Who remembers S&H Green Stamps and Top Value Stamps?
For those too young to recall, these stamps and others were a way for groceries, gas stations and other retailers to build customer loyalty by issuing stamps that consumers used to fill collection books. When you filled enough books you could shop at a local stamp store or through a catalog to ‘buy’ things you wanted such as toasters, hair dryers, and the like.
Gary Borders of Red River Radio wrote in 2015: “The (S&H) catalog was called the ‘Ideabook.’ It featured everything from lamps to bicycles, furniture to fishing poles. An image of a catalog found online shows items ‘for the man of the house,’ including a Stanley tool kit for 19 books, a leather attaché case for 16 books and a Norelco electric razor for seven books.”
An online search suggested that you received 10 stamps for every dollar spent, but I don’t really recall what the redemption rate truly was. I just remember my mother making sure she collected her stamps so we could glue them into the collection books.
Top Value stamps worked the same way.
When I was very young growing up in East Buncombe County in North Carolina, the only full-service grocery chain east of the Beaucatcher Tunnel in Asheville was miles away in Black Mountain. As mom had to travel downtown to pay the water bill or for us to go to the public library every week, she shopped at a Winn-Dixie located near the Thomas Wolfe Memorial in downtown Asheville.
That store and other Winn-Dixies issued Green Stamps.
When the Tunnel Road Shopping Center was developed east of the tunnel, that Winn-Dixie location up and moved out of the downtown area to relocate there.
I distinctly recall being five or so and feeling sadness when we pulled into the old store location to see trash blowing across the parking lot and the doors locked. However, mom knew where it had moved and within minutes we were shopping in the spanking-new store.
(Today that location is an apparently thriving establishment you visit to sell your plasma.)
Top Value Stamps were issued in the region by the up-and-coming Ingles Markets, though I don’t recall if other earlier stores had also carried them.
The first Ingles was located on Hendersonville Highway near Biltmore Forest, and I recall founder Bob Ingle bagging our groceries there one weekday afternoon.
So, we were a two-stamp family, collecting both S&H Green Stamps and Top Value Stamps, which were yellow.
The stamps were adhesive on the back, moistened to stick onto the pages. I believe every page required 50 stamps, which you could fill with single ’50’ stamps, five ’10’ stamps, or five rows of single-value stamps.
You might start off licking the stamps, but the discerning collector realized it went quicker if you wet a sponge in a small bowl to use to moisten the back of the stamps. You could get bold and drag a whole strip of single stamps across them to apply a row at a time, but sometimes they would fold over and stick together.
As a kid I recall the excitement when we had enough stamp books completed so we could drive to the stamp store to shop.
The S&H Green Stamp redemption store was located on Merrimon Avenue in Asheville, while the Top Value redemption store was out west of Asheville on Patton Avenue.
I’ve read online where a band director for a Midwest high school once ran a Green Stamp collection drive to collect enough completed stamp books to buy the band a new bus, and succeeded. That must have involved crates and crates of full stamp books.
It seems that the stamp catalog was at times as popular as the Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog in many homes, with parents and children both dreaming of what they might get if they collected enough stamps.
I truly don’t recall a single thing we bought at the redemption stores with loyalty stamps, though I do know it was always fun to wander the aisles looking at what was possible.
—Jonathan Austin