I have service for 24 people. It all came from a grocery store about 30 years ago. I have dinner plates, dessert plates, dessert bowls, soup bowls and cups and saucers. It is Homer Laughlin stoneware. A different piece was featured each week at 59cents each.

I don't have any, but I remember my girlfriend's mother collecting a set. It was an ornate floral pattern.

Another thing I remember--from a later time--is Plaid Stamps and S&H Green Stamps. Heavens . . . I pasted in a lot of those stamps! Got some rather nice stuff with them too.

I think mine had a piece of wheat. Well, it was 50+ years ago in my other life.

When I was in high school our bank ran a promotion - deposit $25.00 into a savings account and you could purchase a 5 piece place setting for $2.95. You could also purchase additional place settings and service pieces (platters, serving bowls, gravy boat etc.). But the $2.95 was limited to one place setting per savings account - so I gave $25.00 to my brothers, parents and neighbors and ended up with service for 14.

My Mother packed it away in the attic while I went to college, married and moved several times. When we purchased our first home in 1978 we finally had room and Mom delivered it - it was our 'good' china since we had Corelle for everyday.

Well I'm still using that china although it's now our everyday dishes. They're very simple, plain white with a silver rim.

I remember the wheat dishes. My mother had some. The stoneware I have is used for holidays and special occasions. My everyday is Corelle.
I remember the stamps too.

I too, purchased a set years ago, called "Maybelle". Gave most of it to a neighbor DD, but did keep a covered dish and sugar bowl and creamer. Really like the tan/brown trim pattern with a small flower design.

You were enterprising, Maire Cate! And it really paid off.

I know my Mum bought 2 sets from our local Sentry grocery store in WI. One was off white with a swirl design and the other was melmac with violets! I loved that set and found some on EBay and bought it and shared it with her.

She loved a bargain and also loved using her green stamps to get things.

Here is a link that might be useful: One set looked like this

never bought the dish set, but sure did get a set of cookbooks that I still use...

Socks, that is a very pretty plate.

Our grocery stores here do pots and pans. About 35 years ago, the gas station gave a piece of stainless steel tableware with each fill up and it went on long enough to collect a set. I still use those for between meals so that the good stuff is clean and ready to set the table. When the boys were teens and preteens, I often found that I had to wash dishes again after school because they used so many items for all their snacks. Therefore, I set a rule that the gas station table ware was for all snacks.

When I moved from home after my parents' death, I kept the old S&H Green Stamp books that my mom had not used. I ended up buying my modern stainless set of Revere pots with them.

My mom had the wheat dishes too. This would have been 50 years ago. Did they come in boxes of laundry detergent? Or maybe I'm thinking of the dish towels - white with red and blue stripes down the side. They were folded up in a teeny tiny box inside the detergent.

Mom had the wheat dish set, the aluminum glasses that came with cottage cheese in them and she got two sets of white with silver trim dishes she gave to my girls for their hope chests. She also collected dishes from detergent boxes. Have not seen anything like these promotions until recently, but Albertsons is selling cookware with a stamp promotion now. I think we even got dishes or glasses, can't remember at the Saturday matinee at the movies.

I remember the end displays of dishware at grocery stores, usually at the front opposite the check-stands, and the special announcements for what piece was coming "next week". My family never bought any.

I also remember when I was a teenage driver in Southern California that Shell gas stations used to give away gray colored drinking glasses. I want to say it was something like one glass for every 5 gallons of gas purchased, but I'm not sure. We used to joke that it was easier to throw them away as wash them because we'd accumulate so many. Anyone remember those?

I remember those melamine ("melmac"?) dishes with the bunches of violets:
I loved those things!

My Aunt Bea had that set, & I always loved having a snack on one of her truly sophisticated yet purple dishes!

Melamine was the 'in' thing at the time;
I can't remember my mother's pattern, but it seems like it had an aqua & milky brown pattern;
the cups were milky brown.

When I worked at the grocery store, we had a china promotion:
for every maybe $20 you spent, you were entitled to buy one "item of the week" for something like 59 cents.

