Pages and Pages of Green

Remember the Green? It was all available if you just had enough of the green. Those little paper books filled with the valuable green stamps.

"S&H” symbolized the Sperry & Hutchinson Co, which Thomas Sperry and Shelley Byron Hutchinson established in 1896. S&H Green Stamps became the most popular trading stamps across the United States. They were found in many households from the 1930s to the 1980s, but it was during the 1960s and ’70s that these stamps reached their peak.

The S&H stamp story began in 1896. Salesman Tomas Sperry noted that a store was having success with a program where customers were rewarded by coupons redeemable for store items. Perry theorized that dispensing coupons that were not tied to a specific store and could be redeemed everywhere would lure customers into the store to collect the stamps.

Working with Shelley Hutchinson, the pair launched the Sperry and Hutchinson Company and began selling S&H Green Stamps. S&H representatives had to persuade stores that by dealing in these stamps, customers would get hooked on them and choose their store over another. Retailers bought the stamps from S&H, and distributed them to their customers as a bonus for shopping and using cash rather than credit. A 1963 magazine article stated that the average supermarket paid $2.45 for the stamps needed to fill one collector book.

The first redemptions center opened in 1897. People would bring in their booklets filled with stamps and ‘buy’ their free merchandise. S&H bought merchandise at wholesale prices and sold it at retail prices (when stamps were redeemed).

The popularity of the stamps spread like wildfire, becoming a wild craze and huge drawing factor for loyal customers. 83% of households were saving S&H Green Stamps. S&H was printing three times as many stamps as the U.S. Postal Service at the height of their popularity. The rewards catalog was among the leading single publications in the country, with approximately 35 million catalogs a year.

The stamps had an actual cash value. If you brought in 1,000 stamps, S&H would cheerfully hand you $1.67. But few cared about the stamps’ cash value when catalogs offered tempting merchandise like clock radios and Corning ware. The perforated stamps came in values of one, ten, and fifty points.

S&H Green Stamps had several competitors, “including Greenbax Stamps offered by Piggly Wiggly, Gold Bell Gift Stamps (in the Midwest), Triple S Stamps (offered by Grand Union Supermarkets), Gold Bond Stamps, Blue Chip Stamps, Plaid Stamps (a project of A&P Supermarkets), Top Value Stamps, King Korn Stamps, Quality Stamps, Gunn Brothers given by Safeway,” among the few.

S&H provided the collector’s books free. The books contained 24 pages with a page requiring 50 points, so each book contained 1,200 points. Shoppers then exchanged filled books for housewares and other items from the local Green Stamps store or catalog. Each item was assigned a value expressed by the number of filled stamp books required to obtain it.

So what was bought? Bathroom accessories, swank accessories for men and tobacco items were a hit in the 1970s. An array of picnic items was available in a catalog from the 1960s.

A question was asked of who remembered those little green books. Many remember their mother buying: “It was a toss-up: the boys wanted a rowboat and the girls wanted a sewing machine. In the end we compromised and got a nice color television that everyone could enjoy! My mother bought a set of “real china”. A camping tent and a little camp stove. An iron and ironing board in 1974. Cuckoo clock, a small vacuum cleaner, toaster, waffle iron. My mom collected enough with stamps to give her three kids complete sets of real silver tableware, initialed. When they first were invented, my mother got an electric percolator. Sheets for my college dorm room.”

In 1966, Pennsylvania school children collected enough stamps — 5.4 million — for a pair of gorillas: one went to the Pittsburgh Zoo in Highland Park, while the other one, a female named Samantha, went to Glenwood Park Zoo in Erie to serve as a mate for their male gorilla, Lonesome George. Donkeys and elephants were available for zoo groups too. Offered, but never purchased was an 8 passenger Cessna airplane.

Andy Warhol got into the act showcasing S&H Green Stamps. “His lifelong attraction with ready-made, reproducible imagery is expressed in creating his S&H painting. According to The Museum of Modern Art in New York: “Warhol hand stamped an image of an S&H Green Stamp trading coupon in three successive layers (light green, dark green, and red) using silkscreen ink. This labor-intensive three-step stamping process mimicked the more efficient process of screen-printing, which Warhol would employ in the months to follow.”

When the economy turned bad in the 70’s, the tough economic climate dragged the value of the stamps down. The consumers preferred lower prices rather than reward stamps, so stores stopped giving out stamps. As it took more and more stamps to purchase anything worthwhile, people stopped caring about them and cashing them in.

Sperry and Hutchinson was sold by the founders’ successors in 1981 to Baldwin United. In 1999, it was purchased from Leucadia National a holding firm by a member of the founding Sperry family. At that time, only about 100 U.S. stores were offering Green Stamps.

So, the little green book that offered that exciting dream to many a family slowly died due to the access of the internet and ever-changing economy.