Artist: Allen Sherman

Year: 1966

Lyrical relic: S & H Green Stamps

Thrill me with your green stamps
I love your little green stamps
I took collecting green stamps
I love the way they look

Although you likely own a few rewards/points cards or apps, you probably don’t give them much thought, because frankly they’re not all that exciting. Definitely not thrilling enough to inspire a song. But before the modern loyalty card, there were stamps. Stamps that were designed to gain a shopper’s loyalty and get them buying more, more, more.

S&H Green Stamps were a crazy popular line of trading stamps. They were distributed as part of a rewards program operated by the Sperry & Hutchinson company. This company would sell their stamps to stores who would then reward their customers with the stamps. The more a customer bought, the more stamps they’d receive.

They looked like green postage stamps. And just like old-school stamps, they required saliva to stick to a special “savers book”. When you had acquired a specific amount, you could redeem them for merchandise in the S&H rewards catalogue. In 1968, one completed book could get you a pen and pencil set. With 926 books, you could score a brand new Ford Mustang! 

These stamps quite literally stuck around for a long time. They first became available in 1896 and remained popular into the 1980s. You could get them at supermarkets, department stores, and gas stations. 

The stamps had their heyday around the time that Allan recorded this song. At one point in the 60s, S&H stamp production was allegedly almost three times higher than that of the U.S. Post Office. Nearly 80 percent of American households collected Green Stamps during the 60s and 70s.

The Green Stamp program has been resuscitated and lives on today in a digital format. But forget the fun of collecting and licking stamps– you just need to tap on the app. Based on the current website, it’s a completely lackluster affair with a limited collection of lackluster redemption gifts.

Allan was a popular song parodist (a tamer, not-so-weird predecessor of Weird Al Yankovic). Green Stamps was a parody of Green Eyes, a song made famous by Helen O’Connell in 1957.

Allan’s lyrics reflect the absurdity of the Green Stamps craze. Satire aside, the song seems to foretell the rise of mass consumption and today’s consumer society in which we buy more than we actually need, often under the assumption that we can “save” if we buy in large quantities. Tell me this doesn’t sound like a trip to Costco:

I buy, though it's not urgent,
Two truckloads of detergent,
Three hundred pounds of bird seed,
Though I don't have a bird
Some extract of vanilla,
Enough to feed Godzilla

Allan also gets bonus lyrical relic points for also including a reference to a car that also went buh-bye: 

A car is what I hope for,
What I bought all that soap for
They promise me the first Studebaker
Made in 1965

Whether Allan jinxed it or not, the Studebaker Automobile Company would be defunct a year after his song was released.