1991-2012 TSI: AdDept: The Whiffs

Posted on August 8, 2021 by Mike

A few notable failures. Continue reading →

We had a very good record of closing AdDept sales. Most of the whiffs fell into one of two categories:

Divisions of Federated Department Stores. Our relationships with various Federated divisions are described in detail here. They are not included in this entry.
Companies that did not advertise enough to justify a high-quality multi-user centralized database. We actually sold the AdDept system to a couple of these anyway.

TSI’s first efforts to market AdDept were concentrated around New York and New England. I figured that there were not very many retailers who could afford the system to keep track of advertising, but, then again, I did not really expect to justify the cost of the system at Macy’s in the very first module that we activated—ad measurement.

The strip mall in which the Enfield store was located was named after Caldor.

Our first attempt was a quintessential whiff. Kate Behart (much more about her here) had been in contact with someone in the advertising department at Caldor, a discount department store based in Norwalk, CT. Kate arranged for me to give a presentation to them at the IBM office in Norwalk. Of course, we had to make sure that the office had the BASIC program, and I had to install both the AdDept programs and some data that I had dummied up from Macy’s real data.

My presentation was flawless. The only problem that I encountered that day was the lack of an audience. No one from Caldor showed up. We never did find out why not. Kate called them repeatedly, but no one returned her calls. It may have had something to do with the fact that in 1989, the year that we installed the first AdDept system at Macy’s, the May Company sold Caldor to a group of investment houses.

Caldor went out of business in 1999.

I also paid a visit to another local retailer, Davidson and Leventhal, commonly known as D&L. Theirs were not exactly department stores, but they had fairly large stores that sold both men’s and women’s clothing. So, they had quite a few departments. The stores had a good reputation locally. The headquarters was in New Britain, CT.

This D&L ad was on the back cover of the issue of Northeast that featured my story (described here).

The advertising department only employed three or four employees. They wanted to know if they could use the computer for both D&L ads and ads for Weathervane, another store that they owned, as well. That seemed vaguely feasible to me, and so I said they could. In fact, we later did this for Stage Stores and for the Tandy Corporation, but both of those companies were much larger, and I had a much better understanding by then of what it entailed.

I didn’t even write up a proposal for D&L. The person with whom I spoke made it clear that what we were offering was way out of their price range.

D&L went out of business in 1994, only a few years after our meeting. Weathervane lasted until 2005.

I have only a vague recollection of doing a demonstration at IBM’s big facility in Waltham, MA, for a chain of auto parts retailers from Phoenix. The name of the chain at the time was Northern Automotive. My recollection is that I spoke with a man and a woman. If they told me how they heard about AdDept, I don’t remember it. After a very short time it was clear that AdDept was much more than the company needed. Although Northern Automotive had a lot of stores with four different logos, it only ran one ad per week. So there was really not much to keep track of. I had the distinct impression that the demo was just an excuse for the couple to take a vacation in New England on the company’s dime.

I don’t remember either of their names, but the experience list on LinkedIn for a guy named Paul Thompson (posted here) makes him a strong candidate. Northern Automotive changed its name to CSK Auto, Inc. not long after our meeting. In 2008 CSK was purchased by O’Reilly Auto Parts.

Won’t Paul be surprised to be busted thirty years later in an obscure blog?

Tom Moran (more details here) set up an appointment with employees of Genovese Drugs at its headquarters in Melville, NY. The two of us drove to Long Island to meet with them.

I probably should have talked to someone there over the phone before we left. The only impression that I remember getting from the meeting was that they were not at all serious about getting a system. We had a great deal of trouble getting them to describe what the advertising department did at the time and what they wanted to do. I was frustrated because I had considered this a relatively cheap opportunity to learn how chains of pharmacies handled their advertising. It was actually a waste of time and energy.

Tom tried to follow up, but he got nowhere. We did not submit a proposal.

J.C. Penney bought the company in 1998 and rebranded all the stores as Eckerd pharmacies.

Woodies’ flagship store in downtown Washington.

While I was working on the software installation at Hecht’s in 1991, Tom Moran coordinated our attempt to land the other big department store in the Washington, DC, area, Woodward & Lothrop, locally known as Woodies. I found a folder that contains references to correspondence with them. Tom worked with an IBM rep named Allison Volpert¹. Our contacts at Woodies were Joel Nichols, the Divisional VP, and Ella Kaszubski, the Production Manager.

As I browsed through the file, I detected a few warning signs. The advertising department was reportedly in the process of asking for capital for digital photography, which was in its (very expensive) infancy in 1991. Tom was told that they hoped to “slip in” AdDept as part of the photography project. Furthermore, the fact that we were not dealing with anyone in the financial area did not bode well.

Finally, we had no choice other than to let IBM propose the hardware. Their method of doing this always led to vastly higher hardware and system software costs than we considered necessary. I found a copy of IBM’s configuration. The bottom line was over $147,000 and another $48,600 for IBM software. This dwarfed what Hecht’s had spent. If the cost of AdDept was added in, they probably were facing a purchase price of over a quarter of a million dollars! That is an awful lot to “slip in”.

I don’t recall the details, but I remember having an elegant lunch during this period with someone from Woodies in the restaurant of the main store. It may have been Joel Nichols. It seemed like a very positive experience to me. He seemed eager to automate the department.

We lost contact with Woodies after early 1992. I seriously doubt that the advertising department even purchased the photography equipment that they had coveted. The early nineties were very bad for retailers. By 1994 the owner of Woodies and the John Wanamaker chain based in Philadelphia declared bankruptcy and then sold the stores to JC Penney and the May Company. Many of the stores were rebranded as Hecht’s or Lord and Taylor.

In some ways Fred Meyer, a chain of department stores based in Portland, OR, seemed like a perfect match for TSI. At the time they were almost unique, and we usually excelled at programming unusual ideas. Their approach to retail included what are now called “hypermarket” (department store plus groceries) stores, although they definitely had some much smaller stores as well. The one in downtown Portland was very small. I really thought that we had a good shot at getting this account, largely due to the fact that the IT department already had one or two AS/400’s. So, the hardware cost would probably be minimal.

She would be lucky to make it in nine hours; there were no direct flights.

I was asked to work with a consultant who, believe it or not, commuted from Buffalo, NY, to Portland, OR. I can’t remember her name. She knew computer systems but virtually nothing about what the advertising department did. She wanted me to tell her what AdDept could do, and she would determine whether the system would work for them. I have always hated it when a “gatekeeper” was placed between me and the users. I understand that they do not trust the users to make a good decision, but advertising is very complicated, and almost no IT consultants know much about it. I would not have minded if the consultant sat in on interviews that I conducted with people in advertising.

If I was allowed to meet with anyone from the scheduling or financial areas of the department, I do not remember it at all. I do remember spending an afternoon with the head of the company’s photography studio. AdDept had a module (that no one used) for managing shoots and another (used by Macy’s East) for managing the merchandise that is loaned to the studio for a shoot.

I remember the photo studio guy mentioning that they also did billable work for outside clients. He mentioned Eddie Bauer by name. He could not believe that I had never heard of it/him.

I probably botched this opportunity. Before agreeing to come out the second time, I should have insisted on meeting with whoever placed their newspaper ads and the person in charge of advertising finance. I did not want to step on the toes of the lady from Buffalo, but I probably should have been more aggressive.

Kate accompanied me on one of these trips. We probably flew on Saturday to save on air fare. On Sunday we drove out to Mt. Hood, where we saw the lodge and the glacier, and visited Multnomah Falls on the way back.

Freddie’s was acquired by Kroger in 1998, but the logos on the stores were maintained. There still is a headquarters in Portland, but I don’t know if ads are still created and/or placed there.

Aside from our dealings with Federated divisions² TSI had very few whiffs during the period that Doug Pease (described here) worked for us. After one of our mailings Doug received a call from Debra Edwards³, the advertising director at May Ohio, a May Company division that had its headquarters in Cleveland. Doug and I flew Continental non-stop to Cleveland and took the train into downtown. My recollection was that we were able to enter the store from the underground train terminal.

The presentation and the demo went very well. I am quite certain that we would have gotten this account were it not for the fact that in early 1993 the May Company merged the Ohio division with Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh. Management of the stores was transferred to Pittsburgh. Debra was hired as advertising director at Elder-Beerman Stores.

We stayed overnight in Cleveland and had time to visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which was right down the street from the huge May Co. building. I cannot say that I was greatly impressed with the exhibits.

A few years later Doug and I undertook a second trip to Cleveland to visit the headquarters of Sherwin Williams. Doug had talked extensively with the lady who was the advertising director there. He was very enthusiastic about the prospect of making this sale. By that time Doug had already closed a few big deals for us, and so I trusted his judgment. However, I could not understand how a company that really only sold one product could possibly need AdDept. Yes, they have thousands of stores, but how many ads do they run?

I don’t honestly remember anything about our discussion with them. Needless to say, Doug did not close this one, although he never stopped trying to revive it.

I don’t really count it as a whiff, but Doug was unable to close the deal with Liberty House in Honolulu after our epic trip to Hawaii in December of 1995. The details are recounted here.

I drove past two of the stores in Texas, but I never went inside.

