My college lamps and end tables/chairs were from stamps! I had them for many years!

My 72 year old sister still has the quilt our mother bought using Green Stamps 60 years ago. Sadly, mine is long gone.

Yes, started with green shield, then, others started churning stamp programs for goods. My mom had enough trouble balancing her checkbook, stamp saving was not her thing. I have uncovered many things valuable, ancient, historic and nutty in her stuff, but noooooo stamps.

Oh Lord, I am 58 years old and remember some of the stuff my Mom got in the early 1970s from a book filled with Green Stamps! She would get them with every purchase from out local IGA (another blast from the past) grocery store!!! Oh how I wish sometimes I could go back to those times if only for a day! 🤔

When my mom passed found 10 full books of Green Stamps in her things. I guess she did not live close enough to a redemtion store to use them. I still have them. My kids will wonder what the heck are these for. Bless you all for keeping this place sane and on top of everything.

I’m 73 and remember S&H Green Stamps but don’t remember what we redeemed them on or where. In Ohio at least, there were also ‘tax stamps’ of different colors to show how much tax was paid? I’m not sure what they were for.

My mom collected them and used them. I was to young, but it was my job to lick them and stick them in the book when she brought them home. Yuck.

I was still using them in 1981. Not sure how long after that they lasted. But I loved them. I only recently got rid of a lamp I purchased with them back in the early 80s.

You must be as old as me! I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and remember these very well. And I love you optimism, “how the generation soon to come will find new methods to avoid the censors and monitors.” I got fed up with doomers a while ago who don’t realize we’re on the winning side. Lies lose and truth wins eventually, and we are winning!

Tom in VA

I remember them but too young to use them.

. . . I remember them well — and my Mom turning hers in for a pressure cooker! 🙂

Got my first bicycle with green stamps sometime around 1957-58.

I bought everything for my first child – highchair, stroller, infant seat, etc. and especially remember buying gifts of a clock and some silver pieces for my parents’ 24th anniversary. I also remember how sick I was after licking and pasting 1000s of stamps in the books the night before a purchase!

My great-great grandmother, grandmother, and mother collected roosters. I tagged along with them to the S&H Green Stamp store to purchase roosters to hang on their walls. They’ve all since passed and now adorn my and my daughter’s walls. I derived great excitement as a child watching the women in my family get items they loved by saving their stamps when they shopped for groceries and participating in the painting, antiquing, and watching the hanging of another pair of roosters along their furr downs as the furr down was the optiuum place for Green Stamp roosters in my family’s opinion.

We collected Blue Chip Stamps. I remember helping my Mom paste them into the books. If I remembe4 c9rrectly, on one trip to the Redemption Center we got a small Magnavox black and white that eventually ended up in my bedroom. Good times.

Absolutely I remember them. My mom always got them but couldn’t be bothered with them so, I glommed onto them. I got camping gear with them. Sometime or other in the early 70s, the guy who ran the, as he called it, filling station (aka, gas station) next door to my grandad’s auto parts store couldn’t get his kids to take it over, so he was just going to close it when all the gas was gone, and retire. He had tons of stamps he’d never disbursed. He gave them to me! I replaced all my warn out camping gear, got some fishing gear and I don’t remember what all. As it turned out, that year Santa’s name was Kenny. 🙂

Going to the redemption store was a family affair! So much fun! We bought a painting that stayed in our house for over 50 years!

Blue Chip stamps were more common when I was growing up in the Los Angeles area.

Remember gas wars when station operators would try to outbid each other in offering up to 5x the normal number of stamps?

Oh yes, I remember green stamps. Mom would have us licking for days.
Can’t ever remember what she bought, if anything at all (she was a nutcase), but eventually, here in AZ it moved to goldstamps with Basha.
To this day I’m pretty sure when I lick an envelope it takes me back to licking stamps, in a good way.
Really appreciate the commenter that brought this up yesterday.
Sometimes, we need a reminder and a to step back and remember.
This is what we are really fighting for.
God bless

My Mom used them for things we couldn’t otherwise afford, especially for some Christmas presents.

She used to save up a dollar or two every week to deposit into the Christmas club savings account at our bank, too.

We had numerous books of green stamps. We got the stamps from all kinds of places. Grocery stores, gas stations and many other places. We also got S & H gold stamps, if anyone remembers those… Don’t remember buying anything though.

