Amazingly flicking through the first one I selected from 1978-1979 at least 3 childhood gifts including my first ‘music centre’ (record player really with a 5 pin DIN connection I used for cassette) were there!
Airfix Super Flight Deck - used to hog the hall and launch the Phantom Jet back and forth for hours, probably to my mother’s annoyance but she was often back and forth between kitchen/dining room and unaffected by my hall sqautting!
Wow what a find!!! Just had a flick through 1984 and realise nearly everything I owned as a 9 year old was in there!!! It was an alien way of shopping back then, stood at the collection counter watching all the delights come up a conveyer belt wondering if yours was next…
That Fidelity record player didn’t track perfectly - even 2 replacement copies of the The Icicle Works eponymous album skipped - cured I discovered proudly after blu-tacking a 2p piece on top of the head shell
I think Argos was just one of those places that accepted them - I can remember my grandmother getting dozens of these stamps shopping at the co-op in the 70’s, not just single strips but multiple rows/colums of stamps - maybe that was the norm.
Loved the cards in tea cartons from those days too - some were very educational.
I had that Fidelity ‘stereo’ at 13 or so. Also ‘improved’ the tracking with coins… Still have a few albums I tortured with it.
Replaced, when I was 16, with a Garard SP25 and (I think) a Sinclair home-build amplifier, maybe something like a Stereo 60 (from Googling) and some home-made speakers with elliptical drivers. I bought this all built so can’t claim credit for it…
On a more serious note, two of my grandchildren go to a primary school in North London and had to dress up as “their favourite book” for World Book Day last year.
It was a lot of fun by all accounts, but one thing I especially remember being told was that one boy came to school as the Argos catalogue, that being the only “book” they had in his household and his parents hadn’t taken any interest in helping him to think any further than that.
Funny to read. I once found myself in a conversation with 2 now retired british guys where one did use the 2p coin and the other did not. The one using the 2p coin was a sales guy and the one not using the coin was a very distinguised conscientious person.
I had a Saturday job at Argos - I still remember the bi annual event of ‘Catalogue Change’, when we had to change the shop around and put display copies of things out. The overtime equated to a new album, so it wasn’t all bad.
