Green Stamps

I am sitting here looking at my reward points with Amex. I am getting ready to buy a plane ticket with them and it reminded me of Green Stamps.
When we were married, they were the big thing. You didn't buy from a place that didn't offer them. Filling stations, grocery stores, some department stores..they all gave them. We used to have stamps flowing from every storage place and then once every six months or so we would take the weekend and paste them in a book. (Yes, all my organized friends put them in the book before they put the groceries away.)
After awhile, stores started giving their own stamps and the grocery store was my favorite, because you could turn in a book of stamps and get $2.50 off on your groceries. Sometimes I would have enough 'red' stamps to pay for my groceries for the week. That was a good thing.
Then the filling stations began giving glasses instead of stamps and you could collect sets of glasses and pitchers to match. Today, you can sell those sets for a lot of money. I never collected them.
Finally, in the late '70s I think it was, trading stamps began to fade away. I aquired lots of stuff with those stamps and it was fun to look through the book and see what you could get and how many books you had to save to buy that special thing you wanted for your house.
Now, we get points for using credit cards and buying airline tickets. But I have a devil of a time using them. It seems I am always on the wrong day, or wrong flight, or going the wrong place. I am going to work really hard to make sure I use these points for my trip. Even if I have to go to Nome, Alaska in the middle of the night to get to Florida!!