I spent hours in the early years of our marriage filling up these books with stamps I accumulated at the grocery store. My efforts certainly paid off! I was able to get dozens of free household items. My final reward was a 19inch television!! Not a bad return for licking and pasting stamps.
A little research this morning informed me that these trading stamps first came into use in the 1930's and were around until the late 1980's in some areas.
"They were distributed as part of a rewards program operated by the Sperry & Hutchinson company (S&H), founded in 1896 by Thomas Sperry and Shelley Byron Hutchinson. During the 1960s, the company promoted its rewards catalog as being the largest publication in the United States and boasted that it issued three times as many stamps as the U.S. Postal Service. Customers would receive stamps at the checkout counter of supermarkets, department stores, and gasoline stations among other retailers, which could be redeemed for products in the catalog." Wikipedia
Sadly, the coupons that print out of the cash register at the supermarket these days
just don't offer the same rewards or excitement.
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