Filene’s was the May Co. division that had its headquarters in Boston. TSI finally sold them an AdDept system and installed it for them, but I was never satisfied with the progress that they made in using it.
Open to the public, but not TSI.
Even before TSI hired Doug Pease as its Marketing Director in 1993, I had made a substantial effort to convince Filene’s to use AdDept. After all, it was the closest large chain of department stores, an easy drive up the Mass Pike from Enfield. Unlike the other divisions, they would not need to pay my air fare. Nevertheless, we had a very difficult time getting through the door.
In 1998 the May Co. agreed that all of its divisions should be using AdDept to administer their advertising departments. That story is told here. Chris Giles1, who managed the PC’s, Macs, and the network in Filene’s Advertising Department, came to TSI’s office for training, but the installation of the system was delayed for several years. There were numerous problems. Filene’s Newspaper Manager had instituted routines using spreadsheets to provide much of what was needed in his area. He admitted that it could not produce insertion orders, but the fact that AdDept could not only produce but also fax insertion orders—with little or no data entry—was not enough to sway him. I did not blame him, but I was disappointed that someone else did not tell him the score.
In 1998 a new liaison, David Doane, was assigned. His main job was as Production Manager. I don’t know why they assigned him responsibility for AdDept. His background was in printing.
I drove into Boston to spend a day with him and to give him a little insight into how the system could work, but we never heard from him again. I wrote prophetically in 2000: “I am not sure that the installation can ever succeed until the liaison comes from scheduling, accounting, or planning.” Spoiler alert: it never did.
That building on the right is Macy’s.
The other major issue was that the Advertising Director, Shelley Rubin,2 did not seem to like the idea of an integrated system. Maybe she did not appreciate the May Co.’s interference in her operation.
Things finally began to move a little in 2000. I received a surprising telephone call on April 6.
Chris Giles called at 5:45 PM! Joe Hrabar sent him our proposal. Shelley Rubin, the advertising director at Filene’s, had taken a tour of Foley’s. She wanted to make sure that the system we proposed was at least as fast as Foley’s. Evidently she was very impressed with what she saw there.
On January 13, 2001, Filene’s asked TSI to send them three sets of “training booklets”. I printed copies of the generic book that described how the AS/400 and AdDept programs basically worked. He also printed copies of the booklets that described the tables for media and accounting. The package was sent within a week.
The plan was to install Filene’s version of AdDept on a model 270 in the Midwest Data Center in St. Louis. I flew there and began the installation on March 13. It seemed to go fairly smoothly. I installed the AdDept programs as well as IBM’s BASIC licensed program3. I then set up the communications so that Denise Bessette could sign on from TSI’s office. I populated the department hierarchy tables and the broadcast stations from files on a PC diskette supplied by Filene’s. The settings from Kaufmann’s AdDept system were used for several other tables.
This was the first time that one of the divisions would be running AdDept on a computer located in the data center. I reported:
On Tuesday I met with ten (!) people from the May Company’s Midwest Data Center to discuss how the installation will be handled. There is not that much to it. We will have to call someone to vary on the line before we call in. They will then program the AS/400 to vary off the TSI line when we are finished. Someone will be available to do this 24 hours a day.
Adding new users will be a little kludgy. The liaison will have to submit a form to the Mid-West Data Center. Someone in St. Louis will create a user ID and a directory entry for them. The liaison will have to create the record in DAUSERS.
While I was in St. Louis I demonstrated the AxN programs to people from the May Co. and from Famous Barr, which had been using AdDept for a few years (as described here). This installation was definitely being driven by the people at corporate headquarters.
On Tuesday afternoon we had a conference call with Filene’s. All together about 15 people were in on the call. It was uneventful. They just wanted to go over the support regimen.
My notes concluded with a warning to the people at the Data Center about the difficulties of using Mac printers as system printers and a request from Jerry Catalano that I determine how much disk space Hecht’s4 was using per year.
Figure two hours in the morning or evening in good weather.
I made several trips by car to Filene’s office in the downtown Boston store after that. For the most part I worked with a lady in the Business Office to make sure that they could record all of their invoices into CAPS. I am not sure that they ever used the system for much more than that.
