MANY of us of mature age will remember Green Shield Stamps, which were all the rage for many years in the 1960s/early 1970s. But do you know how they originated, and what followed them after their demise.
The origin of Green Shield
Back in the 1950s, a British printer named Richard Tompkins was on holiday in Chicago, where he first encountered S & H Green Stamps.
These were trading stamps, which customers received at the checkout counters of supermarkets, department stores, and gas (petrol) stations among other retailers, which could then be redeemed for products from a catalogue.
This was effectively a loyalty scheme, a clever way to encourage shopping; every time you made a purchase in participating retailers, you earned stamps.
The back of the stamps had to be licked (as old postage stamps had to be) to stick them in special books.
In the States, these and other trading stamps had been available for over 50 years, but the scheme had not caught on in Britain.
Richard Tompkins was intrigued by the idea and could see that with the burgeoning development of department stores and supermarkets in England this trading stamp system could well be popular.
So, on his return home he set about developing a similar system and in May 1958 he registered the Green Shield Stamp Trading Company, with the first ‘gift’ shop (known as Redemption Shops) in Holloway, London.
The Green Shield books for sticking the stamps in required 40 stamps to fill a page and there were 32 pages in each book.
The company was so successful that it required a tall, purpose-built building to be constructed in Station Road, Edgware, known as the Green Shield Tower.
By 1969 the company was employing 2,000 staff in 60 ‘gift shops’ around the country.
The six million copies of the catalogue produced that year depicted nearly 1,400 ‘gifts of the highest quality, from leading manufacturers such as Hoover, Ronson, General Electric, Kenwood, Morphy Richards, Pyrex and Prestige’.
The company comes to Wycombe
The first contact between Green Shield and High Wycombe came about when the company awarded a contract to print the Green Shield Stamps to local printers Harrisons.
In 1969 the company established an operation in Wycombe when a 2.5 million cubic feet warehouse was opened on the Cressex Industrial Estate, in which over £1 million worth of ‘gifts’ were stored ready for distribution to ‘gift’ shops.
The following year, 1970, a ‘gift’ shop was opened in July at the north-western end of White Hart Street in what is now a Sports Direct store.
This was the fifteenth such store opened in the previous 12 months, making a total of 75 ‘gift’ shops, which ‘were always busy, but never taking a penny, the only currency being Green Shield Stamps’.
How effective were Green Shield Stamps?
Although the value of each stamp was minimal, there was something rather enticing about collecting them, sticking them into their book and watching the collection grow.
So the typical shopper tended to go to retailers who were in the scheme, rather than those who were not.
But was it worthwhile for participating shops?
It was widely believed that the cost of the scheme had to come from increased prices.
However, Tesco was one of the first of the major supermarket chains to sign up to Green Shield, and according to their spokesman in a radio broadcast, the scheme encouraged such an increase in customers that the increased profits more than covered the cost of the scheme.
The success of the Green Shield scheme was relatively short-lived as supermarkets like Tesco developed their own loyalty scheme.
Tompkins develops the Argos brand
Like a true entrepreneur Richard Tompkins could see that the Green Shield brand would have a limited life.
The essence of the business was two-fold, the estate of ‘gift’-shops and the catalogue, how could these be repurposed?
The answer was to allow customers in the shops to pay by cash, as well by redeeming stamps.
On November 13, 1972, he registered a new company, giving it the name Argos.
In the Greek language Argos means ‘shining white, brilliant’, and is also a city in the Peloponnese, Greece.
Was Richard Tompkins on holiday there at that time?
In 1973 he began rebranding the Green Shield shops as Argos, and opened the first purpose-built Argos shop in Canterbury towards the end of that year.
After several changes of ownership Argos was acquired by Sainsbury’s in 2016.
In Wycombe the Argos operation is now within the Sainsbury store in Oxford Road.
Acknowledgement
A version of this article first appeared as a Facebook post by Mark Page, to whom I am grateful for inspiring me to prepare this account.
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