Wednesday ads

Today, as on any given Wednesday, the flyer for each of the local grocery stores was stuffed between the folds of the local paper and distributed throughout the paper’s circulation area.

I began to wonder how many people actually knew, or even cared why the grocery store ads all came out on Wednesday? Is it a giant price-fixing conspiracy? Why not Sunday when the circulation is at its highest? Why not Friday, in time for “weekend Specials”;  Why Wednesday?

It seems that grocers and the Sperry and Hutchison Company need a way to perk up sales on the day that was notoriously the slowest grocery shopping day of the week…I am not sure when the tradition actually came into play, or where, but it seems that any grocer worth its salt for decades before  the 1970s gave away S & H green stamps. And Wednesday was double stamp day! That’s right; boys and girls, TWICE the normal amount of Sperry and Hutchison’s famous “S&H Green Stamps” could be yours for merely making your weekly trek to the grocer on a Wednesday! Believe me, it was a tradition in our household, as well as many, many other households. I believe Double stamp day was marketing genius, but that is for another entry.

I assume the tradition is just that now, and the fact that grocery store ads all come out on Wednesday  still boost sales somewhat, although I am sure the sales have leveled out somewhat.  S&H green stamps were out of production in the 80s and its meager distribution at that time did not raise much of a fuss. There were other saving stamps, Gold Bond, Royal, and others, but all went the way of the dinosaur, the dodo bird and the pet rock.

I miss those days of wandering what the accumulation of books of green stamps was going to purchase. Browsing the catalog seemed to be a tradition, too. Every Wednesday Evening, right after all those stamps were duly licked and affixed to the pages of the book used to collect them. ( I sure was a happy camper when I figured  out that a damp sponge was an acceptable substitute for my tongue)! The prices in the Green Stamp catalog were in numbers of books required for purchase. There was a redemption center in the nearest town of any size, and the people there would gladly order you whatever you had enough books for. The stamps were used to buy many Christmas gifts, and a catalog would get work quickly in the days following Thanksgiving.

The catalog was nowhere as extensive as A Sears or Montgomery Ward’s catalog, but still, the funding for the  wonderful model airplanes, BB guns, and footballs contained within were readily available and easily counted…there in those shoeboxes that have been accumulating for all these many months…

Double stamp day….Ain’t it crazy what a nostalgic trip thorough time an ad stuffed into the local newspaper can do? Make memories while you can, for you and those around you, and try to make them all good, you and your loved ones will appreciate it someday, I promise.