Growing up near an Martin Marietta factory my buddy’s dad was the executive pilot for the Big Wigs and when he filled up the plane several times a week he got 2 to 3 books of S&H Green Stamps and we ended up getting all kinds of stuff for Boy Scouts !
I still have my True Temper Hatchet and it still holds an edge and chops fire wood .
I’ll be 69 this August and I got it when I was 12 . Mr Pete was a great Man to know growing up Born under a ranch work wagon in a blizzard in Kansas (his dad was a real cowboy) and retired flying a corporate Gulf Stream Jet a true American legacy

I think Sundance deserves a big THANK YOU for this trip down memory lane. Where else can you go in today’s world for this kind of content. Wouldn’t trade him for a million…🥰

I came in on the end but still managed to make them work. I would buy household items and then use the stamps to save on other household items. The money saved went to buy furniture a piece at a time. Curtains, rugs, pots and pans…eventually my apartment was completely furnished using the stamps and the savings they gave me. And it was fun to think about what next item I would get looking at the books I was filling. The old times when you saved to get things instead of trying to remember which credit card wasn’t maxed out.

Oh God yes… My parents were stamp books galore.. Virtually every store and gas station gave out some sort of stamps. Gas station would give out every thing from toys to glassware. They even had gas wars to provide the lowest price… That’s when America was at it’s best.

I can’t say that I remember what all was acquired with Green Stamps but my Mom, long since retired as an elementary school teacher, knew how to keep the four of us engaged and entertained.

I have licked many a green stamp and glued them into the books.

Also were the pickle jar with a dash of dish detergent and a few brass bb’s for making a “tornado” in a jar…kaleidoscopes…some cool 3D “glasses” to peruse topo maps and visits to her college professors homes and classes for geology “entertainment” but WAY more educational looking back…

I had one of the “spy” briefcases SD has posted about too….

It was a different time and now I find it SO WEIRD to describe myself as 6X years old….at first it happened slowly….and then all of a sudden.

God bless SD and CTH and Treepers….

I still have a lamp and a set of glassware that my parents bought with Green Stamps…it was an earlier version of a type of “cash back”on purchases. gas stations used to give them out too. in my area their were blue stamps and plaid stamps as well…

Sundance, why are you calling them green “shield” stamps??? Where I came from we just called them green stamps or S&H stamps. People knew what we were talking about. I saved them up until the mid to late 1980’s and in the city where I live we had a local store right down on main street where I turned in my books for 2 feather pillows. I got those pillows home and HATED them because I kept getting poked with the feather spines. My husband hated them and our little boy also hated them. Wish I’d purchased a new electric fying pan instead.

Also, I recently had a landline installed at my house. I have 2 cell phones but sometimes I leave them laying somewhere and cannot find them unless they ring. So I use the landline *on the wall in my kitchen* to call my cell phones. When they ring, I know where to find them!!! My best friend and I visit on the landline often because we feel safer having political conversations. I don’t KNOW if it’s any safer or not but it just feels safer, ya know what I mean?

I also recently purchased an old fashioned cassette/CD/radio player for my oldest granddaughter who is heavily into researching the 1980’s right now. She LOVES the music from that era and so do I !!!

BTW, we are once again being smothered by Canadian wildfire smoke. Can’t go outside, can’t take a deep breath and I really pity the people who have COPD or any breathing problems to start with. It’s awful. Trudeau doesn’t care, he’s letting 1/2 of his country burn to the ground. Less work for that little maggot if there’s nothing to govern, right?

I think that I could like every single reply in this thread but I just don’t have the patience…

So to every reply…

Likes….

In the 60s and 70s My family of 7 purchased pup tents and sleeping bags for our camping vacations. Lots of fun. The tents were made of real canvas. I could smell it now.

I can still recall the taste (ugh) of licking the stamps to paste in the book, eventually we used a sponge. My first gun, a Daisy BB rifle 😉 and then a cooler, charcoal fire set that fit in the car for road trips. I bet if I looked I could still find some stamps in my deceased mothers box of trinkets probally mixed in with the WWII meat stamps.

Much like the others, we in southern California had green and blue stamps (parents worked civil service for the Navy). I remember licking and attaching the stamps to the booklets, but don’t remember what we got for them!

I’m curious though, how did the conversation about monitors and censorship lead to S&H green stamps?

Yes, certainly do remember.
I also recall another, similar, savings stamp: “Top Value”?
Yellow stamp with 2 red ribbons and “Top Value” printed.

