Plaid Stamps

          On a whim I decided this morning to order some make-up from Clinique -- a huge leap of faith since no one, other than my dog Toby, is going to be looking at my face until far into the foreseeable future and so probably this make-up will be all dried up by the time it is needed.  But I was feeling quixotic.  I phoned the order in rather than order online because it is always nice to hear another live human voice, especially these days.  At the end of the transaction, the customer representative on the other end of the line said,

          "Oh, before I let you go ... we have something called the Clinique Loyalty Program.  You've just earned 46 points with this purchase towards a discount when you order a product from us in the future. I can sign you up for the program, if you like."

            "How many thousands of points do I need to accumulate in order to get this discount?"

             "Oh, I don't think thousands!"

              "I ask because I remember the Plaid Stamps era of the '50s.  You had to buy around  $4,000 worth of stuff in order to get a so-called "gift", which you could pick out of their catalogue, or else a ten-dollar discount on a pair of sunglasses or something like that.  And you had to paste these stamps

               At this point, the Clinique fellow on the other end of the line was laughing heartily.  "I remember!  I remember!  My mother did the same thing!"

               "The funny thing is that for all the time my mother put into this enterprise, I can't recall a single "gift" or meaningful discount we ever received on anything!"
in a book every time you bought something.  Every corner of my family's living room featured a

mountain of half-filled Plaid Stamp books. The books multiplied like rabbits.  In fact, everywhere you looked little piles of them stared back at you.  In this we were not alone.  Even as a kid, I couldn't help but notice that the neighbors' homes had this same strange decor.  In fact, all of America was into this stamp business with a passion. I recall  once coming into the living room and saying, 'Mom, did you happen to see my keys anywhere?'  And my mother from the sofa pointed to the coffee table in front of her where there was a mountain of Plaid Stamp Books rising like the Tower of Pisa --and replied: "Oh, honey, look under these books I've just been working on,"  -- by which she meant for she had  been licking dozens and dozens of Plaid Stamps and placing each one neatly into the outlines of its allotted rectangles in one one of the books.

                But what a vision from the past!   If I could somehow magically be transported back to that living room scene today, I'd say to my mother: "Mom, save your saliva!  Let's go for a walk together instead."

 

Maxine F.

April 2020