The Real Customer Stood Behind the Counter

Shoppers thought the little squares were a gift. The stores handing them out were the paying customers, and of the more than 100,000 that once did, fewer than 100 still bothered by the late 1980s.

The drawer by the phone never closed all the way. Something was always wedged in the back of it.

At the register the clerk tore a strip off a roll, the length matching the size of the bill, and slid it across with the change.

You took the strip home to the kitchen table. There was a paper book with numbered pages and small squares to fill.

You ran a wet sponge across the gummed backs and pressed them down in rows. If you were a child you licked them instead, and the taste was faint and sweet, and you were told to stop.

A full book was worth something real. A drawer of half-filled books was worth waiting for.

Every errand added a few more. The grocery run, the fill-up, the trip to the hardware store.

The little squares were Green Stamps, and Sperry and Hutchinson had been printing them since 1896, when the company first issued them in Jackson, Michigan.

The shopper thought the stamps were a gift from the store. They were not. The store had bought them from Sperry and Hutchinson and handed them out to bring you back.

That is the part almost no one saw. The shopper was not the customer. The grocer was.

Sperry and Hutchinson sold a loyalty habit to retailers, and the little squares were only the receipt for it.

The money worked in the gap between the stamp and the prize. The store paid Sperry and Hutchinson when it bought the stamps. It paid out a toaster or a lamp only later, and only if the book was ever finished.

A book left half full in a kitchen drawer was a sale with nothing owed against it.

The stamps behaved like money the shopper could not quite spend anywhere else.

They pulled people past the store next door and turned an ordinary week of errands into a small account that only grew. Loyalty came glued to the receipt.

By the mid-1960s more than 100,000 stores handed out the stamps, from supermarkets to gas stations, and shoppers redeemed more than a billion stamps a week.

The company was printing more stamps than the United States Postal Service printed postage, and by 1964 its prize catalog had become the largest single publication in the country.

Then the cost of everything jumped. The oil shock and the long slump of the middle 1970s squeezed every grocer and every filling station.

A store paying for stamps was paying to compete without touching its shelf prices. When budgets tightened, the shopper stopped asking for stamps and started asking which store was cheaper.

So the stores did the math and cut prices directly. A low number on the sign did the same work the stamps had done, and it cost the grocer less to give.

The stamp had always been a way to buy loyalty without a discount. Once the discount itself became the pitch, the middleman had no job left.

Sperry and Hutchinson was sold to a financial holding company in 1981, and the era it had led was already closing.

Stores dropped the program one after another. By the late 1980s fewer than 100 retailers still handed the stamps out, down from more than a hundred thousand.

The redemption centers emptied and shut. The catalogs stopped arriving. The drawers by the phone slowly cleared out.

The company lived on paper for decades more, passed from owner to owner, but the thing it had invented was finished.

The paper died. The idea it carried did not.

Reward the customer with something that costs less than a price cut, let a share of it go unclaimed, and you buy a habit without buying a loss.

Airline miles, credit card points, the punch card at the coffee shop, the app that counts your tenth sandwich. Every one of them is a stamp you no longer have to lick.

The glue dried up. The points are everywhere.