Just as Marvin Elbaum had backed out of his contract with TSI for a GrandAd system in 1986 (as described here), so also one company signed an agreement for TSI’s AdDept system and, before we had installed the system, changed its mind. There was one big difference in the two situations. The second company was the Tandy Corporation, which had actually ordered installations of AdDept for all three of its retail divisions. At the last minute the company decided to close down Incredible Universe, one of the three divisions. The other two companies became TSI clients in 1997, as is described here.

It was not a big loss for TSI. IU was one of a kind. Its stores were gigantic multi-story combinations of electronics and theater. There were only seventeen stores, and only six were ever profitable. Those six were sold to Fry’s Electronics. The other eleven were sold to real estate developers at pennies on the dollar.

I did a demo for Mervyn’s California, a department store based in Hayward, CA. I think that I must have done the demo after finishing a training/consulting trip at Macy’s West in San Francisco. I cannot imagine that I would have flown out to the west coast to do a demo without spending a day or two gathering specs.

The IBM office nearest to Hayward was in Oakland. I took BART in the late afternoon from San Francisco to Oakland. There was quite a bit of excitement at the Holiday Inn at which I was staying. Someone had been murdered on the street in front of the hotel the previous night. There was one other very peculiar thing about this stay. I checked into a Holiday Inn with no difficulty, but I checked out of a different hotel (maybe a Ramada?). The hotel had been sold, and its ownership had changed while I was asleep.

The demo went fine. The guy who had contacted me—his name was Thiery or something like that—liked what he saw. However, the sale never advanced any further. This was almost always what happened whenever I got talked into doing a demo without taking at least a day to interview the potential users. At the time that I did the demo Mervyn’s was, unbeknownst to me, owned by Target. This might have explained the lack of progress. Target may have been restricting or rejecting any capital purchases at the time.

Mervyn’s was sold to some vulture capitalists in 2004. A much smaller version of the chain went out of business in 2009.

For some reason Doug and I once had a very short meeting with the president of Gottschalks, a chain of department stores based in Fresno, CA. He told Doug and me that he would get all of the other members of the Frederick Atkins Group to install AdDept. This organization (absolutely never abbreviated by its initials) somehow enabled its members to shop for foreign and domestic merchandise as a group. Nearly every department store that was not owned by the May Company or Federated belonged to it.

A few years after he made this promise he (or someone else at Gottschalks) arranged for me to speak before the members at one of their conventions in Naples, FL. I flew to Fort Meyers and rented a car from there. Naples was beautiful and reeked of new money. I gave my little spiel, but I did not have an opportunity to interact with any of the members of the audience. So, I did not get any direct feedback.

We eventually did sign up a few members of the group—notably the Bon-Ton (described here) and Elder-Beerman (described here). I don’t know whether my speech had any effect.

I think that the Frederick Atkins Group is defunct in 2021. The references to it that I could find on the Internet were all from decades past.

In (I think) 1999 Doug Pease and I made an unproductive trip to Columbus, OH, to talk with the IT director of of Value City about the possibility of installing the AdDept system for use by the advertising department. That adventure is described here.

TSI got a phone call from a chain of furniture stores in coastal Virginia, Norfolk⁴, as I recall. As part of my crazy automotive support trip, I stopped by to talk with the advertising director at this company on my journey from Home Quarters Warehouse in Virginia Beach to Hecht’s in Arlington. I spent a couple of hours with him. When I discovered that the company had only three stores, I knew that this was a mistake. I told him that our software could address his problems, but the cost and effort would not be worth it for either of us. I advised him to hire someone who was a wiz with spreadsheets.

I think that I got a free cup of coffee out of it.

I can’t tell you what happened to the company thereafter because I don’t even remember its name.

We had two reasonably hot leads in 2000. I had to handle both of them myself. The first was at Bealls department store, which has its headquarters in Bradenton, FL. This was another situation is which I had to deal with the IT department rather than the advertising department. I am pretty sure that the company already had at least one AS/400. I have a few notes from this trip, but it is not clear whether I intended to do the demo on their system or on one at a nearby IBM office.

In any case I think that there was a technical problem that prevented a successful installation of the software needed for the demo. So, I had to improvise, and I did not get to spend much time with the people who would have benefited from the system. The whole thing made me very depressed.

I had some free time, and so I went to the beach. I stopped at a Jacobson’s store to buy a tee shirt to wear at the beach. The cheapest tee shirts in the store cost $100!

The beach was lovely, and it was unbelievably empty. The weather was pretty nice. A beach in Connecticut would have been packed in this type of weather.

We did not get the account, but the tale has an interesting coda. Bealls is still in business today. For years Bealls could not expand outside of the state of Florida because a different store with exactly the same name was already using it in other states. These Bealls stores were run by Stage Stores, a long-time AdDept client that was based in Houston. Stage Stores was still using AdDept when TSI went out of business in 2014.

In 2019 Stage announced that it was changing all of its stores into Gordmans, its off-price logo (which did not exist while I was working with them). When the company declared bankruptcy Bealls purchased, among other things, the right to use the Bealls name nationwide.

I remember going to Barneys New York in late 2000 to talk with someone in advertising. I also have discovered three emails that I sent to Christine Carter, who was, I think, either in charge of the advertising department or in charge of the financial side. Barneys only had twenty-two stores, and that included some off-price outlets. I don’t know how much they actually advertised.

We never heard from them after my last email, which emphasized how easily AdDept could be adapted to differing needs even for companies the size of Barneys. By this time the very affordable AS/400 model 150 had been introduced. It would have been perfect for them.

I think that Barneys is dead or nearly so in 2021. All of the stores in the U.S have been closed, and even the “Barneys New York” brand was sold to Saks Fifth Avenue. However, the company also had a Japan division, which is evidently still operational.

I received a very unexpected phone some time in 2001 or 2002. It came from a man who had formerly worked at Saks Fifth Avenue and had taken a job as a Vice President at Sears. He knew that the advertising department at Saks had been doing things with its AdDept system that Sears’ advertising department seemed utterly incapable of. He invited me to the Sears headquarters in Hoffman Estates, IL, to investigate the possibility of installing AdDept at Sears.

At about the same time I had been in contact with the agency in a nearby town that Sears used for buying newspaper space and negotiating newspaper contracts. They wanted to talk with me about the possibility of working together. The agency’s name was three initials. I think that one was an N, but I am not sure.⁵

I arranged to spend consecutive days at the two places. It was cold on the day that I visited the agency. I learned that it recruited new clients by claiming that they could negotiate better rates for them because they also represented Sears. I suspected that this was baloney. Sears was a bid dog nationwide, but the amount of newspaper ads that they bought in any individual market was not that impressive. They were just in a lot of markets.

After the people explained the services that they offered to clients, I remarked that about 10 percent of what they did overlapped with about 10 percent of what we did. Privately I could not imagine that any of our clients who would benefit from their services.

I told them about A^xN, our Internet product. They informed me that the papers did not want to sign on to their website for insertion orders. Of course, they wouldn’t, and they had nothing to hold over the papers.

We ended the meeting with the usual agreement to stay in touch and look for synergies, but privately I considered them the enemy.

I did not see a parking structure. Maybe I entered on the wrong side of the pond.

The next day was bitterly cold, and there was a strong wind. I located the sprawling Sears complex and parked my rented car in a lot that was already nearly full. I had to walk a long way to the main building, and I have never felt as cold as I did on that walk.

I could hardly believe it when I walked into the building. The ground floor was billed with retail establishments—a drug store, a coffee shop, a barber shop, and many more. I had to take the escalator up to get to Sears. I was met there by the woman with whom I had been in contact. She was from the IT department.

OK, now I get it. Our problem was that we did not have enough architects.

She took me up to meet the “advertising team”. Six or eight people were assembled in the room, and they all had assigned roles. I remember that one was the “system architect”, and one was the “database manager”. I almost could not suppress my amusement. What did all these people do? There was no system, and there certainly was no database. At TSI I handled essentially all the roles that everyone at the table described.

They asked me some questions about the AdDept system. When I told them that it ran on the AS/400, the system architect asked me if that system was not considered obsolete. I scoffed at this notion and explained that IBM had introduced in the AS/400 64-bit RISC processors that were state-of-the-art. I also said that, as far as I knew, the AS/400 was the only system that was build on top of a relational database. That made it perfect for what AdDept did.

I wonder how many “OS/2 shops” there were in the world.

They informed me that Sears was an OS/2⁶ shop. I did not know that there was such a thing. In the real world Windows had already left OS/2 in its dust by that time. In all my time dealing with retailers I never heard anyone else even mention OS/2. It might have been a great idea, but IBM never did a good job of positioning it against Windows.

Besides, just because the corporation endorsed OS/2 should not eliminate consideration of multi-user relational databases where appropriate. The devices with OS/2 could serve as clients.

They explained to me that Sears’ advertising department had hundreds of employees, most of whom served as liaisons with the merchandise managers. Most of the ads were placed by agencies. I presume that the newspaper ads were produced in-house. No one whom I talked with seemed to know. The people on the committee did not seem to know anything about how the department did budgeting or planning.

Someone talked about Sears’ competitors. The example cited was Home Depot. I don’t know why this surprised me. I must have been taken in by the “softer side of Sears” campaign a few years earlier.

