S&H Green Stamps: what a full book bought, and what your old books are worth now

S&H Green Stamps can’t be redeemed anymore. The company stopped paying cash for them in 2012, and its closing notice says, “They have no value.” To collectors they’re worth a few dollars; on eBay from July to mid-October 2026, old books and lots of stamps sold for a median of $8.

They once bought real things. In 1966 an RCA color television in the S&H Ideabook cost 140 books of Green Stamps. A book held 1,200 stamps, and most stores gave one stamp for every dime you spent, so that TV took $16,800 worth of groceries and gasoline, about $174,400 in today’s money.

In 1964 a full book bought $2.86 to $3.31 worth of merchandise, according to the record of the Supreme Court case over the stamps, which comes to between 2.4 and 2.8 cents back on every dollar spent. The store had paid S&H about $2.65 for the 1,200 stamps that filled it.

The Ideabook: a toaster for 4 books

The Ideabook was the catalog and the books went to a redemption center to be traded for what was on its pages.

Some of its prices, in books, straight from the catalog pages:

Ideabook	Item	Books
1966	Proctor deluxe 2-slice toaster	4
1966	AMF 26-inch boys’ 3-speed bicycle, “Flamboyant red”	19
1966	Singer 337 portable zig-zag sewing machine	42
1966	RCA table model color TV	140
1966	Disneyland admission and attractions, per adult	2
1979	Polaroid instant camera for SX-70 film	15½
1979	GE 13-inch color TV, almond	124

The toaster and the bicycle still cost the same 4 and 19 books in the 1968 Ideabook.

How big it got

Thomas Sperry and Shelley Hutchinson started the stamps in 1896 and the first redemption center opened the next year. By 1964 the whole trading-stamp business was handing out 400 billion stamps a year through more than 200,000 stores, and S&H had about 40 percent of it. In 1969 alone the company issued 162 billion Green Stamps and ran more than 800 redemption centers.

More than 30 million Ideabooks went out every year from 1960 on.

The cash value printed on the stamps

Look closely at an old stamp, the singles say “DISCOUNT FOR CASH” and, in small type, “VALUE 1 2/3 MILLS,” a mill being a tenth of a cent; the 10-point stamps say “VALUE 10 MILLS.” Some accounts say 1,000 stamps were worth $1.67 in cash and others that a full book was worth $1.20, and both fit those printed values, depending on which stamps filled the book. Some state laws required that printed value. New York’s law still calls for a printed cash value and cash redemption from $1, and Florida’s from 25 cents.

What happened to S&H Green Stamps

By the mid-1970s S&H said its stamps were saved in 18 million households, about a quarter of the country’s homes, and it was down to about 500 redemption centers. In 1981 it agreed to merge with Baldwin-United of Cincinnati. Walter Beinecke III, of the family that had sold it, bought it back with partners in early 1999, and on March 1, 2000, it went online as S&H greenpoints.

An S&H Green Stamps sign turned into an “Out of gas” notice during the 1973 gasoline shortage, Portland, Ore. Photo by David Falconer, National Archives, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The paper stamps lost their value a step at a time. From Oct. 1, 2012, the company didn’t pay cash for them anymore.

By June 2014 it wanted at least 26 full books before it would turn stamps into points, one point per stamp. In 2016 its rules warned that loose stamps “will be discarded!” and 31,000 points bought a $25 gift certificate, about 26 books’ worth.

The company’s closing notice says, “S&H Green Stamps are no longer valid and we are no longer accepting them. They have no value.” Greenpoints ended on Oct. 4, 2020.

Old Green Stamps today

We went through 107 sales of S&H Green Stamp items on eBay between July and mid-October 2026, leaving out deals made by private offer. The best original lighted S&H store signs sold for $400 to $695, and porcelain Sinclair gas pump signs with the S&H emblem for about $130 to $180. Reproductions of the old signs sold for $30 to $76, and Ideabooks for $9 to about $39.

The 55 sales of books and stamps brought a median of $8, and even a lot of 28 partly filled 1969 books went for $30. Filled, those 28 books would have been a fifth of the 140 that the 1966 color TV called for, and they were never turned in. The ones that were went to the company’s warehouse in Metuchen, N.J., where in 1969 about 100,000 redeemed books arrived every workday from nine states and were burned in an incinerator built to eliminate smoke.