You know, I kind of vaguely thought that when I posted, but thought it must have been one of those imagined things. Should have been arsed to do my research. 
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My mom collected both S&H Green Stamps and Top Value Stamps. It depended on which grocery store she shopped at. I recall the cashiers having these big manually-operated machines that had either sliders or wheels (like enormous phone dials) that they would quickly manipulate according to what your total purchase that day was, and it would spit-out the appropriate number of stamps.
There was a Green Stamp store near our home, where you could walk in and redeem your books of stamps for items in the store. It always seemed to require an inordinate number of books of stamps to earn anything.
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Green Stamps launched in the 1930s, peeked in the 60s and 70s, and were gone by the 1980s.
My maternal grandma kept these by the tens of thousands. The part where you cashed them in at some point was apparently lost to her…
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Yeah, I remember my grandparents being avid collectors of them in the 70s, asking my mother for any stamps she might have. It was a chore, but my mother saved them and handed them over. I had no idea what they were or what value they had, other than my grandparents wanted them.
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oh yes, i remember them. i loved being in charge of sticking them in the book. funnilly enough, i don’t recall ever getting anything for them, though…
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I seem to remember that this promotion overlapped a bit with those in which, like Crackerjack ‘prizes’, items like hand towels and Corelle Dinnerware pieces were embedded within big boxes of laundry detergent.
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Yep, if you wanted in on the GOOD with granny, you went to the grocery store and scanned the parking lot for the discarded ones.
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What were they peeking at?
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I remember making a monthly trip to the S&H store with my grandmother. Mostly she bought drinking glasses - 14 grandkids were hard on her supply.
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My mother loved these, but I don’t remember ever getting anything noteworthy from them.
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We had Green Shield stamps in Ireland too.
We used to get them with purchases of petrol in the local BP station.
I had the misconception that Green Shield and BP were the same thing cos the logos were sort of similar. Fox’s Glacier Mints were in that mix too 'cos the guy who pumped the petrol always used to give me one along with the stamps.
That BP garage was an endless source of fascination for me as a preschooler. I can remember it in some detail along with the delicious smell of the leaded petrol that was a visible liquid in a bulb on top of the pump.
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Chemistry set? Bah! Microscope? Bah! I got an IRONING BOARD!!!
ETA: I still have that green stamp ironing board, from about 1971, out in the garage.
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Stephen King writes about them in his book On Writing. He collected them when he was a kid. I believe he said his first short story was about a guy who figured out how to counterfeit a fictionalized standin for the stamps, but the amount of effort required to lick so many stamps was daunting.
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I do - or something similar. I thought they were the “food stamps” people were always talking about.
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Folks might enjoy my WEIRD UNIVERSE post on the topic. Since I can’t include a link, go to Weird Universe and search on the post’s title: “S&H Green Stamps Motorboat Redemption”
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Typical of that neighborhood. My brother used to live in the slums on E. Jeff Davis St, a short walk to his neighbor, the Governor’s Mansion.
Those were Plaid Stamps 
No kidding!
She may have been saving for the mink coat?
Er, no, wait, that was Gold Bond Stamps…not sure if S&H offered mink coats…
Wikipedia:
Carlson was founded in 1938 by Curt Carlson. It was originally name the Gold Bond Stamp Company and started with a $55 loan Carlson received from his landlord during the Great Depression.[2][3] Carlson used “Gold Bond Stamps”, a loyalty program based on trading stamps, to provide consumer incentives for grocery stores, supermarkets, and gas stations.[4] The stamps could be redeemed for various items such as patio furniture or a mink coat.[3] During the 1950s, C.F. Carlson was the largest supplier of mink coats in the United States.[3]
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S & H was a big deal in Florida when I was a kid, and I have one memory of going to the redemption center with my mom once when we were visiting my grandparents. My grandparents totally had the pitcher and glasses set shown in the catalog at 06:30 in the video!
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I still have a mini-chopper my grandmother got me with green stamps - still works great! I remember going to the Piggly Wiggly grocery store with her where she would get them (I would also love it if I could still go to a grocery store called Piggly Wiggly).
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S&H was a big deal in Florida because Publix supermarkets - then, as now, a dominant chain in Florida - gave out Green Stamps until the late 1980s. As a kid, I licked a LOT of those stamps and stuck them in a LOT of booklets.
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