After the meeting my escort took me to a remarkable room that was dedicated to the advertising project. It was a small theater that had ten or so posters on the wall with big Roman numerals at the top: I, II, III, IV, etc. There were no statues, but otherwise I was immediately struck by the resemblance to the Stations of the Cross that can be found in almost any Catholic church in the world. I asked what the posters represented. The answer was that they were the “phases of the project”. I was stunned by the assumption that the project required “a team” and that it was or indefinite duration. No one ever allowed us more than a month or two to have at least portions of the system up and running.

At some point I was allowed to give my presentation. The man who had worked at Saks attended along with a fairly large number of people. Maybe some were from advertising. I was never allowed to speak with them individually.

I never got to read the advertising department’s Wish Book.

My talk explained that AdDept was a relational database that was specifically designed for retail advertising departments. I described a few of the things for which it had been used by other retailers. I could not do much more than that. I had not been able to talk with any of the people in the department, and the IT people were clearly clueless.

When I returned to Connecticut I wrote to both my escort and the man from Saks. I told both of them that I did not know what the next step might be. I had not been given enough access to the advertising department to make a proposal. The whole experience was surreal. If someone had asked me to return, I would only have done it if I were granted unfettered access to potential users.

No one ever contacted us. I told Doug not to bother following up.

One puzzling whiff occurred during the very short period in which Jim Lowe worked for us. The strange case of Wherehouse Music is explored here.

Perhaps the strangest telephone call from a genuine prospect that I ever received was from Albertsons, a very large retailer with is its headquarters in Boise Idaho. The person who called was (or at least claimed to be) the advertising director there.

I had heard of Albertsons, but I did not know very much about the company. All I knew was that they were a chain of grocery stores in the west. Since advertising for grocery stores is basically limited to one insert/polybag⁷ per week, they had never seemed to be great prospects for AdDept. However, I never hung up on someone who expressed interest in the system.

The problem was that this lady insisted that I fly out to Boise to meet with her and her crew the next day. I tried to get her to explain what the situation was, but she said that she had no time to talk. She needed to know if I would make the trip. It was a little tempting for a peculiar reason. Idaho was one of the few states⁸ that I had never visited. Still, this sounded awfully fishy. I passed.

The incredibly bumpy road that Albertsons has traveled is documented on its Wikipedia page, which is available here. I don’t remember when the call from the advertising director came. I therefore have no way of knowing whether she was in charge of advertising for a region, a division, all of the grocery stores, or none of those. I might well have passed up an opportunity that might have extended the life of the company. Who knows? It looked like a goose, and it honked like a goose, but maybe going to Boise would not have been a wild goose chase.

Jeff Netzer, with whom I had worked in the nineties at Neiman Marcus (recounted here), called me one day in 2010. He asked me if I remembered him. I said that I did; he was the Aggie who worked at Neiman’s.

He informed me that he was now working at Sewell Automotive, the largest Cadillac dealership in the Dallas area. He said that they were looking for help in automating their marketing. I was not sure how well AdDept would work in that environment, but I agreed to visit them. His boss promised to buy me a steak dinner.

I flew Southwest to Dallas, and for the first time my plane landed at Love Field. It was much closer to Sewell than DFW would have been.

I found a great deal out about their operation. I doubted that we could do much for the agency for a reasonable amount of money. On my computer I recently found a three-page document dated September 23, 2010, in which I had listed all of the issues that I learned about at Sewell. A woman named Tucker Pressly entered all of their expense invoices into a SQL Server database. It was inefficient, and there were no programs to help them compare with budgets.

The main objective of the marketing department was to make sure that they were taking advantage of all available co-op dollars from Cadillac and other vendors. We could not help with this unless we wrote a new module. I described my reactions to their issues in a letter to Jeff.

I never heard back from Jeff, who left Sewell in 2012. Nobody ever bought me a steak dinner.

Sewell Automotive is still thriving in 2021.

In 2011 or 2012 I received a phone call from a lady from the advertising department at Shopko, a chain of department stores based in Green Bay, WI. I don’t recall her name. She said that she worked for Jack Mullen, whom I knew very well from both Elder-Beerman and Kaufmann’s. Before Doug Pease came to TSI, he had worked for Jack at G. Fox in Hartford.

I flew out to Packer Land to meet with her. They had a very small advertising department. They basically ran circulars in local newspapers on a weekly basis. As I remember, she and one other person ran the business office.

I worked up a proposal for the most minimal AdDept system that I could come up with and sent it to her. When I had not heard from her after a few weeks I called her. She said that the company was downsizing and, in fact, her position was being eliminated.

Jack also left the company in July of 2012. His LinkedIn page is here. Shopko went out of business in 2019.

1. Allison Volpert apparently still works for IBM in 2021. Her LinkedIn page is here.

2. As I write this I can easily visualize Doug stabbing a box with a pencil after a frustrating telephone conversation with someone from a Federated division.

3. I worked fairly closely with Debra Edwards when I installed the AdDept system at Elder-Beerman stores in Dayton, OH. That installation is described here. She was the Advertising Director there. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. The “l” in Norfolk is silent, and the “ol” sounds much more like a short u.

5. I later learned that there were actually two affiliated agencies across the street from one another. I encountered the other one, SPM, in my dealings with Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc., which are detailed here. The agency was still around in 2023. Its webpage is here.

6. In fact IBM stopped updating OS/2 in 2001 and stopped supporting the operating system in 2006. I cannot imagine how Sears dealt with this. I pity their employees with nothing OS/2 experience at Sears on their résumés.

7. Polybags are the plastic bags that hold a group of flyers from diverse retailers. they are ordinarily distributed to people willy-nilly.

8. The others are Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska. I am not certain of Arkansas. I might have gone there with my grandparents when I was a youngster. The only place that I have been in Utah is the Salt Lake City airport.

1993-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Lord & Taylor

Posted on July 22, 2021 by Mike

Quasi-independent department store division of the May Co. Continue reading →

TSI enjoyed a good relationship for nearly all of the two decades in which the chain of department stores known as Lord and Taylor used AdDept to manage its advertising department. The headquarters was in one of the upper floors of the flagship stores on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

I don’t remember the details leading to the contract back in December of 1993. I am not sure that we even did a demo for them at the IBM office. L&T may well have been the first sale for TSI’s marketing director, Doug Pease (introduced here).

We had two very important things going for us. The Senior VP of Advertising at L&T was Howard Adler, who had seen what we could do at Macy’s East, the first AdDept installation (described here). Moreover, L&T was owned by the May Company, and two other May Company divisions had been using AdDept successfully for a few years.

In the April 1994 issue if the newsletter, Sound Bytes, TSI announced the fact that L&T had purchased the AdDept system and an AS/400¹ on which to run it:

Lord & Taylor, the third May Co. division to use the AdDept system, is currently in the process of finalizing the specifications for its system. Their system will reside in the company’s Manhattan headquarters. All areas of the department will be connected through a PC network.

Although L&T was definitely owned by the May Company, it did not play by the same rules enforced on the other department store divisions. L&T’s advertising department was not required to produce the same monthly reports that bedeviled the other divisions. Its merchandise was different—I actually saw elbow-length gloves for ladies for sale there. It was much more autonomous in many ways.

The flagship store was more elegant than that of any of the other May Company stores. The nearest men’s room to the advertising department was between elevators on a selling floors. It was by far the most spacious, sparkling, and elegant restroom that I encountered at any office, department store, or anywhere else.

I always took Amtrak to Penn Station when I visited L&T. I usually walked to the store on Fifth Avenue unless the weather was really foul, in which case I stood in line at the taxi stand on 34th St. to get the next available cab.

I entered L&T through the employee entrance, which I think was on 38th St., and descended stairs to the security area. Someone would come down to escort me to the advertising department, which was on one of the upper floors. When I left in the evening, I had to get a note from someone verifying that the laptop in my briefcase belonged to me and had not been purloined from L&T.

An amusing set of incidents in Penn Station that occurred on one of my last visits to L&T in 2007 has been recounted here.

Lord & Taylor used direct mail more than regional department stores. Notes that I compiled in 2000 state:

A very large number of reports were done for them. Unfortunately they are almost all too involved to be used by anyone else. They are the only client that uses AdDept to keep track of bill inserts – the little things included in the monthly statements.

They set up production schedules for direct mail. At one time they used AdDept for estimating direct mail, but they abandoned it. They have job jacket programs for both ROP and direct mail.

L&T also did more magazine advertising than the other divisions. AdDept did not seem to help much in that area.

We developed as part of the original design document an elaborate system for them of managing their magazine advertising (“The Projection Book”) and comparing it with competitors’, but they do not use it.

I think that this was the Greek feast. Norm is at the lower left. The guy sitting between two women with his tie in his shirt is Charles. Behind him is Chris.

I vaguely recall that at the very beginning the liaison between TSI and L&T was Norm Vlahos². I have only a couple of distinct memories about him. The first is that whoever chose him for that role also assigned him and another fellow to act as “security officers” for the AS/400. Norm thought that they should be issued badges or at least arm bands to designate their authority. I also remember that Norm was responsible for ordering the food for the Greek-themed feast in which most of the department participated during one of my visits.

This is Charles’s old office. From left: Jennifer, Denise, Jennifer’s reflection, Ali’s reflection, Denise’s reflection, Bob’s reflection, my reflection (flash).

The other person whom I remember from those early days was named Charles. I am pretty sure that he was the finance director of the advertising department. Charles had a very unusual office. One of the walls was a gigantic mirror. I am not sure what its function was, but it made me very uneasy when I was required to sit in there to talk with him.

