Grocery stores seemingly have always ran promotions to add incentive for customers to shop at their stores. Customers can get a free turkey, free dinnerware and even gas at a discount.
Imagine being able to get a free badminton set? Or how about a meat grinder or just about anything you can imagine? And how's this for an idea, the points for these items would be available from a number of different stores too.
There was a time when it that was all possible; it was the era of the S&H Greenstamps.
Throughout my childhood I helped my mom keep and paste the Greenstamps and by doing so I was able to pick an item out for myself too. The two most memorable items I received are a keyboard and a tent.
The keyboard was pretty nice compared to my old one. It had a lot of sounds and you could push many keys at once. I didn't have it too long though; I lent it to a friend in highschool and never got it back.
The tent we got was pretty large and it took a long time to set up. I'll never forget the smell of vinyl and plastic it had. Since I have never been camping I guess I never used it for its intended purposes but I sure do remember playing in it a lot. My friend Jeff and I even had wrestling matches inside of it.
While websites say that S&H Greenstamps went into a decline in the 70's, it was very much alive for our family and stores we shopped until the early 90's. As time went on it took much more money to get enough stamps to get anything worthwhile and the smaller stamp amounts faded out for mostly 50 point ones. Collecting stamps just didn't end for us; like a lot of things it just faded away without any real curtain call.
It doesn't take long to look at our house to find a few old stamps; it took me only a few minutes of searching in my mother's room to find the ones for the pictures. As for the items that we got I really can't think of any that we still have but I am sure that they are many items in the cupboards and the attic.
It's funny how simple things in our lives like S&H Greenstamps are always there but over time they just fade away. Hopefully people don't forget such simple things and remember the good old days with a smile.