S&H Green Stamps

About S&H Green Stamps

Remember licking and pasting stamps into booklets to redeem for a toaster or a tent? Test your memory of the trading-stamp craze that ruled American shopping. S&H Green Stamps packs 15 multiple-choice questions with a mix of 6 easy, 6 medium, 3 hard questions into a relaxed session of roughly 7 minutes — no sign-up, no timer pressure. An explanation appears after every answer, and finishing once a day keeps your streak alive.

A few sample questions

1. 1. What did the "S&H" stand for in S&H Green Stamps?

   Answer: Sperry and Hutchinson

   S&H stood for Sperry and Hutchinson, the company founded in 1896 by Thomas Sperry and Shelley Byron Hutchinson. They launched the Green Stamps program to reward loyal shoppers.

2. 2. How many S&H Green Stamps fit into one full trading-stamp booklet?

   Answer: 1,200 stamps

   A standard S&H Green Stamps booklet held 1,200 points across 24 pages, with each page holding 50 points' worth of stamps. Filling up a booklet was a satisfying milestone for the whole family.

3. 3. At the peak of the S&H Green Stamps craze in the 1960s, the company printed more Green Stamps than what other widely printed item?

   Answer: U.S. postage stamps

   At their peak in the 1960s, S&H printed roughly three times as many Green Stamps as the U.S. Postal Service printed postage stamps. They were truly everywhere in American life.

4. 4. What was the big book that showed shoppers everything they could redeem their Green Stamps for?

   Answer: The Ideabook

   S&H published the famous "Ideabook" catalog, which shoppers looked forward to browsing each year. It was filled with appliances, toys, sporting goods, and household items.

5. 5. Where did families go to exchange their filled stamp booklets for merchandise?

   Answer: A Redemption Center

   S&H operated thousands of Redemption Centers across the country where customers could browse actual merchandise and exchange their booklets on the spot. At their height, there were roughly 800 such centers in the United States.

Things you'll learn along the way

• ✓Gold Bond Stamps were a popular rival loyalty program, especially strong in the Midwest, and one of the most direct national competitors to S&H. The other three names here were never real trading-stamp brands.
• ✓Top Value Stamps were closely associated with Kroger supermarkets and similar grocery chains. Like Green Stamps, shoppers received them based on how much they spent per visit.
• ✓Although S&H stamps were invented in 1896, they exploded in popularity during the postwar boom of the 1950s as supermarkets and gas stations adopted them to attract customers, before reaching their absolute peak in the 1960s.