stamps”.

After I was married we used the stamps to buy wedding gifts for others getting married. We were not being cheap, but we could only use just so much of the stuff from the stamp redemption store.

Oh my goodness. I was raised in a small town in South Georgia and the closest store was Tallahassee FL and we’d ride down and pick up a toaster or some such. Wow, a blast from the past indeed.

blue chip stamps were in my town. and a redemption
store within walking distance of home. i remember saving up books and buying my sister a macrame ashtray you could hang from ceiling. it was a big hit in her first apartment. did i mention she didn’t smoke?

My job as a child was to wet the stamps and stick them on the pages of the books. My mother bought her first (and only) set of china which I inherited when she passed. She may have used it twice over the decades that she owned it. We were not “fancy” people. I got a lamp for my nightstand, Dad got a cooler for our trips to White Lake, NC. The store was either in Goldsboro or Mt Olive? I was little so I can’t remember and no longer have my parents to ask such things. When I cleaned out our family home I found some old S&H books partially filled with the green stamps.

I remember my mom saving the Green stamps I remember going to the hardware store in town and mom got a waffle iron she wanted. The first time she used it I stuck my hand over the bottom and the lid fell and burnt my hand and I still have the scar on my hand as a fond memory

I remember them, but was just in charge of pasting them in the books.

We bought some furniture with S&H Green Stamps when we were first married and in College at University of Missouri. That was in like 1971… I think it was an end table and a lamp.

We had S&H Green stamps plus Gold Bond stamps, but the Green stamps were more abundant. Traded them in for lots of kitchen appliances.

My dad was an S&H Green Stamp representative in Wisconsin. The corporate office was near the capital in Madison. The redemption center was near Minneapolis.
I traveled with him when I was young.

Every once in a while there would be promotions where you could get double or triple the number of green stamps. Watch out! Those promotions were dangerous!

oh my gosh. That takes me back a ways. Pretty sure we got a toaster, and if my memory serves me, a small black and white tv. Maybe a trasistor radio. Early 60’s when the NY Mets first got started, pre Tom Terrific. Used to put the radio under my pillow to listen to the games. Which brings to mind that being a Mets fan in those days was like being a conservative today. Our Republican political team is a consistent / persistent disappointment, but we keep hoping…..

Oh yes, very nice memories of my mother collecting the stamps and she and I pasting them into the booklets, and then redeeming them. Thank you for the nudge to recall those memories.

I bought my Dad a nice checkers set with S&H green stamps. Trivia tidbit: the Mr. Hutchinson (of Sperry & Hutchinson aka S&H) lived in my hometown: Ypsilanti, Michigan. He had a big ‘castle’ on the hill on River Street called Casa Loma. By the time I came along, he was long gone, ‘The Casa Loma’ had been turned into apartments (and River Street had become rather seedy) and my Mom and I went there to ‘collect’ for my brother’s paper route for a few weeks when my brother was laid up with a broken leg. My Dad delivered the papers for him. Good ole days 🙂

Before my 1969 time I guess. My single mother was a coupon/stamper for the record books as far back as I remember.

The 50’s were so much fun. Life was simple and full of opportunities. My Dad, born in 1922, once said that was the best decade in America. Lots of fond memories. The music, the cars…..how sweet is was.

My mom used S&H green stamps. She’d go to the store and us four kids would gather around to help put them in books. Mostly all our special things came from there. One Christmas she bought the three girls Shirley Temple dolls. Oh, how I miss those days.

Green Stamps were serious! I worked in a filling station in that era and NOBODY turned down the offer of stamps for their purchase. When the roadside signage disappeared one night, it was serious for the station owner to get that sign replaced. All GS merchandise was good quality too!

my mom would collect every kind of food stamp and coupon you can imagine…it was a whole day hobby once a week. Then she would select carefully which coupons to use and the rest she would give to families in the church. Eventually, mom would teach the younger families who to make a budget, how to build savings, and where to shop to get the best deals. Later mom decided the best way to really teach was to open a church kitchen two times a week and help prepare meals ready to eat (frozen) for dozens, sometimes hundreds of families. It was something else watching 20 plus people in a church kitchen shopping for food in commercial sizes and saving hundreds of dollars and having really good home cooked food.

probably more than anyone in my life, it was my mom who taught me to value wise spending and saving and being frugal. I don’t think I have bought a single new piece of clothes in 15 years. I just cannot bring myself to spend 40 bucks on a pair of blue jeans, when I can shop the salvation or care help and buy second hand for 3 bucks a pair. They wear the same. I owe my Dad the respect for teaching me to repair vehicles and tractors and all manner of machines. So I drive a 30 year old truck that still purrs like a kitten. Life is good when you make it affordable.