I don’t remember too many details of those trips. I remember that I would stop and get a Big Gulp-sized Diet Coke at 7-Eleven on the way from the parking garage to the building. I also remember that the only men’s room on the floor that housed the Advertising Department was near the cafeteria, which was a very long walk. On the other hand the elevators were very close, and there was one handicapped restroom that could be used in emergencies.
Epilogue: In 2002 Filene’s took over administration of Kaufmann’s5 stores, but the Kaufmann’s logo was retained.
In 2005 Federated Department Stores acquired most of the May Co. properties, and in 2006 the administration of the Filene’s and Kaufmann’s stores was moved to Macy’s in New York City. The stores were eventually either closed or relabeled as Macy’s.
1. Chris Giles worked at Filene’s until 2006, when the administration of the stores was assumed by Macy’s East. His LinkedIn page is here.
The Downtown Crossing store was closed in 2006 in favor of the nearby Macy’s that already existed. Although it was protected as a historic landmark, the interior was gutted, and the building remained unoccupied for years. In 2023 some of the floors are occupied by retail, some by offices, and others are empty.
2. Shelley Rubin also stayed at Filene’s until Macy’s took over in 2006. Her LinkedIn page can be viewed here.
3. IBM no longer supported the BASIC language programs on the AS/400/iSeries, but they allowed TSI to make copies of it and sell them to users.
4. The story of the AdDept installation at Hecht’s is posted here.
5. The details concerning the AdDept installation at Kaufman’s can be viewed here.
In the Model T days the name still had the apostrophe.
Doug Pease, TSI’s Marketing Director who was introduced here, took the phone call from someone in the IT department at Gottschalks (never an apostrophe) in 1994. Gottschalks was an independent chain of department stores based in Fresno, CA. I am not sure how the people in the IT department had heard about TSI. We had previously had only incidental contact with the Advertising Director there. Since they seemed like an ideal candidate for the AdDept system, I quickly agreed to talk with them in person.
The only reasonable way to get to Fresno was by way of LAX. Sometimes I drove (3+ hours). Sometimes I took the short flight.
Doug and I flew out to Fresno on a Saturday to make a presentation and gather specs about their requirements. On Sunday we decided to drive up to Carmel by the Bay and then drive down Highway 1 along the coast. This was a very pleasant trip for me, but, as I described here, Doug enjoyed it a lot less than I did.
The presentation and demo in Fresno seemed to go well, but almost no one from advertising except Robert Guinn1, the manager of the Advertising Business Office, attended. At some point during that first visit Doug and I were also introduced to the president of Gottschalks. He made the startling claim that he would make sure that the other members of the Frederick Atkins2 group would also purchase AdDept3.
Shortly thereafter a contract was signed, and a small AS/400 was ordered.
In December of 1994 I flew back to Fresno and installed AdDept on an AS/400 that the company had purchased from IBM. The machine was kept in the data center. That room had tight security, and it was always very cold, at least from my perspective. Because it was December, I had my overcoat with me. The only place that I wore it was in the data center.
Gottschalks’ headquarters was several miles north of downtown Fresno.
Gottschalks recommended that I stay at the DoubleTree hotel in downtown Fresno. It was right next to the casino4. The entire downtown area, aside from the casino, was pretty much dead by the mid-nineties. I did not like staying at that hotel. Fortunately, it was easy to persuade Gottschalks to let me stay somewhere on the north side of town that was both cheaper and closer to the company’s headquarters at 7 River Park Place East.
The primary purpose of the installation was not to improve or make more efficient Gottschalks’ advertising. Its main use was to keep better track of the money spent by the department. Here is what I wrote in 2000:
The liaison is now and always has been an accountant. The advertising department has shown very little interest in using the system. Their opinion is that the system was forced down their throats. This opinion is accurate. The accounting department and the IS department purchased the system in order to hold the advertising people’s feet to the fire.
On the other hand, there may be an opportunity here. Most of the people involved at the time of the installation have moved on. If contact is made with the new people, we may be able to sell them on efficiencies to be derived from using AdDept for scheduling.