The pattern was "Maria", white plates with pastel pink flowers on the edge & a silver rim.

Week One was plates (guaranteed to get you hooked right away).
Week Two was salad plates, then dessert bowls, then cups.

love looking at everyone's dishes & hearing the stories!

The wheat dishes came in boxes of Duz detergent and different pieces came in the boxes. For other pieces like platters and such you could send away for them. I had a huge set and sold them a few years back. These were in the boxes back in the 1950's I also had the blue and white Currier and Ives I bought from someone. I think those came from the A & P store. I still have a lot of it. I sold some of it.

Sue

I remember getting things at the grocery store when I was a kid. No dishes that I remember. I believe that is how we used to get our set of encyclopedias.

We had green stamps and some other kind of stamp. We got various things with those, but the biggest thing was probably the four folding chairs my dad still uses today.

I remember plastic/acrylic type glasses that came in boxes of Quaker Oats.

Here in CA (maybe other places too), we also had Blue Chip stamps which worked like the green ones. Things sure have changed over the years!

I remerber these, too. Before I was married I bought pot and pans from a selesman. Along with it I got silverware and melmac dishes.. I am still using the pots and pans today. I remember getting bowls in laundry soap. And the dishes at the grocery store that you could purchase weekly. Now they have pot and pans. Some bakeware, too. Sure miss the good old days.

When we were first maried the green stamps were popular. We took ours into the redemption store and got 2 sleeping bags, a cooler, a lantern and 2 Vorath pie pans. I still use the pie pans today. They are heavy stainless steel.
Sure do miss some of the things we used to have.

My MIL had a lot of the leaf dishes. Our daughter has them now. She was at a garage sale this past summer and there was a big box of the extra pieces. There was a lady looking at them and she waited patiently for the lady to move on. She did and our daughter picked them and she bought the entire box for $20.00. As she was paying the lady came up to her and said she was going to buy them. The seller stood up for our daughter and she left happily!! Our daughter looked online and found the pitcher in the box was worth $75.00. She had 8 pieces in the box. A great find!!

I love all the china patterns you've shared. And that lilac set! Oh my; I think I need a set myself!

In the mid-70s I was collecting a set of stoneware from a local grocery store. The line was called Hearthside Garden Festival and I chose the "Prairie Flowers" pattern.

They offered two or three similar patterns. The serving pieces were plain, with only a golden yellow border. They coordinated with each of the patterned pieces.

Did I know way back then that I'd end up in the back of beyond on the prairie?

I gave most of the set to a thrift store decades ago, but I still l have the tea and coffee server, cream and sugar set, two cups and saucers, two of the dessert/salad plates, and a serving bowl.

I see them every now and then at the thrift shop. Perhaps I should fill out my "service for two"?

This post was edited by caroline on Sun, Jan 11, 15 at 11:17

I have my grandmother's china. When I researched the pattern, I discovered that it was given as a bonus when a full set of pots and pans was purchased.

Mom had the aqua with milky brown set. I think that's where she got the stoneware set that she gave me, which we no longer have. And pots and pans! Mom worked at a grocery store. Need I say more?! And I remember her using the S&H green stamps.

Do you remember the dish towels in boxes of Breeze? I remember embroidering on them and giving them away as gifts.

Sue

We got our set of encyclopedias from the grocery store. Also a big, thick medical book. I remember the dish towels also. And I absolutely adored the green stamps. It was such a thrill to get the green stamps from my mom when we got home from the grocery store so I could hurry up and put them in the book.

How cool would it be to have them back? I would love that.

Once a few of 'my generation' women were talking about the days of saving S&H Green Stamps, A younger woman in the group developed a little frown. She said she remembered afternoons when her uncle forced her and her brothers to sit at a table for hours, pasting 'green stamps' into books. There were hundreds of books.