God Bless America

My mom saved the S&H greenstamps. I remember exactly where the store was. If I wanted a new football or basketball she would hand me the book and off I would go.

I remember the women in our and our extended families pooled green stamps and also blue chip stamps together (both grandmothers, mother and my aunts). I always had the impression that it was a back up for hard times. Something to fall back on.

When a great many books would accumulate, they would all sit at the dining room table carefully examining the catalogs and each would select an item for her family.

My mom and her friends would “loan” books for those who were short.

It is now 50+ years later and I can taste the paste on my tongue …. it was a ritual when I stayed over at my grandmother’s house and on every Saturday at home, to fill up the family stamp books.

Mom traded for a manual cranked “home made” ice cream mixer that uses the rock salt. Great ice cream.

Remember walking in the grocers back in the stamp book days when they all had grind your own coffee machines? The great scent of fresh ground coffee throughout the store?

This is hilarious. DW and I were out for our daily constituionals and the subject of S$H Green stamps and the gold stamp arose in conversation and now here it is in Treehouse LOL

We had Blue Chip stamps and Green stamps in So Cal. I think we got them when filling up at gas stations back when there was competition instead of the monopolies now.

My grandmother took my brother and me to her S&H store. We purchased 2 daisy air guns. I’d have to include it on a list of ‘The Most Memorable Day of My Life’

I do remember the stamps (but not much more) – I also remember banks offering gifts for opening savings accounts – also remember gas stations giving gifts for filling up (I think). It was things like knives and glasses, IIRC. Sorry, memory ain’t what it used to be 🙂

Top Value Stamps family primarily from Kroger Grocery Stores. My mother let me spend them on my stuff when I was a kid.

My parents used S & H Green Stamps to get a big, chrome and black Bakelite Sunbeam toaster with cloth insulation on the cord. I have it now, and at over fifty years old it still works better than any of the toasters they make now.

By the way, where I live we also had Top Value (TV) Stamps.

LOVED them! We saved from gas stations, grocery stores…I was exciting to see what you could get next! Why do these useful concepts have to disappear from life & steal your joy? I’d rather go back.

S&H and Top Value were the most popular back then in my neck of the woods. Their catalogs were like wish books and were a lot of fun. I remember getting a croquet game from S&H.

My 89 year old uncle owned a gas station for over fifty years and still curses those stamps to this day.

I remember in the early 70’s going into the basement of a Sears or JC Penney to redeem the book of stamps and choose your small appliance. I was in elementary school.

My first vacuum cleaner that lasted 30 years.

There were 9 kids in our family. My mom used Green Stamps to get 12place settings of silver-plated flatware and China.

I remember those little stamp books, filled with stamps and more guarded than the gold at Fort Knox. Even Lowes Foods used the same setup several years ago. I wanted the stainless-steel vegetable cleaver, and it required the most stamps, but I eventually bought enough groceries to pay the light bill and all of the employee's salaries for a month just to get a 25 or 30 dollar cleaver. I had tunnel vision and a laser focus on that cleaver. Looking back on it now, certainly wasnt my finest hour. It doesn`t seem to matter that you are paying five to ten time what the item of your desire actually cost. It is all about obtaining it for yourself. Such is life.

I remember, as a child, pasting these stamps, into the provided booklets, for my Grandmother. I also remember going, with her, to the S&H store to exchange them for an electric coffee pot and toaster.
Good times.

I bought my Kitchen Aid mixer with green stamps. I still use it today. Works great!

My parents gave me a Cuisinart food processor as a wedding gift in 1973. Still working.

Free light bulbs from Detroit Edison…Eastern Market in Detroit . Going there since 1954 and still go @ least once per year… I remember @ Clark gas 16.9 cents 1963 64 time frame

I remember these, and my mother shopping with them. I’m 63 yrs old, my parents are still with me, and they still have a lamp they bought with green stamps.

Plaid Stamps from an A&P grocery in Brooklyn. Remember being sat down as a little guy with a damp sponge, stamps and the book and being expected to paste them in neatly. Also remember going to the redemption center with Mom a few times but the only thing I actually recall getting there was a Thermos set one time. It had a red plaid theme. Now wonder if that was coincidental or if some relation to the plaid in Plaid Stamps.

Sperry & Hutchinson. I never heard the “Shield” part of the name. Just S & H Green Stamps.

My mom was a voracious collector of green stamps.
I used to help her fill in the booklets.
Dont remember what I bought but I do remember how proud and happy I was to buy something with just the green stamps.
It was fantastic!

Oh wow, such nostalgia. We got those tv trays in the picture front bottom right!!!