Retailing: Soul Stamps

Art Powell, all-star football end of the Oakland Raiders, was mulling over business prospects while recovering from a knee injury. What about trading stamps? Why, Powell asked himself, should a collector have to take the stamps to a redemption center and ex change them for gifts? Instead, Powell figured that a customer should be able to redeem the stamps where he gets them — for an extra loaf of bread at the grocery, or a tank of gas at the filling station. Powell thought that idea would appeal particularly to Negroes, many of whom could use the extra merchandise to satisfy basic needs. With that in mind, he started a black-owned business that is trying something relatively new, and the large white-owned stamp companies are watching with interest.

Powell is president of the two-month-old Black & Brown Trading Stamp Co., which issues stamps bearing the picture of Soul Singer James Brown, a B & B director. The company is managed by Powell and Lawyer Donald Warden; they recruited Brown because they needed a folk hero to appeal to blacks. B & B has signed up about 700 groceries, barbershops, gas stations and even auto dealerships to offer and redeem the stamps in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles. Customers get four stamps for each dollar spent, and when they have collected a book of 1,200 stamps, they are entitled to $3 in free goods or services. Merchants, who pay about 1½¢ for each four stamps, appear enthusiastic. Jesse Porter, a barber in Berkeley, reports that “kids keep coming in all the time now for haircuts just to get the stamps.” B & B officers contend that, since merchants redeem the stamps on the spot, the repeat business enables them to pay for the stamps without raising prices.

B & B is also beginning to diversify. It founded an advertising agency to design its stamp-collecting books; now the agency also represents Singer Brown, and will produce ads for his new restaurant chain. Later this month the company plans to start distributing a free newspaper for shoppers, the B & B Exchange, which will feature stories about black businessmen. Eventually, B & B expects to distribute its stamps nationally, possibly in white areas as well. Powell and his officers promise to extend to white communities a B & B policy of devoting 20% of profits earned in any area to scholarships for children of the neighborhood.