Shortly after I wrote this evaluation Ernie Escobedo5, who succeeded Robert as TSI’s primary contact, arranged for an upgrade to the painfully slow AS/400 that they had been using. The new Model 170 was sitting next to the old one in the frigid data center when I arrived on August 19, 2000, to migrate the AdDept programs, the data, and everything else.
The fiasco: Writing about this episode is one of the most painful things in the entire 1948 Project. It was certainly the low point of my career as a cowboy coder.
The new system used RISC processors; the previous system used CISC. The compiled versions of the hundreds or maybe thousands of programs in the AdDept system needed to be converted. I had already done this a few times, including on a system used in TSI’s office. In fact, we used precisely the same model of AS/400 that Gottschalks had just purchased, and I was very familiar with the CISC model that they had been using. I knew that it would take most of the weekend to effect the changes, but I was quite confident of my ability to pull it off. I was so certain that I had scheduled time at Robinsons-May in North Hollywood for Tuesday and Wednesday. I planned to drive to Santa Clarita on Sunday evening and commute from the Hampton Inn there to Rob-May
The trip started very well. Here is what I wrote:
Yes, I often wore a suit, too.
I managed to get upgraded to first class for both legs today. Nadine told me that when she called three weeks ago they told her that there were no first class seats available on the Cincinnati to LA leg. It was indeed full, but I got one of the seats.
In first class they give you a hot wet towel before dinner. I have never quite understood what this was for. I guess that maybe they are afraid that the common people might have touched something on their way through our section. We wouldn’t want their common germs to mix with ours. I had delicious food on both flights. The food in first class on Delta is really excellent.
A guy across the aisle from me who was at least my age had a short haircut which had been dyed blonde on top. The only thing I can think of to explain this is that he must be the manager of a supermarket who did it to identify with his employees.
Wow! We just passed over Albuquerque. I could easily pick out the base that I was stationed on, the airport, and the two golf courses I played. The last was easy. They were the only green spots to be seen. The southwest is really desolate.
The drive to Fresno wasn’t too bad. Well, the first 22 miles were horrible, but the last 200 were easy. The car has a CD player. I played the duet CD through twice. I changed cars at Avis. When I got to Fresno, I realized that I still had the key to my first car. Whoops.
I am pretty certain that I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express on that occasion. I must have arrived late. The only room that they had was handicapped-accessible. There was a tub, but no shower. I had to sit down and spray myself with one of those handheld devices that are so common in Europe.
Both a football (soccer) and volleyball team are known as the Fresno Heat.
Although it was August, and Fresno had a reputation for very hot summers, I brought a jacket because I knew that I would be cold in the data center. If I had not, I would have been even more miserable than I was. David Seeto, our technical contact in the IT department, was there during the following process:
The new system came with the operating system and licensed programs already loaded. We had to call IBM to find out what to do. Unfortunately Gottschalks’ software contract did not cover weekends. Nevertheless we finally got IBM to tell us how to remove the licensed programs. When we did so, we got a processor check on the new machine. We called IBM again. They told us first that we probably had a bad disk drive, but we should try to IPL from the tape again. We did. This time the system said that it could not find one of the disks, but it completed the task. A second IBMer told us how to reconfigure the disks to find the second disk drive. By now it was 4 PM.
A “processor check” is a fatal error. The system is not usable without extraordinary intervention.
I then began the process of bringing over the data (trivial but time-consuming) and programs (much more complicated). The most important programs were in the library named AdDept. I successfully brought that entire library over to the new system. Then I deleted all the objects in the AdDept library on the old system. I don’t know why I decided to do that. It was certainly unnecessary, but I could not see how it could cause a problem. That system with all of its contents was surely headed for the junk heap anyway.
The process of converting all of the programs was still running when I left on Saturday evening. I came in on Sunday morning and was delighted to discover that the conversion had completed without any problem. I then put the system through some simple tests to make sure that everything was OK. I soon discovered that, while some programs performed correctly, a few of the most important ones did not. The most commonly used program in the system, WRKADS (work with ads), produced erroneous results.
I tried recompiling the programs that were producing erroneous results. That did not help. This was intolerable. I had no choice. I had to make the CISC system usable again. Here is what I wrote to my partner, Denise Bessette (introduced here), about the process.
David Seeto.
