Merchant Stamps Bring Back Memories

In the UK we had "Green Shield"stamps.
I remember getting them from my dad when he purchased petrol. He always looked for a garage that had Double or triple stamps!
There have been others issued but these were the most famous!
I did not keep any

See https://goscf.com/t/78643 for my notes about Art Mongan's catalog, which I just received from APRL.

Merchant trading stamps were sometimes used illegally as postage stamps. Here is a cover from my collection mailed from Houston, Texas to Des Moines, Iowa that made it without being detected by the USPS.

I am sure there are other examples; share them here if you have one in your collection.

Linus

My mother and grandmother used to save Blue Chip stamps. I remember when the local Blue Chip redemption center closed in the 1980s.

There's a scene in one of my favorite trashy movies (Russ Meyer's Faster, cat! Kill! Kill!) where the homicidal go-go dancers leave the gas station before collecting their trading stamps.

I well recall carefully pasting dozens, nay thousands, of S&H green stamps which my mother got from the Acme supermarkets in SE Pennsylvania into small books. There were in addition to the small green "singles" larger ones that must have been denominated 5 or 10. It was a long time ago. Wikipedia says the book had 24 pages, each holding 50 stamps, for a total of 1,200 stamps per.

One weekend in the mid to late 60s my mother and father went on a shopping trip to the S&H store two towns over to redeem the booklets of which there were quite a few. These were the fruits of my child labor so I was definitely interested to "go with." The immediate impetus was as I recall, an announcement that they were ceasing the rebate program. Perhaps that was just the closing of the local S&H store, or maybe Acme ended its participation.

I recall going up and down the three or four aisles with them, looking at stuff that one could get with say 30 books or whatever. Discontent grew at the lack of really good stuff to get with the stamps, and as my father tried to optimize the number of booklets with the variety of goods. I think they eventually settled on a new toaster, or maybe it was a blender. The latter would have been a relatively new luxury gadget.

I was never tasked again to stick them into booklets. I suspect the leftover one or two booklets my parents had left, which couldn't be exchanged for anything, were thrown into a garbage can outside the S&H store.