Death of the Top Value Stamp

Find me on Facebook and visit my website, http://www.bfoswaldauthor.com. Thank you.

From the Toledo (Ohio) Blade, March 18, 1974: Local Kroger Stores To Stop Issuing Top Value Stamps.

Thus the final nail was driven into the coffin of the once ubiquitous Top Value Trading Stamp and Redemption Center phenomenon. Merchants doled out these little stamps with lick-and-stick backing when you made a purchase. You took them home and pasted them in a redemption book, which when filled and added to other like books were taken to a redemption center and exchanged for one of any number of items such as lamps, clocks, bed spreads, bathroom accessories, radios and TVs, and a legion of other domestic goods. These items 'cost' one or more books, or portions thereof. For instance: A Borg Meteor bathroom scale redeemed for 3 books; a Brearly Hassock Hamper of quilted washable vinyl for 4.4 books. (From a 1967 Top Value Stamp catalog.)

Stamps and books were actively 'borrowed' from family, friends and neighbors when you found that item in the catalog that you could not live without another moment, but for which you needed just ten more stamps or a part of a book or an entire book. Of course you were honor bound to pay back the stamps or books borrowed as quickly as possible. (Some nefarious relatives/friends/neighbors actually charged a few stamps extra as interest on their loan.)

 Collecting these premiums was not without difficulties. Stamps thrown into bags with sweating grocery items by careless cashiers and thus dampened glued themselves to the inside of the bag and could be removed only with great difficulty. Catalog items were 'sold out' or discontinued while you still lacked a book or part thereof to obtain it. The dog might eat a book or two, or your charming little person might take a strip of stamps and glue them to his or her pretend mail. Mothers-in-laws, not into collecting the stamps, cleaned out your stamp drawer in your absence. And worse of all, a borrower 'forgot' to pay you back, or fudged on the amount borrowed when returning stamps or books.

Few of the stamp collectors went to the trouble to determine just what a TV stamp was actually worth. You received one stamp for every 10¢ spent, ten for a dollar. Included (hidden) in the amount charged for a given item was a three percent surcharge to cover the cost of the stamps, books, catalogs and the premiums. Since it took 1200 stamps to fill a book, each book represented $120.00 in purchases. If I have done the arithmetic correctly, the hamper I cited above actually cost you $59.04 in 1967 dollars. More often than not, the same item could be purchased retail for two-thirds that or even less. TBC