Herberger’s (known locally as Herbie’s) was a chain of department stores arrayed across the northern tier of the Midwest. It was the last Saks Inc. division to employ the AdDept system to manage its advertising. Prior to 1997 it was apparently an employee-owned company and, at least according to an article posted here, a wonderful place to work. The writer speculated that Herberger’s went downhill rapidly after it was acquired by the company then known as Proffitt’s Inc.

One of the moves that occurred shortly after the acquisition was the direction by Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG) to install TSI’s AdDept system in the advertising department on an upper floor (there were only three floors) of the flagship store in St. Cloud, MN.

I visited St. Cloud a total of three times in 1998 and 1999. I found only a few notes and two photographs to help me remember the experience. Furthermore, I cannot recall the names of most of the people with whom I worked, and I was unable to find any references on the Internet. So, this account will mostly depend upon my increasingly unreliable memory.

The purposes of my first trip to St. Cloud were to install the AdDept system on the AS/400 that had been purchased from and installed by IBM and to train the people who would be responsible for setting up the tables and entering the ads. St. Cloud is north of the Twin Cities, just far enough away to be considered an independent city. On that first occasion I flew Northwest Airlines from Bradley to the very nice Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. I then took a long hike to my connecting flight, At the time¹ a regional company flying with a Northwest flight number made the trip back and forth several times a day. I described it in one of my emails to Denise Bessette:

We boarded for St. Cloud at 8:20. We rode on a seatless bus to the plane. Then we sat on the plane for a while. Then we taxied for a while. We left at 9:05. We arrived at St. Cloud at 9:22. 45 minutes on the ground; 17 in the air.

On the subsequent trips I just rented a car at the airport in Minneapolis and drove to St. Cloud.

On all of my visits I stayed at a hotel² that was only a couple of blocks from Herbie’s. I walked there and used the employees’ entrance from the parking lot behind the store.

I think that Josh Hill from PMG was present for all of my visits. PMG owned the system and insisted that there would be no custom programming. This made it extremely difficult for the president of a company with “Tailored” in its name. It came at a time when our programming staff was up to its armpits in alligators; that was good. However, for the first time in my life I knew that I sometimes could not provide what the client wanted or, sometimes, even what they needed.

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The people: I have pictures of three Herbie’s employees: Al DeCamillis³, the Business Office Manager, Christie Vierzba³, the Direct Mail Manager, and Anne Hof. I remember little or nothing about Christie, Ann, and the other workers in the department.

I think that Al was hired between my first and second trip. He was eager to use AdDept for all of the accounting, but he could not use it for his closing. The method he used was “closing to plan,” which meant that the expenses and income that he reported to corporate accounting always matched the planned amount to the penny. The offsetting entry was to a slush account. Evidently this was what he had always done. It meant that the monthly figures in every advertising account were, for purposes of analysis, worthless. No one could ever determine from the general ledger where too much or too little was spent.

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My life in St. Cloud: My first visit to Herbie’s was an eye-opener. By that time I had visited the headquarters of twenty or more retailers. Each was either a free-standing structure or the upper floors of a huge store. Herbie’s was indeed in an upper story of a store, but although the building occupied the entire 600 block on St. Germain Street, it was only two or three stories high. It would never have been considered as a setting for a movie about a department store. It was just a store with departments. It even had a good-sized parking lot. The town itself had a much more Midwestern feel than any that I had been in.

I have remarkably few memories of my time in St. Cloud. I cannot remember any restaurants. My only recollection of the hotel was that there was definitely an iron and an ironing board in my room.

Not much of great note or interest actually happened either in the store or in the town while I was there. By far the most memorable event for me was the stress that I underwent while worrying about what was happening back in Enfield. That tale has been related here.

The location for one very unusual event involving Herbie’s occurred during one of my visits to Birmingham. It has been described here.

Epilogue: The installation at Herberger’s was not a happy one for anyone. In 2000 Saks Inc. decided to transfer the administration of the stores to Carson’s in Milwaukee. The jobs for 260 administrative employees in St. Cloud were eliminated. The stores retained the Herberger’s name but they also replaced the flower with a circle of red hexagons that Carson’s displayed on all of its stores. Eventually Carson’s was renamed the Northern Division. It was then sold to the Bon Ton in 2005. By 2017 all of the Herberger’s stores were closed. In 2023 there were still rumors that the brand might be resuscitated, but I found no evidence that any Herberger’s stores had been reopened.

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1. In 2023 the only flights to and from the St. Cloud Regional Airport connected the town with Mesa AZ, Punta Garda FL, and Laughlin NV.

2. It was not part of a chain then. I think that it might be a Marriott Courtyard in 2023.