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To the younger generation, the idea of a grocery store giving you tiny paper stamps that you had to physically lick and paste into small paper booklets sounds like a bizarre, made-up piece of history. Yet, for decades, this exact ritual was an absolute staple of American consumer culture.
As seen in the iconic image_5ed21e.jpg, S&H Green Stamps were the original loyalty rewards program, turning ordinary weekly shopping trips into a high-stakes collecting game for families across the country.
The Original Cash-Back System
Founded all the way back in 1896 by Thomas Sperry and Shelly Hutchinson, the Sperry & Hutchinson (S&H) company created a system that boomed spectacularly in the 1960s and 1970s.
Whenever you made a purchase at a participating supermarket, department store, or gas station, the cashier would hand you a strip of tiny green stamps along with your receipt. The number of stamps you received depended entirely on how much money you spent.
From there, the responsibility fell to the family. Millions of Americans remember sitting at the kitchen table, painstakingly licking the backs of the stamps (or using a damp sponge if they were saving their tongues), and carefully filling up the designated S&H booklets. As the text in image_5ed21e.jpg notes, it took exactly 1,200 stamps to fill a single booklet.
The Magic of the Ideabook
The real magic happened when you accumulated enough full books. S&H published an annual catalog called the Ideabook, which was filled with hundreds of pages of items you could claim.