Photo note: crop out the cover and any printed name on the stamps. The brand name is the answer.
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It's a thin paper booklet, small enough for a purse. Inside are 24 pages, and every page is a grid of small empty squares.
In a lot of homes, it lived in a kitchen drawer with a stack of loose little paper squares, a damp sponge in a saucer, and a lot of patience.
Some kids got a nickel to help fill it. Some just got the job.
Three Clues
- You got the things that went in it every time you bought groceries or filled up the car.
- One full book was worth 1,200 points.
- At its peak, the company behind it printed more of its little squares than the U.S. Postal Service printed stamps.
What People Usually Guess
A stamp collecting album. Very close. But these stamps weren't for mailing anything.
A ration book from World War II. Reasonable, and it looks similar. Wrong decade, though, and the opposite idea: this one gave you things.
A school attendance or savings book. Kids did have those. This one belonged to the grown-ups.
The Answer: It's an S&H Green Stamps Saver Book
This was the book for S&H Green Stamps, the trading stamps that stores handed out with your change. Fill enough books and you traded them in for merchandise.
How It Worked
- **Shop.** Supermarkets, gas stations, and department stores that signed up gave you stamps based on how much you spent.
- **Paste.** The stamps came in 1, 10, and 50-point sizes with gum on the back. You moistened them and stuck them in the book. Each page took 50 points, so a full 24-page book held 1,200 points.
- **Dream.** You browsed the S&H catalog, the Ideabook, and picked out what you wanted: dish towels, a lamp, a set of dishes, a fishing pole, a bicycle.
- **Redeem.** You carried your filled books to an S&H redemption center and walked out with it.
The stores paid S&H for the stamps. A 1963 magazine article estimated the average supermarket paid $2.45 for enough stamps to fill one book. In return, shoppers kept coming back.
Who Used It, and When
Thomas Sperry and Shelley Byron Hutchinson founded the Sperry & Hutchinson Company in 1896, and the first green stamps went out at stores in Jackson, Michigan. They weren't the first trading stamps (a Milwaukee department store, Schuster's, gave out stamps in 1891), but they became the biggest.
The golden age came after World War II, when supermarkets adopted trading stamps on a huge scale. By the 1960s, according to Smithsonian magazine, there were about 800 S&H redemption centers and more than 100,000 participating businesses. In 1964, S&H distributed a reported 32 million catalogs. Andy Warhol even made a silkscreen of the stamps in 1962, now at the Museum of Modern Art.
Why You Don't See Them Anymore
When the economy stalled in the mid-1970s, people bought less and stores cut back on extras like trading stamps. Many supermarkets switched to simply advertising lower prices. By the late 1980s, only a small number of retailers were still giving out Green Stamps.
The idea never really died, though. Every store loyalty card and points app in your wallet is a grandchild of the saver book.
Still Got One?
Half-filled books turn up in estate sales and old kitchen drawers all the time, often with loose stamps tucked inside. They're mostly worth the memory today, but the catalogs and full books are popular with collectors.
What did your family save up for with trading stamps?
Sources
- "Customer Loyalty Was Once Measured in Green Stamps," *Smithsonian* magazine, April 2026
- "Made in Jersey: S&H Green Stamps," NJ.com, Nov. 2013
- Newell A. Clapp, "Trading Stamps," *Ohio State Law Journal* (Ohio State University Knowledge Bank)
- "S&H Green Stamps," Wikipedia (book format and point values)
Related Reading
- [another remember-when slug]
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