Same room; different feast. Tom is in the foreground to the left. The bald spot belongs to Howard.

I later learned that Charles owned a string of karate (or something similar) studios in New Jersey. Maybe he used the mirror when he practiced his moves.

Charles ordered the food from the 2nd Ave Deli for the luncheon with a Jewish theme that the department held on one of my visits. It was the best deli food that I ever tasted.

After the initial period in which the tables and historical data were into AdDept and the users had become somewhat familiar with the system, Tom Caputo³ was assigned primary responsibility for the AdDept installation. This was a big break for TSI because we got to deal with a person who had both the authority and the expertise to make good decisions about prioritizing what the system should be used for. He made our lives much easier because we seldom needed to deal directly with the users. He was good at finding out exactly what they wanted or needed and conveying the information clearly to us. Over the years he sent us a very large number of custom programming requests—so many that he asked us to combine the billing for the $75 quote fees onto one monthly bill. We were happy to do that.

Tom worked with us at L&T until 2001. He then took a job at Saks Fifth Avenue, where we again had the pleasure of working with him.

After a while L&T provided Tom with an assistant, Chris Pease⁴, who was employed by L&T from 1996 through 2001. We often worked closely with Chris as well.

I have a lot of very vivid memories of Tom and Chris. I remember almost nothing about the innumerable small projects that we discussed. However I distinctly remember one episode. You can see from the photos that nearly all the men in the advertising department wore suits, white shirts, and ties. One morning Tom spilled coffee or something on his shirt. He dispatched Chris down to the men’s wear department to buy a substitute for him. I was pretty impressed.

Somehow, my visits to L&T became associated with big departmental lunches in the advertising department. Trust me; no one was celebrating my presence or the wonderfulness of the code and support that TSI provided. It was just that I showed up every two or three months, and that also was deemed a reasonable interval between departmental lunches.

There was always a theme for the lunch and an employee in charge of the choice of menu and restaurant. In addition to the Greek lunch ordered by Norm and the Jewish one managed by Charles, I seem to remember an Italian pranzo and a Mexican fiesta. There may have been more. I don’t remember too many specifics, but the meals were all both authentic and delicious.

I have no idea who these guys are. Tom asked them if they were hungry and then told them to dig in.

If no departmental lunch was scheduled, Tom nearly always took Chris and me to a restaurant for lunch. We usually walked to a Chinese restaurant near L&T. On one of the last occasions we ate delicious lamb chops at a chop house. This was really the life.

After Tom and Chris departed, the installation entered a holding pattern. TSI’s primary contact for several years was Esther Roman⁵. I am pretty sure that she was in charge of the financial area of the advertising department. AdDept was just one of the tools that she used in her job.

Denise Bessette, Bob Wroblewski (who helped TSI with marketing of A^xN to newspapers), and I made a trip to Manhattan in 2004 to meet with the newspaper coordinators, Jennifer Hoke⁶ and Ali Flack⁷. The purpose of the trip was to show them how TSI’s new Internet product, A^xN (described here), could work for them. The ladies were rather enthusiastic about it, and L&T used the product for quite a few years.

In 2005 Federated Department Stores merged with and took over management of the May Company stores. L&T did not fit into Federated’s plans. Seven stores were sold or rebranded as Macy’s. The rest of the stores, including the flagship store and the headquarters in New York City, were sold to NRDC Equity Partners in 2006. In the following years NRDC also negotiated the purchase of Fortunoff, which was a chain of jewelry stores that was somehow linked with a group of stores that sold outdoor furniture. The intent was to use the L&T staff to manage these stores.

NRDC wanted to keep a separate set of books for the Fortunoff stores. L&T therefore asked TSI to create a separate instance of AdDept on the same AS/400. We figured out a way to do this (some tables and even data files needed to be shared) and installed it in late 2007 so that it could be tested for a couple of months and then used live in 2008.

Our main contact at L&T during this period was Esther. I also dealt with Dan Marrero, who worked for her, in 2007 and 2008. My notes for that period also mention someone named Rachel, but I don’t remember her.

The Fortunoff scheme was a fiasco. In February of 2009 Fortunoff declared bankruptcy after a lackluster holiday season during the Great Recession. NRDC tried to sell the chain, but there were no takers. By May of 2009 all of the Fortunoff stores had been shuttered.

Meanwhile, NRDC had purchased the Hudson Bay Company, the oldest corporation in North America. It decided that the HBC staff could manage the remaining L&T stores from Ontario. The last work that TSI did for L&T was to help with the migration of the programs and data to an AS/400 somewhere in Canada.

This marriage did not work very well either. In 2019 L&T was again sold, this time to Le Tote, a company that rents women’s clothing (!). The flagship store on Fifth Avenue was closed in 2019 along with some of the other stores. The Covid-19 pandemic rendered the recovery of the remaining stores unfeasible. All the remaining stores were closed by the end of 2020.

The Lord and Taylor name remains in 2021, but only as an online retailer. I tried to find out if they still sell those long gloves. There was no search feature on the website, and there was no category that formal gloves would fit in. So, I don’t think so.

Most of my trips to L&T were one-day excursions. I rode an Amtrak train to Penn Station in the morning and caught a northbound train back home in the evening.

The approach to Lincoln Center is breathtaking.

On Thursday, March 6, 2008, however, I stayed overnight at a hotel. When the dates for the trip had been set, I checked to see what was being staged at the Metropolitan Opera that evening. When I discovered that Verdi’s La Traviata, one of my very favorite operas, was on the bill, I resolved to attend. I had seen this opera twice at the Bushnell in Hartford, and I owned a fantastic CD that featured Luciano Pavarotti and Joan Sutherland. I had listened to that recording dozens of times.

After work on the 6th I walked the 1.7 miles from L&T (or maybe the nearby hotel) to Lincoln Center. The theater was nearly full. My seat was near the front but way to the left. I had a terrible view of the stage, but the sound in the theater was so good that the awkward viewpoint did not affect my enjoyment much. I adapted.

The building was, of course, extremely impressive both on the inside and the outside. It was hard to believe that such a huge auditorium had such outstanding acoustics.

The curtain rose on the ballroom scene. I expected for my eye to be drawn to Violetta as the life of the party, but I was wrong. Even after she started singing I was slow to identify the shortest and chubbiest woman on the stage as the legendary lady of the camellias. Ruth Ann Swenson was in excellent voice, but it was impossible to suspend disbelief about her being either an irresistible Parisian courtesan or a woman in the last stages of consumption.

The other two leads, Matthew Polenzani and Dwayne Croft, were fine, but for me the real star was Franco Zeffirelli’s classic production. I especially enjoyed the last act, which employed the Met’s stage elevators and a staircase to transport the Germonds from Violetta’s parlor to her bedroom. Operas are seldom even slightly realistic, but I don’t see how this approach could be topped.

I discovered when researching this section of the blog that the first few performances of this opera back in the beginning of the season had featured Renée Fleming. That would have been something to see, but, then again, I probably would not have been able to scare up a ticket on short notice. Furthermore, if I had waited a week, I might have been able to see Jonas Kaufmann as Alfredo. I did not know who he was in 2008, but within a few years he became the most revered tenor in the world.

The 2007-2008 season was the last that Ruth Ann Swenson performed at the Met. Peter Gelb did not offer her any more contracts, although he insisted that it was not because of her weight.

1. A detailed description of the AdDept system design can be found here. Unique features of the AS/400 are described here.

2. Norm’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

3. Tom Caputo’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Chris Pease was not related to Doug Pease, at least not closely. Chris’s LinkedIn page is here.

5. Esther’s LinkedIn page is here.

6. Jennifer Hoke’s LinkedIn page is here.

7. I could not find a LinkedIn page for Ali Flack. However, there are strong indications that she continued to work for L&T after the management of the chain was turned over to HBC.

8. A detailed description of the AxN system can be found here.

1993-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Foley’s

Posted on July 22, 2021 by Mike

May Co. division based in Houston. Continue reading →

I remember getting two phone calls from Beverly Ingraham¹, the Advertising Director at the May Company division based in Houston, Foley’s. The first one came in early 1993 before we had hired Doug Pease to handle our marketing. I spoke with Beverly about AdDept, TSI’s administrative system for large retail advertisers. She had learned of it from one of our mailings.

Foley’s flagship store at 1110 Main St. was demolished in 2013. I am not sure what replaced it.

I informed her that we had installed the system at a “sister division”, Hecht’s. I emphasized that it had been helping the employees at Hecht’s with their monthly May Company reports as well as many quotidian administrative tasks. She asked me to fly to Houston and show the system to them. Although I don’t remember the occasion, I must have spent a day or two talking with potential users, primarily Richard Roark² in the business office at Foley’s off in one of the top floors of the flagship store on Main Street. The demo must have been at an IBM office. Sue might have come with me to Houston, but neither of us remembers the trip. We met Beverly and Linda Knight, the Senior VP of Advertising³. The people at Foley’s all seemed enthusiastic and exceptionally nice, as they did every time that I visited there.

After we returned to Connecticut, I wrote up a proposal to run the AdDept system on the F10 model that had recently been introduced by IBM. There is little doubt that I also included quotes for some custom programming—I forget the details.

