Who Took Away S & H Green Stamps? Is FourSqaure Digitally Recreating the Centennial Tradition?

In returning home from a recent trip from NYC this week, the driver taking me home from the airport was quite a character. His story was his trek with S & H Green Stamps, back in the day. I remember as a kid my folks glove box of our family car being stuffed with them, and my mom leafing through the catalogs on what the next purchase may be when the stamp books were full.

‘S&H Green Stamps’ (also called Green Shield Stamps) were a form of trading stamps popular in the United States from the 1930s until the late 1980s. They were distributed as part of a rewards program operated by the Sperry and Hutchinson company (S&H), founded during 1896 by Thomas Sperry and Shelly Hutchinson. During the 1960s, the rewards catalog printed by the company was the largest publication in the United States and the company issued three times as many stamps as the U.S. Postal Service. Customers would receive stamps at the checkout counter of supermarkets, department stores, and gasoline stations among other retailers, which could be redeemed for products in the catalog.

Where Do Things Go

So, for almost one hundred years a company and a certain culture, stamp collecting was popular, peaking in the 1960’s and dying out in the 1980’s, a pretty good and long run. So as we embrace this digital age, and Social Media is all the rage, what ideas of the past can we apply differently. Is Four Square today’s stamp collecting?

Our five year old granddaughter can very effectively navigate the web, what does that mean? We laugh about it, but what should marketers be focusing on. The floor is shifting, what are we doing, or not doing to sell to the buyers of tomorrow?

What is the value of Expanding Your Digital Foot Print?

What is the risk in ignoring the digital buzz?

What are your thoughts, or challenges or successes at making sense of the change.