In the 1960s, Foodland supermarkets gave out Blue Chip trading stamps with each order, one stamp per ten cents spent. After a shopper accumulated enough loose stamps to be an annoyance, they pasted them into a small book with space for 1200 stamps. After shoppers collected enough books to exchange for an item in the premium catalog, they brought the books to a redemption center. One of my jobs as bookkeeper was keeping the cashiers supplied with stamps.
The Blue Chip premium catalog included such useful items as a Swank key ring with nail clipper attachment, 1 book; a Health-O-Meter bathroom scale, 4 ¼ books; and at the high end my personal favorite, the Polaroid Highlander Model 80A Instant Camera, price many, many books. About this camera, I will just say that it took excellent pictures.
Each pad of stamps had 50 pages, 100 stamps per page, 5 thousand stamps in all, equivalent to just over four full books.
Our store had two tiny rest rooms for employees – the men’s was always dirty and in a state of disrepair, the ladies’ much nicer. When closing the store at night, after all the female employees had left, often the remaining men would use the ladies’ to wash up. In the morning, the man (back then it was always a man) who opened the store might use the ladies’ to straighten his tie and otherwise get ready for the day.
On Sundays we usually had a single female employee working, a cashier named Barbara.
One Monday when I arrived at work, assistant manager Eddie, second-in-command to manager Neil, was waiting for me. Waving a sealed pad of Blue stamps, he said “I have to fire Barbara, I found these in the ladies’ room.”
“Errrm, those are mine.”
“Oh.”
A few months later, I transferred to another store in the chain. Eddie told me they weren’t planning to change the combination to the safe after I left, adding “If it was Neil leaving it would be a different story.”