I was very excited about this. I knew that Foley’s advertising must have had money because the May Company had recently merged the D&F division, which had been based in Denver, with Foley’s. The combined operation would be run from Houston. That gave them stores in Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. The May Co.’s purse strings were bound to be a little looser than usual.

I was also excited because I was quite certain that most of the work that we had done for Hecht’s would be usable for Foley’s with only minor adjustments. For once we seemed to be on familiar ground.

Over the next week or two I talked with Richard Roark about some of the items in the proposal. When I finally got the second call from Beverly, she did not immediately say that the project had been approved. I had to ask her. She said, “Oh, yeah. Sure.” She then corrected my assumption that Richard Roark would be the liaison. She assured me that she would tell me who it was, and she did a little later.

I remember very well my first visit to Foley’s in May of 1993 to install the system. I flew on Continental Airlines from Bradley to Intercontinental Airport⁴, which was twenty-three miles north of the city center. I took a shuttle bus to the Hyatt Regency Hotel, which was only a couple of blocks from Foley’s headquarters.

The Hyatt featured a lobby that was both luxurious and sometimes very noisy. A bar was right in the middle of it, and the area above was open all the way up to the roof, thirty stories up. It was like an echo chamber or a natural amplifier. So, half of the rooms had windows that viewed the lobby. After my first stay there I always requested a room with an outside window.

That’s the Hyatt’s bar way down there in the middle of the lobby.

The elevators all had glass walls on the lobby side. I am not ordinarily affected by heights or tight locations, but the rapid descent in these glass cages made me quite uneasy.

I distinctly remember my first stroll to Foley’s from the Hyatt. It was March. I knew that I would not need the overcoat that I had worn to the airport in Connecticut, but I did have on a wool suit. The lobby of the Hyatt was very cool. I went through the revolving door and I was smashed in the face by the heat and humidity. It was like walking into a sauna.

By the time that I ~~swam~~ walked the few blocks to Foley’s big brick building, I had grown tolerant of the humidity. However, I was not expecting to see ten or so mendicants sitting on the sidewalk near the employees’ entrance. This crew was not the aggressive kind I had encountered in my life in Detroit and visits to New York. They just seemed hopeless. I don’t know why, but I was shocked to see this in Texas.

I don’t actually remember too much else about that day. That is a good thing. In TSI’s thirty-five year history we only had a few near-disasters or crises, and I distinctly remember each one.

I recall that one of our first big assignments for Foley’s was when the Houston Chronicle bought out the Houston Post and its assets in 1995. Foley’s was by far the largest advertiser in both papers. They ran dozens of ads every week, and the newspaper coordinators had already recorded the schedules for both papers for several months ahead.

Their first requirement was a list of all ads that were scheduled to run in the Post but not the Chronicle. That was not difficult; I wrote a query to produce the list. They would need to decide what to do with those ads and adjust the schedules for the Chronicle where necessary.

Next, they needed to delete all of the ads scheduled for the Post. This was was a little more difficult. I had to replicate exactly the process that would have occurred if they canceled them individually. That meant that I had to write history records for each deletion, and all subsidiary files and summary records needed to be updated as if the deletions were being done one at a time.

Finally, they needed me to find all the ads in the Chronicle that were full depth (the longer dimension), which, if memory serves, was twenty-one inches. All of these ads would be one-half inch deeper because the Post’s presses, which the Chronicle planned to use going forward, cut the paper to that size. That meant that the costs (Foley’s kept track of actual costs billed by the papers and costs marked up to reflect production expenses that they showed the merchants) had to be recalculated.

Since any paper could change its size (and many subsequently did), I made this one into a program that could be attached to a menu available to the users. Since AdDept’s rate calculations had been externalized into separate callable modules, this was also not too difficult. History records and updates of subsidiary files and summaries were required for this step, too.

They needed all of this in just a couple of days. There was no test environment. No one helped me, and no one tested the code that I produced. On TSI’s developmental system I simulated a few ads of each type and tested the code on them. When I felt satisfied with it, I sent the code to Foley’s over the phone lines, crossed my fingers, and ran the programs.

I must have done a pretty good job. No one complained.

Visits to Foley’s were frequent during the nineties. Sometimes they wanted training, but usually they wanted to describe enhancements that they desired. Two of the trips had a comical aspect. The first one was when I asked Sue to take one of the early trips for me. I cannot remember what the objective for the trip was. She did not have a credit card in those days, and she forgot to bring any cash. Fortunately, someone at Foley’s cashed a check for her, or she might have needed to join the beggars clustered by the employees’ entrance.

On another occasion I wore my running shoes on the flight to Houston. When I had arrived in Houston, as usual I took the shuttle to the Hyatt. When I opened my suitcase at the Hyatt, I was aghast to discover that I had brought only one leather shoe. How could my valet have been so careless?

I recalled that I had seen a Payless Shoe Source, at one time a division of the May Company, between the hotel and Foley’s. I bought a pair of black leather shoes at Payless for $20. They were so uncomfortable that I threw them away as soon as I arrived home after the trip. However, they saved me from embarrassment during the three days of that visit. I figured that my misbegotten purchase was the equivalent of a bargain-priced rental for less than $7 per day.

One of Robert’s most important jobs was to keep the printers clean and full of paper.

Our first liaison at Foley’s was Robert Myers⁵. I think that he must have come from the IT department. He helped to set up a system whereby the store managers could view the contents of their ads on systems in their stores before the ads were run. He tried to get me (of all people) to market the arrangement to other retailers. I suppose that he meant that we should try to offer it as an enhancement to AdDept, but the guts of what he had done involved infrastructure that was unique to Foley’s. I didn’t understand most of it, and I was too busy with things that I understood a lot better to devote time to learning it.

Robert attended nearly all of the training sessions when I came to Houston, and he did a good job of writing up software requests when I was not around. He was one of our best liaisons.

That is Robert talking and facing the camera. The bearded guy in the foreground is Doug Pease⁶. This picture was not taken at Foley’s. I don’t recognize the other three.

Robert once expressed the opinion to me that XML would become the solution to all of the interoperability problems of software systems. I had read a little about it, but I did not understand it. He did not do a good job of explaining it. He may have been right, but to my knowledge XML never entered the main stream among software developers. TSI implemented a lot of interfaces with software from other companies. Sometimes we sent them files, and sometimes AdDept received and processed files. We never considered using XML.

One day Robert took me on a road trip. This must have been over a weekend, probably the one in which I oversaw the migration from the F10 that Foley’s initially purchased in 1993 to a faster model with more capacity, the 270.

We drove down⁷ to the Johnson Space Center (now called Space Center Houston). We spent some time at the exhibits that they have about manned space flight. It was OK, but ever since I was required in 1967 as a member of the varsity debate team at the University of Michigan (explained here) to argue against the concept of putting an American on the moon, it has always seemed to me that it was an expensive and dangerous idea with very little payoff. So, I was not as gung-ho as most of the visitors to the center.

I found notes that indicated that I went out to dinner with Robert Myers and his wife in 2000. I have no clear recollection of the occasion.

The May Company determined that AdDept should be installed in all of its department store divisions. The process of reaching this decision is described here. Robert was assigned by the May Company to help with the installations at several other divisions. On a few occasions we crossed paths at other divisions.

Left to right are Charisse Cossey, who was the TSI liaison after Robert, Sharon Mullins (the second-in-command), Beverly Ingraham, Ralph Annunziato, and Angela Hurry. That’s my big blue mug in the foreground. This room was called “The Wall Room” because the ads for the current week were always displayed on the wall.

Beverly Ingraham had a nameplate on her desk that said “Bevo”. I don’t know whether she was an alumna of UT⁸, or if it was a play on her name. Maybe both.

I remember doing one project that Beverly was especially interested in. The IT department was able to provide us with sales by department by store by day. I wrote a program to convert this file into a usable format for AdDept programs. We then used the information in reports and screens for each merchant that showed them in each market the total costs of their ads (or parts of ads) and the associated sales.

The ability to provide this kind of information was a big feather in Beverly’s cap. This was the first of several TSI projects aimed at evaluating the productivity of the advertising. The concept was actually more useful as a sales tool to show the power and reach of the AdDept system than as a practical tool for the advertisers. If more than one media was employed for a sales event, it was impossible to attribute which of the ads produced the results.

I don’t have distinct memories of most of the projects that we undertook for Foley’s. For the ones after Denise Bessette became VP of Software Development (as explained here) I only wrote up the requests. I don’t have an excuse for forgetting the ones between 1993 and 1997 I probably did most of the coding myself.

This is Robert at a buffet lunch at the department. I don’t remember the reason for it.

I unearthed some notes for a visit in 2000 about insertion orders for newspapers. Foley’s two newspaper coordinators were Hedy Wolpa⁹ and a lady named Leila, whose last name I don’t remember. I was shocked when they told me that they had not been faxing insertion orders to the papers directly from the AS/400 because they could only order by date, not by publication. They thought that this made it difficult for them to specify positioning (such as “Back page of main section”) while ordering. I also learned that they also did not realize that they could specify much longer special instructions as well.

This would never do. They had paid us to provide insertion orders in the precise format that Foley’s had specified, and they had paid IBM for the faxing hardware and software. We might have even gotten a commission on that. Furthermore, TSI needed for them to be ordering in AdDept so that we could switch them to using the product that we were about to release, A^xN (described here).

