고등학교 영어Ⅱ (YBM 박준언) 연계 글

A store can attract a shopper once with a low price, but a rival can win the next visit just as easily by cutting its own price. In 1896, an American firm, the Sperry and Hutchinson Company, began to sell retail stores another kind of incentive: small paper stamps that a store handed to its customers along with their purchases. Each of these trading stamps was about the size of a postage stamp, and customers usually received one for every ten cents they spent.

Customers pasted the stamps into small books, and a single book held more than a thousand stamps. Whoever filled a book could take it to one of the company's redemption centers and exchange it for household goods chosen from a catalog.

To be sure, nothing forced a customer to return to the same store. A half-filled book, however, could not be exchanged for anything, so a shopper who had started one had every reason to keep coming back. Moreover, whoever switched to a rival grocery usually had to begin a new collection, because competing stores tended to distribute different brands of stamps. To put it simply, each purchase brought a shopper one step closer to a reward, and the next step was waiting at the same store.

Trading stamps spread rapidly as supermarkets multiplied in the 1950s and early 1960s. At their peak in the 1960s, stamps were handed out by most large grocery chains and many gas stations, and most American households were saving them. Success, however, carried its own limit: once most rival stores offered stamps as well, the stamps no longer set any single store apart. To make things worse, food prices rose sharply late in the 1960s, and many shoppers came to prefer lower prices to stamps. During the 1970s, many grocery chains abandoned stamps, often in favor of coupons, and stamp use declined steeply.

The idea behind the stamps, however, did not disappear. The company itself has called its stamps the grandfather of programs such as frequent-flyer miles. In the late 1990s, it even launched a paperless program in which stamps were stored on a card and added automatically at the register. Today, whoever collects enough points on a store card or a shopping app can convert them into a reward. The history of trading stamps suggests that a reward built up visit by visit can turn casual buyers into loyal customers, but only as long as it sets a store apart from its rivals.