My maternal great-grandmother managed Green Stamp savings for the family. That was how she could get gifts for everyone, though she was almost completely blind and destitute. I’m grateful for the time spent helping her stick stamps in and learning embroidery and other sewing skills she taught by memory and touch.
I still have my first set of stainless flatware she gifted me with Green Stamps. It’s nice enough that my wife and I added to it and continue to use it in our family almost 40 years later. I so look forward to seeing Greatmama again in heaven!

I still have a jar of them in my pantry. We bought towels and such when we first got married.

My first real job was working as a clerk in a Winn-Dixie store. For the “regular” bigger spending customers I would always give an extra page or two of Green Stamps…Many of
them would line up and wait for me to check them out because of the extra stamps I would give them. The full time cashiers just couldn’t understand why they would wait for me!

My mother still has the card table set she got with S&H green stamps 60 years ago. Common trivia stumper when I was a teen was what did S&H stand for?

Got my baseball glove in 5th grade: 1968-69. Still have it…

Yes, I remember. Good times getting the stamps and driving to far off places to redeem them.

The most important thing about this post is the memories shared about our mothers.

I miss you, Mom. What I’d give to lick a few of those stamps for you again.

In 1962 as a teenager I was working at a company owned Standard Oil Station (became AMOCO then BP Petroleum) and we gave out S&H green stamps. We could actually redeem them for cash then. Also we wore coin changers on our belts. You could get to do the change automatically almost without thinking. I am not sure if it was the mandatory 7 point service, the 26 cents a gallon or the stamps that brought people in.

Also does anyone remember the coupons in the Chesterfield Cigarette packs? My Mother save them. I have no idea what one did with them.

Back when I was an Army pilot at Ft Rucker, AL, we could check out a UH-1 Huey helicopter and just file a flight plan and go fly around to log time for monthly minimums. So after about two hours we’d stop at some little airport at the Fixed Base Operators (FBOs) and gas up. Well a Huey holds about 206 gallons of aviation fuel, JP4, and we would collect the Green Stamps for the fill up. The cost of the fuel went on the US Army Fuel Card. You could fill up those little books really quickly. But sooner or later, the Army got wind of this, and we had to turn in the Green Stamps from the gas purchase over to the Finance folks. Hmmm. Can’t imagine what the Army would do with Green Stamps. But that was 1970 for ya!

I remember mom always shopped on Wednesdays which was triple stamp days. My grandmother would come with us and they would take advantage of the bonus. This was in the mid 50s, so yeah, I’m experienced like many of the Treepers here. Both of them could stretch a food budget like nobody’s business and could make beans and wieners a great meal. Love as an ingredient is the key.

Yep remember those things and filling in the pages for my mom. Then Blue Chip stamps were the thing, you’d look through the catalogs and it almost seemed ridiculous the amount of books you’d have to fill just to get a set of Corelleware dishes (remember that stuff?) or something of the like.

Do you remember when a recipe was a recipe and you didn’t have to read a novel to get to the ingredients and instructions? Twice today I pulled out cookbooks because I didn’t feel like “jumping to the recipe”.

All the dishes we used, serving platters, butter dishes, etc. when I was a kid my mom got one dish at a time from some promotion at the grocery store. I think she got the stainless steel flatware the same way. Many small appliances, lamps, housewares, furnishings and the thermos my dad took to work every day she got with Green Stamps. A clock she got from Green Stamps is still in her (now my brother’s) dining room. My grandmother got that spiky looking moderistic ceiling lamp you can see in the photo of the showroom 😉 Yes I remember licking them (yuck) There was also some kind of a plaid stamp too from some stores. She got the toaster, a blender and mixer by opening new savings accounts at several banks. Remember when banks gave away toasters and such?

Someone has probably already mentioned this w/there being 600 comments, but in case not, I will ask if anyone remembers making churned ice cream w/salt and ice turning the crank? It was always a treat and delight to look forward to having. Thanks mom and dad! Peach was my favorite.

Whenever there would be a group of people doing ice cream on a summer night everyone would be chattering and as soon as the ice cream was served people got real quiet and enjoyed their bowl. Homemade pound cake and sweet tea w/hand cranked ice cream on the veranda watching the lightening bugs. Life was good.

My Mom collected them and I loved putting them in the books. I believe she saved up for a complete set of Golden Wheat dinnerware and I have some of her saucers.