I think that this picture was taken at Filene’s. Robert is seated with two fingers raised. I don’t recognize the other people. That’s definitely my yellow spiral binder on the table.

While I was at Foley’s I wrote a new front end program for the insertion orders. It allowed them to order for one paper at a time. They were very happy; it was just what they wanted.

Denise hated for me to do things like this on the road. She did not want me to modify any code on the fly. I understood that. In this case, however, I thought that it was better to beg forgiveness rather that to ask permission from Denise. The top priority of this trip was to get Foley’s on board for insertion orders. They became an enthusiastic users, and all their papers subscribed to A^xN¹⁰ a soon as we made it available.

Foley’s was, by most measures, our best client. They used almost every aspect of the system. They even used the SmartPlus interface for broadcast that was originally designed for the GrandAd system for ad agencies. Their agency, which was in Dallas, sent them files with schedules and audit data.

Several Foley’s users also became very adept at using Query/400 to design some of their own reports. They used this product as much as or more than any other client. They sometimes used their queries and a product called ShowCase Strategy without any assistance from TSI.

As of 2000 TSI had delivered and installed approximately 200 custom programming projects to Foley’s.

1. Beverly Ingraham was promoted to Senior Vice President of Advertising at Foley’s in January of 2000. She held that position until the division was dissolved after Macy’s acquired the May Company in 2006. I am pretty sure that she went to the Macy’s Central division in Atlanta and headed the advertising department there for several years. I think that in 2021 she lives in Spring, TX, twelve miles north of the airport. If I am correct, then she is my age and therefore probably retired.

2. Richard Roark’s LinkedIn page is posted here.

3. In 2000 Linda, who was by then known as Linda Knight Quick, resigned as Senior VP of Foley’s to take a job at Penney’s. Foley’s sued to prevent this because of a non-compete clause in her contract. I was unable to determine how the situation was resolved.

4. In 1997 it was renamed George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

5. I have a note from January of 2000 that indicated that he was doing Internet development for Foley’s IT department using Cold Fusion, but I do not know what he has been up to in the last two decades.He helped me identify some of the people in photos of employees from Foley’s and other May Co. divisions. He also said that his association with TSI changed his life, but he did not explain how.

6. Doug Pease was TSI’s most successful marketing director. Much more can be read about him here. I think that Doug and I must have stopped at Foley’s as part of a marketing trip to Stage Stores, also in Houston. That installation is described here.

7. I wonder if I had a rental car for that trip. Robert lived a long way from downtown Houston. He generally took the bus to work!

8 The mascot of the University of Texas Longhorns is a steer named Bevo. The current one in 2021 is Bevo XV.

9. Hedy Wolpa’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here. She worked at Foley’s for thirty-one years!

10. The design of A^xN is described in some detail here.

1994-2002 TSI: AdDept Client: Kaufmann’s

Posted on July 22, 2021 by Mike

May Co. department store chain based in Pittsburgh. Continue reading →

Kaufmann’s was a department-store division of the May Company. Its headquarters was in downtown Pittsburgh. It had stores throughout Pennsylvania and neighboring states. TSI was contacted in the spring of 1994 by Mary Ann Brown¹, Kaufmann’s Advertising Director. I think that she probably heard of us from someone at either Hecht’s or Foley’s.

In May of 1994 Sue and I drove to Pittsburgh to meet with her. We made the trip by car primarily because we had very little money at the time. We also had scheduled a meeting in the same city with an ad agency, Blattner/Brunner Inc. That meeting and our subsequent visit to the Pittsburgh Zoo has been described here.

Our appointment at Kaufmann’s was scheduled for late in the afternoon, 5:00 as I remember it. We left Enfield fairly early in the morning. Sue, who in those days was famous for her lead foot, did most of the driving. We arrived at the outskirts of Pittsburgh about thirty minutes before the scheduled start of the meeting. At that point we encountered extremely heavy traffic. We were in unfamiliar territory, and, of course, cell phones were still a few years away. So, we arrived a few minutes late.

The beginning of the meeting was rather tense. Mary Ann demanded to know why we were late and why we did not call to tell her we were going to be late. If TSI had not already developed a reputation for good work at Hecht’s and Foley’s, I think that she might have told us to reschedule or to forget about it.

Eventually she got down to business and informed us that the people in her department had developed a system for administering the department’s projects. They were satisfied with what it produced. However, they knew that it would not work in the twenty-first century, and they needed to make a decision about whether to rewrite it or replace it. I guaranteed her that AdDept would have no difficulty with the Y2K issue and explained how AdDept’s approach of a multi-user relational database worked. I do not remember meeting anyone else that day.

Sue and I stayed throughout the visit at a Holiday Inn (if my memory is accurate) a few miles north of downtown. We probably presented a demo at IBM the next day, but, if so, I don’t remember it. My recollection is that the entire event was amicable but not decisive.

For years Doug Pease, TSI’s sales person, stayed in frequent contact with Kaufmann’s. I think that Mary Ann must have spent the time arranging funding. My memory of the next trip to Pittsburgh centers around my meeting with René Conrad² (female), who was the department’s Planning Manager, and John Borman³, who managed the department’s networks and its computer hardware. I don’t know if we had a signed contract yet, but by then they were definitely committed to installing AdDept. In fact the installation did not take place until May of 1998.

I had only limited contact with Mary Ann thereafter. I do remember that she joined René and me for lunch once, and she disclosed that she had for a very short time been (or at least had applied to be) an FBI agent. That was, to say the least, a surprising bit of news.

My first memory of René was her presentation to me of an absolutely enormous D-ring binder with a black cover. Collected therein were samples of all of the reports that they needed. She spent the rest of the day answering questions about the selection criteria and the precise definition of the contents of each column of each report. The bad news was that very few of the reports matched up closely with work that we had already done. The good news was that the design document that resulted from the meeting came closer to meeting the client’s expectation than any that we had produced or would produce later. René was our liaison at Kaufmann’s from the beginning all the way to the end, and she was a very good one.

John, René, and TSI programmer Steve Shaw in a training session in Enfield.

I did not need to spend much time with John. Once their new AS/400 was connected to their network, and I explained that the demand for bandwidth would be minimal since the system was totally text-based, he was satisfied. He took charge of getting the necessary software installed on Macs and PCs, and he connected the AS/400 to the department’s network.

I remember two experiences involving credit and debit cards on trips to Pittsburgh. In those days we kept our cash at Bank of America. The best thing about that was that if I needed cash on a trip I could almost always find a local branch with an ATM. I remember that once I used such a machine at the airport and forgot to reclaim my card when I was finished obtaining the cash. I don’t know what happened to the card after that, but nobody else ever tried to use it.

For my first couple of installation and support trips, Kaufmann’s asked me to stay at the William Penn Hotel, which was only a block or so from Kaufmann’s. I sometimes arrived in Pittsburgh late in the evening. On one of those occasions some sort of event must have been going on downtown. In the lobby of the William Penn there were unexpected lines of people waiting to check in. In those days it was possible to make a hotel reservation without providing a credit card number. Several people in line had discovered that doing so did not mean that a room would necessarily be available when they arrived. There were a lot of angry people there that evening. Fortunately, I had already heard about this problem, which had been perfectly explained by Jerry Seinfeld with regard to rental cars. You can listen to it here.

The gilded clock on the corner of Fifth Ave. and Smithfield St. is still a landmark.

I usually brought an unusually large bright-blue suitcase with me to Pittsburgh. Because I sometimes had trouble sleeping when I traveled I often include the foam rubber pillow that I found much more comfortable than the soft feather pillows that old stately hotels favored. One day after working at Kaufmann’s I was unable to find the pillow in my hotel room. Evidently the maid had confiscated it. I complained at the desk, and they eventually located it and returned to me.

It was nice having such an identifiable suitcase. On an early-morning US Airways flight on July 25, 1999, from Bradley to the Pittsburgh airport that served as a hub. I was the only passenger who checked a bag to Pittsburgh. I went to the carousel listed for my flight. No bags ever appeared. I was worried that the bag had not been removed from the plane. Here is what I wrote about the incident in my notes:

When I got into Pittsburgh, my bag was missing. I went to the baggage office. They had no record of my bag. I had seen them put it on the plane and take it off. I told her [the baggage agent] so. She went to look for it and found it. She said the tag had come off. I can’t imagine how this happened. But guess what. I didn’t get angry through any of this.

While staying at at the William Penn I experienced one of the worst incidents that I ever encountered in my trips to see clients or prospects. I was suffering from the only disease that I contracted in all the years that I traveled extensively. Throughout the visit I was constantly running a low-grade fever and had a few other annoying but not debilitating symptoms. I soldiered on, and I somehow got everything accomplished that was on my list. When I returned home I went to my doctor, Victor Sonnen⁴. He gave me a blood test and eventually diagnosed the problem as a urinary infection. Some antibiotics knocked it out.

I did not really like staying at the William Penn. I could get to Kaufmann’s in two minutes, but this was not a great advantage from my perspective. I was always up early, and there was nowhere very close that served breakfast. I could eat in the hotel, but I have always found that hotel food was not very good and terribly overpriced. The evening meals posed a similar problem. I won’t go to a swanky place by myself. The only restaurant within walking distance that I liked was a Chinese takeout place.

