It made buying feel like saving: you bought groceries and gasoline and received a stamp from participating stores for every 10 cents you spent. Once you’d filled a booklet with 1,200 stamps, you traded it in at an S&H “redemption center,” where prices were in books of stamps, not dollars.

S&H catalogs, called Ideabooks, displayed impossibly attractive vignettes of stuff. One writer in 1980 remembered, “The collecting took months and I found myself buying things I didn’t need so I could fill out the books.”

In one 1970s Ideabook, S&H charged 4½ books for a high-pile fake-fur bathmat. It was like getting something for free, except that it wasn’t: you had spent $540 somewhere to collect the stamps for that mat. But the gamification was irresistible, and the whole country was playing. At its height in the 1960s, S&H was distributing 32 million catalogs every year, as customers redeemed more than a billion stamps weekly. Stores advertised the stamps with signs on cash registers and offered “double-stamp days.” In 1966, schoolchildren in Erie, PA collected 5.4 million stamps worth $9,000, enough to purchase two gorillas for their zoo.

The craze started to dwindle with the oil crisis in the 1970s; eventually stores—and everyone else—realized their own rewards programs could cut out the middleman. Today, we are cajoled and bamboozled by grocery and drug discount programs, airline miles, paid memberships, and store cards—at any given time, Starbucks has about $1.75 billion in prepaid cash and unredeemed Stars.

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Special thanks to Philip Cannon for suggesting S&H Stamps.

Links:

• Related from this series: Sears Catalog

  
  

• Great pictures of the Ideabook - Vintage Unscripted

  
  

• S&H Green Stamps Had Consumers Saving By the Book – David McCormick, Kovels Antique Trader, June 30, 2021

  
  

• 5.4 Million Trading Stamps Buy Two Gorillas for Zoo in Erie, Pa.; Residents and Storekeepers Help in Drive to Amass Equivalent of $9,000 – The New York Times, August 13, 1965

  
  

• Customer Loyalty Was Once Measured in Green Stamps. And the More You Shopped, the Bigger the Rewards - Heather Hughes, Smithsonian Magazine, April/May 2026

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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