S&H Green Stamps

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Green Stamps were a type of loyalty program that was popular in the United States from the late 1800s through the mid-1980s. The program was created by the Sperry & Hutchinson Company (S&H) in 1896, as a way to incentivize customers to purchase products from participating merchants.

The first Green Stamps were actually blue, but they were later changed to green to make them easier to recognize. They were distributed by S&H through various channels, including direct mail, newspaper inserts, and in-store promotions. Customers would receive a certain number of stamps with each purchase, based on the dollar amount spent.

The stamps themselves were small, perforated pieces of paper with a gummed back. Customers would collect the stamps and then paste them into books, which could be redeemed for merchandise from the S&H catalog. The catalog featured a wide range of items, from household goods to jewelry and toys.

Over time, Green Stamps became more and more popular, and S&H expanded its program to include more merchants and more ways to earn stamps. In the 1960s, the company even began offering Green Stamps credit cards, which allowed customers to earn stamps on all of their purchases, not just those made at participating merchants.

At its peak in the 1960s, the Green Stamps program was a cultural phenomenon, with millions of Americans collecting and redeeming stamps. The program was so popular that it even inspired a hit song, "Green Stamps," by Eddie Cochran.

However, by the 1970s, the popularity of Green Stamps began to decline. Inflation made the stamps less valuable, and the rise of other loyalty programs, such as frequent flyer miles and credit card rewards, made Green Stamps less relevant. In 1981, S&H filed for bankruptcy, and the Green Stamps program officially came to an end.

Today, Green Stamps are remembered as a nostalgic relic of a bygone era, a time when collecting and redeeming stamps was a popular pastime for American families. While the program may be gone, its legacy lives on, as many people still remember the thrill of filling up a Green Stamps book and redeeming it for a coveted item from the catalog.

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While working on an update to my RF Cafe Espresso Engineering Workbook project to add a couple calculators about FM sidebands (available soon). The good news is that AI provided excellent VBA code to generate a set of Bessel function plots. The bad news is when I asked for a table showing at which modulation indices sidebands 0 (carrier) through 5 vanish, none of the agents got it right. Some were really bad. The AI agents typically explain their reason and method correctly, then go on to produces bad results. Even after pointing out errors, subsequent results are still wrong. I do a lot of AI work and see this often, even with subscribing to professional versions. I ultimately generated the table myself. There is going to be a lot of inaccurate information out there based on unverified AI queries, so beware.