Remember the S&H Green Stamps?
By Bill Duncan
The View From Here
With the gasoline crisis facing Americans, a group of senior citizens that I play cards with in a pinochle tournament reminisced about the days when service stations gave incentives for motorists to buy their gas. We oldsters remember S&H Green Stamps, in particular.
Of course there were other stamp incentives with different colors, offered by competing service stations. The most successful of these was Blue Stamps, which was possibly the greatest competitor of the 110 year old Sperry and Hutchinson Green Stamps, a company still in business and still offering incentives for shoppers through merchants who give S&H Green Stamps with each purchase.
As a trivia buff, I just had to know what happened to S&H Green Stamps. To my surprise, S&H are very much alive and a part of the American economy today. Sperry and Hutchinson began its unique rewards program in 1896. Retail merchants bought the stamps from Sperry and Hutchinson, two very real entrepreneurs.
I don’t know of any service station giving away green stamps for gas purchases today, but according to my research, the big green stamp give away is still in the grocery business. The stamp giveaway program however began to fade away during the 1970s recession.
The original company was sold in 1981 to a holding company. The Sperry family bought it back in 1999 and the company actually rebounded because of the internet. On-line merchants, taking a page out of the past, began giving S&H greenpoints for on-line purchases.
You can view a massive catalog of items offered by S&H greenpoints on the web site (http://www.greenpoints.com).
According to a website called Straight Dope, if you have Green Stamps from that past era, you can still trade them in for either cash or merchandise. It said the cash value of 1,200 stamps is $1.20 or you can choose merchandise from a catalog. You get a catalog by calling 1-800-435-5674.
While gasoline stations probably gave away more green stamps than any other business, green stamps, in their heyday, were used by retailers in a variety of ways — even tickets to the movies. According to the Straight Dope website 80 percent of American households collected green stamps and at the zenith of S&H history, green stamps produced an annual market of $825 million. At one time, Sperry and Hutchinson printed triple the number of stamps as the U.S. Postal Service did.
According to the company, there are 500,000 customer transactions each day through 4,000 North American checkout lanes that give S&H green stamps, or greenpoints as they are called today. The company said the largest segment using S&H green stamps is the grocery industry, but even financial institutions are giving S&H green stamp incentives.
The catalog for rewards was amazingly jam packed with every imaginable item from a strawberry shaped humming bird feeder for 2,400 green points to an Apple Mac for 1,529,000 greenpoints. Interestingly, three organizations will accept your greenpoints as a charitable donation. United Way will accept greenpoint donations for Katrina hurricane relief. Food for All will accept greenpoints as a donation to buy food for the hungry. A group called Global Releaf will plant a tree in an area scorched by wildfires for a 1,000 greenpoints donation.
Perhaps the most notable story of the use of green stamps comes from a school in Erie, Pennsylvania, where school children collected 5.4 million green stamps and bought a pair of gorillas for the Erie zoo.
My card playing friends remembered mostly getting things like small appliances by redeeming their green stamps — or whatever color of stamp — the gas stations handed out with the 39 cents a gallon purchase of their brand of gasoline.
Forget the incentives, just bring back the 39 cent a gallon price.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470, or via e-mail at elderstatesmansblog@yahoo.com)