trading stamp
- noun
- /ˈtreɪdɪŋ stæmp/
- Archaic
- The supermarket offered trading stamps to customers, allowing them to collect points for every dollar spent.
Examples
-
Besides just getting gas for less than 35 a gallon, they gave trading stamps in many places.
Blog text (17) -
And some of the gals even give trading stamps to keep the old lady from waking up the kids when you come home.
-
When she bought groceries, she received trading stamps as a reward, which she could later exchange for kitchenware.
-
He collected trading stamps for years, finally redeeming them for a valuable set of tools from the catalogue.
How Valuable
Surface Forms
Morphology
trading + stamp
The meaning is directly built from 'trading' (relating to commerce or purchases) + 'stamp' (a small printed token); a learner who knows those constituents will naturally infer it is a stamp given in the context of trading or retail as a reward. This is a straightforward compositional marketing construction common across languages, so the overall meaning is immediately derivable from the parts.
Etymology
Trading stamp comes from when shops gave small printed stamps with each purchase; people stuck them into booklets and later 'traded' the full book for goods from a catalog. That's why trading stamp means a little token a shop gave you to collect and exchange for items.