Les Belles Soeurs

Germaine’s three boxes of a million trading stamps (and one box of booklets) are the central symbol in the play. They are what bring the women together, and they are the currency that gives Germaine the social status to demand that the women work for her. Grocery and department stores handed out these trading stamps with customer purchases or sometimes included them in products. Buyers could collect the stamps and exchange them for prizes in a catalogue. They were a method of rewarding customer loyalty and ensuring that customers would return to spend more money since spending felt like earning. For housewives doing the shopping while their husbands earned money, there was little opportunity to bring money into the house themselves or to affect their household’s financial status. Therefore, trading stamps were like a currency. Women could exercise one of their few financial freedoms—to choose the store where they shopped—and accrue “income.”

In reality, the cost of the merchandise that the stamps could buy was very much integrated and paid for in price mark-ups on the items customers bought with money. What’s more, customers could only use trading stamps after pasting them into booklets, which meant hours of tedious work.