Postage Stamp Chat Board & Stamp Bulletin Board Forum
 

Being in the retail industry I have an interest in the many marketing methods used - especially when they involve stamps.

Trading stamps have been around for over a century. No-one seems to know who did them first but the largest and most successful trading stamp company was Sperry & Hutchinson who started in the United States in 1896.



This thread has been set up for collectors to record their British Trading Stamps.

I have also set up threads for trading stamps from Australia and America.

Australian Trading Stamps -
http://www.stampboards.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=15983


American Trading Stamps -
http://www.stampboards.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=15984


Regards

Martin

Perhaps the title should be changed then

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Ian Billings - Norvic Philatelics GB stamps info: http://www.norphil.co.uk - also /catalog for our ecommerce site, blog.norphil.co.uk, shop.norphil.co.uk and Ian_norvic on twitter

Thanks norvic, the perils of cut and paste.

The title is correct, but the sentence should of course read

"This thread has been set up for collectors to record their British trading stamps."

Regards

Martin

Green Shield Stamps.

These would be the most famous of British trading stamps. I only have two books. The vertical format book contains stamps with a '6' denomination. Two sizes are stuck in the book. I think the smaller replaced the larger size.



The 1964 Trading Stamp Act allowed stamps to be redeemed for cash and from this date they bear a face value. The stamps in this book bear a face value of 0.075 of a penny.



A block of stamps in this book shows a nice pre-printing paper crease that has opened out leaving a large white flaw across four stamps.



Any further details on Green Shield stamps appreciated.

Regards

Martin

Sperry & Hutchinson (UK)

America's largest trading stamp company also operated in the UK. Here's a book offered on ebay some time ago but I missed it. I think it would date from the early 1960s predating the 1964 Trading Stamp Act as the stamps contained within do not have a denomination.





A block of stamps in my collection shows the words "UNITED KINGDOM" at the base of the earlier stamps (see above) replaced with the face value of 0.075d. This would date from 1964 to 1971 - when decimal currency was introduced in the UK.



Cheers

Martin

The Co-operative Wholesale Society Ltd.

These "CO-OP" dividend stamps show redemption values of .080d and .033p suggesting they date from 1971 or thereabouts.



Martin

What a big discount -- .33 of a penny!

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Ah, but that's the dual currency version - .080d and .033p.
The co-op (I think) also produced larger stamps which were 4 x the size of these but counted for a whole page in the book.

_________________
Ian Billings - Norvic Philatelics GB stamps info: http://www.norphil.co.uk - also /catalog for our ecommerce site, blog.norphil.co.uk, shop.norphil.co.uk and Ian_norvic on twitter

Glen, read that again - it's .033 of a penny.

And that's not the discount - that's the "cash value" of the stamp which under UK law was (and still in for some savings/discount schemes) a different matter. As Martin said:



A book of Green Shield stamps or S&H stamps (commonly known as "Pink Stamps" at the time) could be exchanged for a more valuable gift, maybe a few pounds in value, but the companies were obliged by law to provide a cash value for each individual stamp, so they made those "surrender values" as small as possible, i.e. the tiny fractions of a penny shown.

gavin-h is right.

Some of the American trading stamps have a cash redemption value of one thousandth of a cent!
More on those when I start scanning the hundreds of different types I have.

Regards

Martin

Some later Co-Ops



Dave

There's a pile of these in the Jim Brodie estate, which we at the RPSNZ are still grinding through the process of lotting.

Here's the first few.

Xmas savings books for Allied Stores



Victoria Wine Co


S&W, and Soverign


Regal Trading book, three different types on one page.



A bunch of miscellaneous ones


Adam.

And more


Lyons



Leisure Arts



Green Shield

And finally ...

Gateway



Co-op



Some cigarette ones



and Brooke Bond tea

Actually I was living in London in 1991 when the "new" Green Shields stamps called it a day.



The Blue Chip ones continued on.


This contemporary article makes interested reading and gives a good history of the company.




Adam.

Adam,

The caption on the top one is incorrect - it's actually "S&H" for "Sperry and Hutchinson". The error is understandable - the script "H" looks very like a "W". A later version with a clearer typeface was illustrated earlier in this thread.

By the way, these were commonly known at the time, with great imagination and for fairly obvious reasons, as "Pink Stamps".

Beautiful stamps!! Thanks for sharing!

Regards
Ernesto

Anyone have an idea of where these originated......

Found in a New Zealand Bulk purchase.......value = 0.125p which could be UK or NZ?