S&H Green Stamps: One of the First Shopper Reward Programs - WorthPoint (2024)

January 16, 2023—Stores and brands have long used loyalty programs to keep their customers happy and spending. While today’s businesses employ more digital methods to issue deals—younger consumers more than willingly sign up for text alerts, download apps, and complete surveys to save money—the first loyalty programs were very low-tech. For example, American shoppers collected S&H Green Stamps for decades. Thousands of retailers distributed these stamps to customers, who then used them to earn points toward the merchandise and products they desired.

BUILDING CUSTOMER LOYALTY ONE STAMP AT A TIME

While the S&H Green Stamp program had its heyday in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, the company began in 1896. Founders Thomas Sperry and Shelley Byron Hutchinson formed a company that printed the stamps and saver books and sold them to stores. They also managed redemption centers and provided shoppers with all kinds of products for stamp redemption.

It was a sweet deal all around because the stores purchased the Green Stamps from S&H for one-tenth of a cent per stamp, meaning that it cost the store a single penny in stamp costs to sell one dollar’s worth of goods. Shoppers typically earned one stamp for every ten cents they spent at grocery stores, department stores, gas stations, and hundreds of other retailers. By the 1960s, S&H printed three times as many stamps as the U.S. Postal Service, and the company managed more than six hundred redemption centers. Many households found décor, furnishings, and home appliances through catalog shopping, so S&H created lookbooks of everything customers could get from their stamp books. Consumers were already purchasing items like gas, groceries, and clothing, so why not earn some extra bonuses along the way?

STAMPING, SAVING, AND SHOPPING

Much like some of the “extreme couponers” featured on some modern reality shows, many homemakers shopped strategically to maximize the number of stamps earned on purchases. Because women were often the decision-makers in homes when it came to purchasing food, clothing, and household items, trading stamps usually aimed their marketing toward housewives with children. Advertising conveyed that even if a woman felt a product like a coffee maker or a lamp was overpriced, she could still get it with the stamps she had saved from her grocery purchases. Women saw the books of Green Stamps as “free money” to spend on items they did not want to deplete their household budget dollars to buy.

Trips to the local S&H Redemption store were significant events for families—the store offered a treasure trove of items to choose from, and many families saved stamps all year to do Christmas shopping. Women were encouraged to get their children involved in collecting the stamps, and many children recall having the “stamp licker” job in the family’s efforts to amass as many stamps as possible.

While most of the items redeemed with Green Stamps were small household items, toys, and furnishings, in 1966, The Pittsburgh Press led a campaign to get a gorilla wife for a male gorilla at the Pittsburgh Zoo, affectionately nicknamed “Lonesome George.” School children saved and donated their stamps towards the cost of a gorilla bride named Ginger, who was living in a zoo in Denmark. It took $6,500 worth of stamps, but it worked. Sadly, George and Ginger never produced any offspring, and when George passed away, an autopsy showed ovaries, so clearly, conceiving a baby was never an option for the couple.

AT THE END OF THE LINE

By the close of the 1970s, several factors impacted the collection of trading stamps. First, there were two significant recessions, one from late 1973 to 1975 and another from about 1979 to 1982. Secondly, more women worked outside the home and did not have time to manage and collect trading stamps. While the S&H program ran for several more years, the company ceased accepting stamps on October 4, 2020, and pivoted to a program of “Greenpoints.” A New York grocery chain, PSK Supermarkets, the parent company of Food Town stores, purchased the rights to the program, which now goes by FreshPoints.

It’s hard to imagine a family gathered around a coffee table, licking and sticking stamps into books while visions of cookware danced in their heads, but that was how it worked for decades. The program was the beginning of modern marketing for retail stores that wanted to reward loyal customers with a tangible benefit that kept them coming back to shop. There were other trading stamp programs, such as Gold Bond Stamps, Top Value, and several local programs at smaller stores, and some collectors still like to hunt these stamps down since they are a bit harder to find.

However, S&H Green Stamps were the brand most people remember collecting. They set the standard for modern customer loyalty programs. While most reward programs are digitally based in our high-tech times, some collectors still like to have a few books of different stamps around, perhaps for the nostalgia of when saving for special items involved the whole family.

Brenda Kelley Kim lives in the Boston area. She is the author of Sink or Swim: Tales From the Deep End of Everywhere and writes a weekly syndicated column for Gannett News/Wicked Local. When not writing or walking her snorty pug Penny, she enjoys yard sales, flea markets, and badminton.

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