In later years I stayed at a Hampton Inn in the Greentree section of town on the south side of the Ohio River. I loved the free breakfast bars at Hampton Inns, and this one sometimes served tasty snacks such as pizza or chicken wings that were good enough to serve as a supper in the evening. The only drawback was that there was nowhere that was reasonably flat to go for a jog. If you live in Pittsburgh, you must learn to like hills.

On two occasions I went to supper with René and her assistant, Maggie Pratt⁵. Since they both took the bus to work, I drove us in my rental car. They directed me to small restaurants that they knew near the University of Pittsburgh. I don’t remember the food that well, but I do remember that dining alone on the road is not a hard habit to break.

One thing that I remember clearly was that René suffered from migraine headaches. When she got one she still tried to work, but it was obvious that she was in considerable torment.

René volunteered as an usher at the Pittsburgh Opera. In the 1999-2000 season Verdi’s La Traviata was performed. In the last act the heroine, Violetta, who has been suffering from consumption (tuberculosis) dies. René did not like this part of the opera at all. It seemed to long to her: “She should just die and get it over with!” I did not dispute this assessment, but I find parts of other operas to be much more tedious.

Luxury apartments occupy most of the upper floors of Kaufmann’s flagship store now. Target is scheduled to open a store on one or two low floors. There is now a skating rink on the roof!

Kaufmann’s advertising department was on one of the top floors of the flagship store on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh. The most peculiar thing about it became evident when one needed to use the men’s room. One was located on the same floor as the advertising department, but the only way to reach it was to walk through the beauty salon. I did not feel at all comfortable doing that. Therefore, I took the escalator up to the top floor, the home of the bakery. This restroom was a little farther away, but I found the atmosphere much more pleasant.

Everyone at TSI worked very hard on the programming projects for Kaufmann’s. The people there were uniformly supportive, and everyone seemed pretty good at what they did. I am embarrassed to say that I don’t remember the names of any of the media managers. The name Debi Katich is in my notes from 1999. I think that she was the Direct Mail Manager, but I may be wrong.

I do not remember the name of the Senior VP (Mary Ann’s boss) at the time of the installation. As I recall, he let Mary Ann pretty much run things. I definitely do remember the name of his replacement in 1999, Jack Mullen⁶, who had been Doug’s boss (or maybe his boss’s boss) at G. Fox in Hartford.

I also do not remember too many details of the code that we provided for them. The detail about newspaper ads that I recall most clearly is that the store’s contract with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette provided for significant discounts if they ran several full-page ads in the same issue. It was like buying two-liter bottles of Coke or Pepsi. The first three ads might cost $X but once the fourth ad was ordered, the price on all of them changed to $Y for all four ads. This was not easy to code because individual ads could be added, deleted, or moved (to another date) at any time. Also, the size could change. Any of these events could change the rate for all the other full-page ads in the paper that day. Not only did the rates and costs for all the affected ads need to be changed, but history records were also necessary.

Kaufmann’s used AdDept for keeping track of all of its advertising. They even uploaded their broadcast buys from the SmartPlus system that they used.

In 2000 Kaufmann’s was an enthusiastic supporter of the implementation of the A^xN project. Several people offered the opinion that the newspapers would never pay for subscribing to the service. Mary Ann did not agree. She said, “They’ll subscribe if we tell them to.” I visited three of Kaufmann’s largest papers to explain what we planned to do and to solicit suggestions. When I mentioned that I was meeting with the IT director at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, John Borman confided to me, “I want his job.”

In 2002, the Kaufmann’s stores’ Pittsburgh business headquarters closed, and its back-office operations were consolidated into those of Filene’s Department Stores in Boston. The consolidation was probably inevitable, but everyone at TSI would have greatly preferred for the new managing entity to be located in Pittsburgh.

1. In 1921 Mary Ann Brown is the Administrative Manager at her alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh. Her LinkedIn page is here. I don’t know why she left her role at Kaufmann’s off of her résumé.

2. René Conrad’s LinkedIn page is here. After the May Company folded the Kaufmann’s division into Filene’s in 2002 I tried to get René to work for TSI. She was interested enough to pay us a visit in East Windsor, but she turned down our offer. Instead she went to work for a theatrical company in an administrative role. We stayed in touch for a few years, but I had not heard from her for more than a decade. However, she recently sent me an email in which she confessed that she owed me a book.

3. John Borman’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Dr. Sonnen died in 2010 at the age of 96. He was certainly in his eighties when he treated me. His obituary is posted here.

5. I am pretty sure that Maggie Pratt’s LinkedIn page is here.

6. Jack Mullen’s LinkedIn page is here.

1991-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Hecht’s

Posted on July 20, 2021 by Mike

A May Co. division with headquarters in Arlington, VA. Continue reading →

In 1991 I received what probably was the most welcome business telephone call in my life. At the time TSI had only two AdDept¹ clients, Macy’s Northeast_², and P.A. Bergner & Co.³ I had recently sent to the advertising directors of several dozen other large retailers a letter that described the AdDept system and the positive effects that it had produced at its first two installations. The phone call was from Barbara Schane Jackson⁴ of the Hecht Company, a department store chain in the mid-Atlantic area. I did not realize it before that first call, but Hecht’s was one of the divisions of the May Company.

Barbara explained that the advertising department was looking for a system that would handle its administrative requirements. She emphasized that it absolutely must be able to produce the data for the 790, a monthly report required by the May Co. that broke out advertising expenses and co-op at the CCN⁵ level. She explained that at the end of every month the financial area of the department struggled to get the report out by combining the data from many spreadsheets. They were barely able to do this by leaving six or seven PC’s running all night. There were two big disadvantages. 1) If anything went wrong, they had no plan B. The May Co. required them to file the report within a week after the end of the month. 2) Hecht’s had recently acquired more stores, and they anticipated more acquisitions in the near future. Their PC approach probably could not handle the additional load.

When I assured her that this sounded feasible, Barbara invited us to visit their headquarters in Arlington, VA, and, if possible, do a demo of the system. This was music to my ears. Not only was Hecht’s a very well qualified prospect for the AdDept System. If we did a good job, we would have a much better chance of signing up the eleven other divisions of department stores owned by the May Company that were all very well-qualified prospects for the AdDept system .

Our marketing person at the time was Tom Moran⁶. Sue Comparetto, Tom, and I drove down to Washington in Sue’s Saturn station wagon. We certainly could not have afforded to buy three round-trip plane tickets at the time. We stayed at a Motel 6 in Maryland just outside of Washington. We could afford nothing better. Actually we could not afford that.

I don’t remember too many of the details about the visit. We met in Hecht’s Arlington store, which was in the Ballston Common Mall. In addition to Barbara and the advertising director, whose name was, I think, Steve, we also probably met with the media, production, and finance managers. Barbara certainly provided me with all the requirements for the 790 report. It did not seem too daunting. The rules were more complicated than the ones that Macy’s used for their reports by Vice President, but the principles were very similar.

Barbara at some point demonstrated the process that they used at the time, which involved Lotus 123 spreadsheets. I could not believe how adept she was at the use of this product. Her fingers flew around the keyboard executing commands and macros.

I did a demo for them at an IBM office in . Barbara later told me that she and Steve had serious doubts about how the answer to their problems could possibly be this ugly. She might have been referring to my appearance, but I think that they were most likely underwhelmed by the AS/400’s⁷ green screens and the pedestrian nature of its reports. There were no graphics of any sort anywhere. The only flash that my presentation had was how fast the screens appeared. In those days users were accustomed to substantial delays going from one step to the next.

The proposal that I wrote for Hecht’s was much more detailed about the contents of the first stage of the installation than what I had submitted to Macy’s or Bergner’s. We recommended, as I recall, that they purchase a model D10, a box that was considerably faster than TSI’s developmental system, but probably not as fast as the one used by Macy’s and Bergner’s.

The hardware determination was largely guesswork. IBM did not provide the usual performance numbers about its systems. For example, there were no statistics about the clock speed of the processors. I later came to understand why IBM did this, but at that time it seemed very strange that two different models actually had the same processors. The only difference was that the more expensive one had the capacity for more disk drives and memory cards. It did not come with these features; it merely had a way to attach them. I always recommended the more economical system unless the client really had a need for those drives or cards.

The installation began in October of 1991. The process of integrating the necessary changes was, as expected, difficult. However, it was never unpleasant. Barbara was a superb liaison, and most of the modules went in with no significant problems. The changes that I had to make to the cost accounting⁸ programs caused me quite a few headaches.

At one point I tried to document the steps of the “explosion” process—TSI’s term for the set of program that created the detail and summary files used by the programs that produced the 790 report. I quit after I had produced ten pages. I was not close to finished, and the result was totally unreadable. Every sentence started with the word “If”.

A major enhancement for Hecht’s provided for different types of costs being allocated in different ways. This required establishment of a table of allocation codes as well as an interface with the mainframe’s sales system to obtain the sales by department for the month. We also provided for a set of reconciliation programs to check the consistency of the results.

I distinctly remember two of the first attempts that we made to generate the cost accounting files. In both cases, Barbara submitted the program to run in batch mode (not tying up any input devices). I was in Enfield, but my AS/400 session had “passed through” to Hecht’s system. At the same time I was on the phone with Barbara.

Angus Podgorny was humanity’s last hope at Wimbledon.

