SPEAKING OF STAMPS…

 

In the previous story, I talked about Tax Stamps and my memory of them. After writing about those, it came to mind about S & H Green Stamps and Top Value Stamps. Like Tax Stamps, these were a phenomenon of the 1950's and 60's.  Whenever we kids went grocery shopping with our mother, after one of the clerks rang up all of our groceries with the old cash register, they would hand out the stamps. I guess the amount of stamps were based on the total cost of all the grocery items. I always was amazed that the clerk always knew just how many sheets of stamps to give out. They even tore out just the right number of stamps if an additional sheet of stamps were over the checkout amount. I guess check out clerks had to be whizzes at math. Since math was never my best subject, I gave up any early hope of being a career check out clerk when I grew up. I would be stalling and stammering trying to figure out just how many sheets of stamps to give out and holding up the checkout line. And I don't even want to contemplate the problem if I had to figure out how many stamps to give out of a partial sheet! Horror of horrors!!! The amount of stamps was very likely based on 1% of the total purchase total or some round number. Since the clerk knew what value each sheet of stamps was worth, it made it easy for them to quickly count them out. The only thing you would have to know is how to figure what amount is 1% of each total then give out the correct number and value of stamps. Hmmm, maybe I should have been a professional career check out clerk, since I now realize how easy it was to give them out. Well, on second thought, the 1% amount would have stumped me since I'm especially weak on figuring percentages. I imagine if one aspired to be a checkout clerk that they must go to college and  take courses on how to figure percentages related to sheets of S & H Green Stamps. Sadly, since I majored in another subject, I can never hope to become a checkout clerk in a Convenience Store. I guess Middle Eastern people are all very proficient in math, especially in percentage solving. But on the other hand, they don't give out these kinds of stamps anymore so there's hope for me yet! Well, maybe not since there's still math involved in handling money. I wonder if Wal-Mart greeters have to handle money? Maybe the only math they need to know is counting shop lifters. Now THAT I could do. I wonder what Sam Walton's phone number is? Oh, wait, he's dead (and so am I if I don't get back to the subject!)

 

When we got home, our mother would have we kids stick the right amount of stamp sheets in a stamp book. We had to tear off the right size sheet by counting the rows and columns of the sheet of stamps. It was really a bummer when we had a partial sheet left over to stick on a page of the stamp book. The next time we had to figure out how to tear the sheet to fill in the rest of the page. After we stuck all the stamps in the book, our tongues were dry and sticky. We always tried to use this as a reason for our mother to give us a bottle of pop. This worked sometimes, but more often than not she just told us to get a glass of water! Now you may wonder, knowing me, why didn't I just go into the refrigerator and sneak a bottle of pop when my mother wasn't in the kitchen? Well, I usually did this on many occasions, but when she realized I had purloined a pop, she would hide the rest of it. Sometimes I would find the hiding place and keep removing bottles. She would always find the shortage since she kept a careful count of them. After yelling at me with various horrible threats, she would then find another hiding place. In time I would discover that one too and the cycle would start all over again endlessly. I'm glad the punishment wasn't too severe at the time. If she had known, she could have really punished me and cured my pop purloining forever by demanding to know what percentage of the pop I had taken and drank! WHEW! Was I ever fortunate she never thought of that!

 

After we had several books of stamps filled, we looked in the stamp catalog to see what items we could get after redeeming the books. They had TVs and things on the cover, which excited us kids to think that we could redeem all the books of stamps we so pain stakenly filled by getting a free new TV! Well, we looked at the amount of filled stamp books it would take for a free TV and found that was somewhere  around 4,000 books or so! With our 2 dozen or so filled books, we'd be lucky to merely get a tuning knob or something! Our mother usually got towels or small bowls and things like that. Nothing fun or enjoyable for us kids who worked so hard at licking all those stamps and filling the books! You'd have at least thought that they would have redeemed all the books to get us a free operation to free our tongues that were stuck to the roof of our mouth from all that licking for months and months! The filled books pages were all wrinkled and lumpy as a result of our licking the stamp sheets and sticking the wet sticky side on both sides of each page.

 

I sure wished they still gave out these stamps these days. With the high price of things though, it probably would now take 15,000 books filled for a free TV! On second thought, with inflation it would probably be 35,000 now. I can just imagine what a stamp redeeming value catalog would look like today.

to see what one would probably look like these days, FOLLOW THE LINK BELOW at the bottom of the page!