Having seen the Embassy coupons topic it reminded me of Green Shield Stamps. Who can remember these ? Given away at filling stations, corner shops and supermarkets. Collect enough of them and be able to face licking them to stick them into collectors books and you could claim valuable prizes from your local Green Shield shop or catalogue.

Back in the 70s they had a brilliant idea to make fruit machines that paid out larger winnings in stamps and living in a seaside town meant I had plenty of access to them. One day, whilst in a local arcade, chucking our pennies into the electro-mechanical forerunners of videogames we discovered that two of the fruit machines had gone haywire and were paying out jackpots every couple of turns and lesser prizes every other turn so with a pocketful of 2ps we started playing them. The lesser prizes meant we roughly doubled our money and the jackpot was 500 stamps, enough to fill a collector book.
Thus, unnoticed by the old lady in the change cubicle we must have played for best part of two hours, scooping the stamps into our school bags until finally the machines ran out of stamps. Next day after school we went back to discover that the machines had been refilled and once again we played for a good couple of hours filling our bags with stamps. Unluckily by the third day it had been discovered that the machines were up the creek and they had 'Out of Use' notices on them. However, by that time my mates and I had enough stamps to get some serious prizes.

The only downside was licking them all to stick in the collector books that we got parents to get as many as they could from the local Green Shield shop in town. The fuzzy tongue was worth it though as one wet Saturday I was taken into town to redeem my stamps and I wandered into the shop, peered over the counter and counted off my spoils. It was like a gangster film but instead bundles of dollars and evil drug dealers it was an eight year old and bundles of stamp books. Christmas came early that year as I announced to the woman behind the counter, "I'll have an Action Man tank, Mousetrap, three packets of Airfix soldiers, a Spirograph, a box of Lego, a new football, a Hurricane model kit and the biggest packet of felt pens you've got please!" .

I remember the airfix soldiers and the stamps. My father had a huge load of stamps given to him and bought lots of things for the house. After he had finished he still had enough left over for those airfix soldiers ( I thoughtfully pointed out ;) ) he said we will keep them for something more useful. The stamp books were still in the biscuit tin when I threw them out 20 years later....