In the first instance I was a little bit worried about how large the detail file that the system created might become. I monitored it and what the percentage of the ads that the program had already handled.

After just a few minutes I realized that the file was becoming very large very quickly. “Oh, no!” I warned Barbara. “The program is eating up the disk like the Blancmange! You’ve got to go to the system console and kill the job immediately.”

I am not sure whether Barbara understood the Monty Python reference (in which a Blancmange from planet Skyron of the Andromeda Galaxy eats people in order to win Wimbledon), but she laughed anyway. She certainly knew what a blancmange was; she had actually majored in French. She killed the job in plenty of time, and I deleted the records in the file.

The disk-gobbling program could have been a serious problem. If the the system’s disk drives had approached 100 percent usage, I am not sure what would have happened. It would not have been pleasant; we almost certainly would have had to involve IBM. After the job was killed, and the file was whittled down to size, I had to change the program to summarize in a few places where it had been writing details. This was a major repair, and it took me a while.

The second incident involved some kind of tricky allocation that I had not anticipated. I don’t remember the details. Barbara had already called two or three times to report that this aspect of the program was not working correctly. Each time I thought that I had fixed it. In the last call I admitted that “I just can’t seem to get this right!” I did not mean that I was giving up on it. In fact, I found the final problem in less than an hour after acknowledging my failures.

When we got the cost accounting program to work perfectly, Hecht’s was very happy.

The airport is at the bottom of this map. Taking the Metro was fine unless there was a problem.

I made quite a few trips to Hecht’s during the first phase of the installation. There were direct flights from Bradley to National Airport in Washington on US Airways. From the airport I took the Metro or a taxi to Ballston. I could be at Hecht’s before business hours, a feat that I could never manage at Macy’s, which was less than half as far away from Enfield.

If my visit was for more than one day, I generally stayed at a Comfort Inn that was within a few blocks of the mall.⁹ I always left the hotel early in the morning. I bought a Washington Post from the dispenser just outside of the mall—for twenty-five cents! I then took the escalator down to the food court and bought a Big Breakfast or an Egg McMuffin and a large coffee from McDonald’s. I ate my breakfast while reading the Post. I also drank about half of the coffee.

Coffee in hand, I rode the escalator back up. I then entered Hecht’s through the employee entrance, signed in, and took the elevator up to the advertising department. I worked mostly with Barbara. She did most of the training or the other users.

About half the time Barbara and I ate lunch at a restaurant in the mall. It was called the American Restaurant or something similar. We talked mostly about the installation and related matters. She knew that I went jogging in the evenings when I was there; she was surprised that I could survive without my glasses. She was a swimmer. The ropes that marked the lanes evidently kept her from getting lost.

She also told me something about needing to use a shop-vac on one occasion.

All of this seemed a little strange to me. Her husband, Kevin Jackson, also worked in the advertising department. My recollection is that he was an art director; he had no contact with the system. He never came to lunch with us.

Barbara resigned from Hecht’s in May of 1993 to work for Barrister Information Systems, a company that created and marketed a software system for law firms.

After Barbara left, Hecht’s continued to use the system, but they did not ask us for much more work, and they did not take advantage of many of the programs that they had. I do not remember the names of very many employees. In fact, the only one whom I recall was Ellen Horn, and that was mostly due to the fact that I saw her so often at her next stop, Belk.

I discovered quite a few notes about the account that covered the period from 2000-2003. I have somewhat vague memories of some of them. Here are some of the people who were mentioned.

Jim Tonnessen surrounded by his computers.

Jim Tonnessen¹⁰ was our liaison at the turn of the century. I think that he also managed the department’s network, which was installed after AdDept was functional. Jim took a job with UUNet in February, 2000.
Jim was replaced by Clint Gibson, but he also departed in August of the same year.
The nexttechnical liaison was Sam Wiafe, who was later known as Kwadwo.¹¹ I guess that he knew computers, but he knew nothing about AdDept, the AS/400, or the needs of the advertising department. The IT people tried to implement a firewall for the AS/440 in order to control access. It was a silly idea that angered me a little.
Jennifer Jones¹² was the manager of the advertising business office in 2000. Chris Dechene¹³ held that position before her. I made a trip to Hecht’s in June of 1999 for the specific purpose of getting Chris acquainted with the cost accounting programs. One of the problems that we encountered at Hecht’s was that the financial people were rotated around every two years. So, as soon as anyone got a good handle on the cost accounting process, we could expect them to be transferred to another area. These people also were not exceptionally good at documenting their procedures.
Prior to 2000 Hecht’s for some reason did not use one of AdDept’s best features, insertion orders for newspaper advertising. On a trip there in that year I met Renee Gatling¹⁴, Ellen Rison, and someone named Sharon. Renee was already pretty good at getting around in AdDept. I convinced them that they should be faxing their orders using AdDept.
By the end of 2000 I think that our primary liaison at Hecht’s was someone named Amy. I don’t remember her, but when we installed the Media Management + interface for broadcast, she was involved. The broadcast buyers at that time were named Krista and Tiffany. I found their names in my notes.
In October 2002 Brian Kipp, whom I had worked with at Meier & Frank, became the planning manger in the advertising department. Carolyn Thompson and a woman named Renée worked for him.
I spent a good deal of time on one visit with Rene Basham¹⁵, who was the manager of the advertising business office. I was astounded to learn that she had not been using the reconciliation process that we set up for the cost accounting. I went through this with her and also worked on documenting the process for the next person who was rotated into the slot.

In looking through the notes I discovered two other interesting things. The first was that Hecht’s used a product called Wam!Net to deliver its ads electronically to the newspapers. The Associated Press developed a product called AdSend, which most large advertising departments used. At the time (early 2000) TSI was beginning to roll out our A^xN¹⁶ product for insertion orders via the Internet, and we were contemplating using the connection that the program established to send ads as well.

One day while I was at Hecht’s in 2002 the performance on the machine was terrible. In the notes I had attributed this to CFINT, an IBM program that I had completely forgotten about. It was a misbegotten effort from IBM to make customers pay more for use of the system for interactive jobs than for batch jobs by slowing the entire system down if the percentage of CPU used by batch jobs was too high!

The main effect of this effort, as far as I could ascertain, was to infuriate the customers. It is possible that the real motivation was to prevent the AS/400 from encroaching on the sales of other IBM systems.

I have one other peculiar recollection. At some point after 2002 I was in the office on a Saturday. It must have been November, and I must have passed through to Hecht’s system to help someone there with a problem. We exchanged a few messages. I then whimsically invited her to come the following day to a big party that I was throwing to celebrate the divestiture of the foliage on the nine maple trees on my property. I recommended that she recruit a bunch of people with their own rakes. An early start would reward them with the spectacular view of the sunrise from the New Jersey Turnpike. I reckoned that they should have time for six or seven hours of New England’s favorite autumnal sport before returning home. They could make it back by midnight unless they encountered traffic.

On February 1, 2006, Federated Department Stores, which had purchased the entire May Co., dissolved most of the former May Co. divisions, and the existing Hecht’s stores were divided between Macy’s East and Macy’s South. Few, if any, employees from Hecht’s headquarters in Arlington went to work for Macy’s.

1. The design of the AdDept system is described in a fair amount of detail here.

2. A description of the Macy’s installation has been posted here.

3. A description of the installation at Bergner’s can be read here.

4. Barbara Schane Jackson has her own consulting firm in 2021. Her LinkedIn page is here.

5. Every department was assigned to exactly one CCN. The CCN’s were the same for each division of the May Company. The N stood for number, but I don’t think that I ever knew what the two C’s referred to.

6. More information about Tom Moran’s career at TSI can be found here.

7. The AS/400 was a multi-user relational database computer introduced by IBM in 1988. It is described in some detail here.

8. In AdDept we used the term “cost accounting” to describe the process of allocating costs to departments (or, in some installations, stores) for the ads in which their merchandise appeared and the cost of more generic ads (called “storewide”). This was a complicated activity that would require a small army of clerks if not done on the computer. Although the May Co. had precise rules about this process, it was almost impossible for the smaller divisions, which ran just as many ads (in fewer newspapers) and had just as many departments, to accomplish it within the deadlines. They therefore cut corners.

9. The mall is now called Ballston Quarter. It was (pretty much) closed down in 2016 and reopened in 2018. The hotel is still nearby.

10. In 2021 Jim works for Lockheed-Martin. His LinkedIn page is here.

11. Kwadwo’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here. In 2023 he was working for Inova Health Systems.

12. Jennifer Jones works as treasurer of a school. Her LinkedIn page can be found here. I wonder how many of her acquaintances have also seen The Song of Bernadette, the movie that won the actress Jennifer Jones an Oscar, and read all thirteen of the articles championing Losing Trick Count in the Bridge Bulletin written by the bridge expert Jennifer Jones. Not many, I wager.

13. Chris Dechene’s LinkedIn page is posted here.

14. Renee Gatling’s profile on LinkedIn can be found here.

15. Rene Basham is still in the Washington area. Her LinkedIn page is here.

16. The design of A^xN is described in some detail here

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: AxN

1991-2012 TSI: AdDept: The Whiffs

1993-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Lord & Taylor

1993-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Foley’s

1994-2002 TSI: AdDept Client: Kaufmann’s

1991-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Hecht’s