This all became clear -- to us and to her -- when she explained that her uncle was a mob underling. The stamps had evidently 'fallen off a truck', but were useless until they'd been put into the books, hence the child labor. When she named this uncle, I remembered a newspaper story about him. He was an career burglar. The story said he had actually listed his occupation on a federal form as "Teef" (thief).

chisue, when I worked at the grocery store in the early 1970's, our assistant manager was allowed to resign rather than being fired & prosecuted (which would have embarrassed the store).

He had been redeeming or selling books of green stamps;
as you said, they "fell off the truck".

The way they caught on was that the stamps had serial numbers, & every stamp in every book was in exact numerical order.

Didn't Safeway have Scotch Plaid Stamps?

or was it maybe the Affiliated Stores?

edited to add:

Here is the brown & aqua set; it's "Beverly">

Here is a link that might be useful: Beverly melmac plates

This post was edited by sylviatexas on Sun, Jan 11, 15 at 23:06

I remember them well!

The grown-ups made coffee in the big stainless (or aluminum?) percolator & drank it out of these tres-moderne cups!

Here is a link that might be useful: brown melmac coffee cups

I'm still using the aluminum pot MIL gave us when we got married. She said she got it from Betty Crocker.

Does anyone remember the green or red glassware that were given with gas purchases?

I can remember glasses in my mom's car from gas purchases, waiting for someone to carry them into the house....

My first set of stainless flatware was Betty Crocker, it seems like a form was available in different magazines, some box tops and $2 for a place setting. There must have been a limit per household because I do remember collecting and filling out the forms in the names of friends and having the pieces sent to them to then give to me....not married yet then, just thinking ahead.

I have prettier flatware but still have the Betty Crocker Oneida too and sometimes we use it. No scratches, pitting, scuffs after 40 yrs, - eight 5-piece place settings was a whopping $16. One fork to my latest is that much, on sale ;)

Gas stations had give always too and also things like Quaker oats had cups of juice glasses

I knew a boy who put himself through college selling sets of pots and pans and continued it as a side job for a while afterwards. I remember the day he came over to show me his new Corvette. He was *some salesman* -- but he couldn't sell me on more than the one ride!

Sylvia -- I think the reason Uncle had all the kids working on filling the books was to mix up the stamp numbers. Talk about an 'alternate lifestyle'!

I grew up in a large family, meaning the grocery store was my DM's favorite place to shop. We had a lot of those "premiums."

Being in a different age group than most of you, the stamps I remember best, but not the colors of, were for shoes, stockings, meat, sugar, gasoline.

After I was married I loved those green stamps. I still have a 3-way wall lamp that I got with them. It has been used constantly and is in my living room now.

Sue

Sue-va -- Oh, I remember the ration stamps too, and taking leftover grease to the butcher at the IGA grocery. I'm only a few months 'pre-war.'

Caroline, my mom had a few of those Prairie Flowers plates; she also gave me a set of dishes when I moved out on my own; they were harvest gold with dark brown (black) patterns (Golden Seville); she hated them so much she gave us a new set of Corelle a few years later!. She also had a set of dishes (cornflower blue is how I would describe them); if you look very closely, the dishes being used on "Everybody Loves Raymond" in Frank & Marie's house are the same ones my mom (and MIL!) had at one time.

chisue, I had forgotten about the grease. But we kept all bacon grease for fried potatoes and scrambled eggs.

So you were a few months pre-war? I was Depression and pre-pre-war, but if it weren't for the war, I would not have met my DH.

Old times, not forgotten.

Sue

Thanks for the nice trip down 'memory lane'. It reminds me of the many 'things' I still treasure from those long gone days. A card table from S&H green stamps; used as an eating table as well as sewing table in all the places in the world where we lived, and remnants of the sets of dishes, luggage (only one piece left). And, Stainless flatware from Betty Crocker. We still use the last pattern that DD and I have, and she has put in a bid for it when we are finished with it.

Old times, fondly remembered.

BTW the Betty Crocker Flatware after 30 and 40 years still looks very well. We have purchased 2 sets of new SS flatware for our Motorhome and at less than 5 or so years old, it has not fared so well.