New Licks in the Stamp Act

Every Thursday night at 8 o'clock thousands of Minneapolis and St. Paul housewives flip on their television sets to watch a video tape of the horse races at St. Petersburg's Sunshine Park. Their object is not to collect on a $2 bet but to match the numbers of the winning horses with numbers on cards that they picked up at their local National Food supermarket. The prizes are trading stamps--1,000 for a win, 500 for a place, 100 for a show.

National Food pays off nearly 700 winners a week and collects a bonus in increased grocery sales. But it will not hold the jump on its competitors for long. Already the rival Red Owl chain has started a TV bingo contest with prizes of trading stamps held out to thousands at home with Red Owl cards. In cities all over, stores are staging such games as "Hidden Treasure," "Split the Dollar," "Hit 100," with a payoff in money, appliances and stamps for those who eagerly collect them.

Colds & Chapels. Now that everybody is in on the stamp act, retailers constantly have to devise new licks. In all, 275,000 retail stores--filling stations, hardware stores, banks, dry cleaners, motels, and even National Car Rental--pass out stamps. The principal beneficiaries are the 350 trading-stamp companies, which will sell $850 million worth of stamps this year.

Merchants are not the only stamp handlers. Some 3,000 companies now use stamps as employee-incentive awards. Crush International Ltd., a soft-drink outfit, gave 1,000,000 stamps to the winner of a sales contest. Electric Storage Battery gives ten stamps for each dollar it saves as the result of an employee's suggestion; it received 589 suggestions in three months, and passes out 3,000,000 stamps a year. A patent-medicine producer called Isodine is surveying the frequency of colds among factory workers by sending 200 stamps a week to plant nurses who report on their cases. A Roman Catholic chaplain at Eastern Correctional Institution at Napanoch, N.Y., is collecting donations of all kinds of stamps to redeem for cash to build a prison chapel.

Costly Venture. The stamp habit is spreading overseas. Sperry & Hutchinson, oldest and biggest of the stamp companies (40% of the market), last week began handing out its stamps in Britain--not the usual S. & H. green stamps, but pink ones because a local stamp rival called Green Shield got there first. In violent opposition, Lord Sainsbury, boss of the big Sainsbury's grocery chain, is preparing to do bitter battle against the gum-backed invaders. In the first skirmish he cut the price of bread, but his chances of holding out are slim. In the U.S. even the mighty A. & P. buckled under after years of resisting.

Though stamps have an almost universal appeal to housewives who think that they may be getting something for nothing, Progressive Grocer Magazine figures that the stamps amount to 14% of a retailer's operating costs, second only to his expenses for labor (44%)--and he obviously has to reckon those expenses in setting his prices. The magazine also questioned 12,000 U.S. housewives, concluded that most do not really prefer one store over another because of stamps or contests, but because of polite and helpful clerks.

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