Well, I think that clearing that AdDept library was the stupidest thing that I have ever done. My recovery technique did not work. The 3/5 tape was missing everything changed from their previous install through that date. I had no way of knowing what the previous install date was. Therefore, I selected everything on the RISC box with a change date from 1/1 through 4/30. I think that this is a fairly good approximation since there was definitely an install here on 4/20. However, I did not discover this until 7 PM. I left Gottschalks at 11:15. The files were finished, but the compiles were still running. Could someone sign on tomorrow morning to test the WRKADS programs? Send me a message with the results.
I canceled my hotel reservation in Santa Clarita. I am staying at the Holiday Inn near Gottschalks. I plan to go into Gottschalks to make sure that things are running reasonably well.
Could you tell Mary Ng that I will try to be in early in the afternoon?
If I had to work with David Seeto every day I would have to take a header off of a bridge.
I only punched one wall today. The wall is fine, but one of my knuckles is very sore.
Gottschalks’ IT department placed a service call with IBM. A customer engineer appeared and ran diagnostics on the new hardware. He testified that it was all in order. As far as IBM was concerned, since the hardware was functioning correctly, the problem must lie in either its BASIC program product, for which IBM had withdrawn support, or our AdDept code. In either case it was not IBM’s problem. End of story. The fact that exactly the same model in Connecticut produced results that were different from those of the one in California did not affect the judgment of the IBM people in Fresno.
I tried to explain this to the people in the IT department at Gottschalks. I promised that I would continue working on the problem remotely. They were not a bit happy with a resolution that left them with an unusable computer that they had already paid for and a very slow one. However, they agreed to keep the new system on, as well as the communications setup that allowed people in TSI’s office to sign on to it. So, at least I would be able to gather data from afar.
I returned to New England with my tail between my legs. Two important clients were angry at me, and I could not blame either of them.
I had plenty to keep me busy for the next few months. At some point I flew to California to make up for the visit to Rob-May that I had canceled. A week or two later I flew to Bradenton, FL, to do a demo for Beall’s. After that trip I needed a few days to cobble together a detailed Design Document and a proposal.
During the periods in which I was at TSI’s office I devoted as much time as possible to trying to isolate the problem with Gottschalks’ new system and to find someone at IBM who would listen to my argument. I remember more about the former than the latter. I do, however, remember the moment when I asked an IBMer to look at an example that contained almost no programming code at all. While working in the BASIC interpreter at Gottschalks I displayed on the screen the erroneous result from a simple sum of two constants. I then performed the same task on TSI’s system and got the right answer.
The IBMer was forced to admit, “This must be a hardware problem.” A day or two later he got the customer engineer to return to Gottschalks and replace the “floating-point processor,” which I did not even know existed. Evidently it was used by BASIC and almost nothing else. I signed on and put the new system through its paces. Everything seemed to work perfectly. I called Gottschalks and scheduled another trip in November to effect the migration.
The flight out to California was not as pleasant as the one before the disastrous August trip. Upon arrival in Fresno I wrote back to Denise,”I was nearly overcome with sadness in the airport in Chicago. If this trip goes well, I will probably feel better. The last one made me rethink my whole approach to life.”
Gottschalks went from a grey box to a black one.
The November migration also occurred over a weekend. It went much more smoothly than the first one, but there were still quite a few hiccoughs.
I cleared out the TSIDATA library on the new machine. I then restored the data from the CISC box. It took six hours.
I keyed in all of the user profiles. I checked the system variables, the backup and cleanup schedules, and the automatic reply list entries. I set it up so that QSNADS was started with QBATCH. I keyed in all of the scheduled jobs. I scheduled jobs to stop and start fax support.
Todd Burke5 from IBM came in the afternoon. He had installed the operating system in August. However, he had failed to install the extended help, the previous compiler support, Advanced Function Printing (needed for faxing), and the Communications Utilities (needed for RJE6). He set up a console in the operator’s area so that it receives break messages from the QSYSOPR message queue.
DATEINFO7 was not in TSIDATA. I discovered this last time, but I forgot. I had to restore it from the old system.
I installed all changes from our system from 8/17 through 11/3. I didn’t leave on Sunday until 8 PM. I was the first to go. I was so tired that I missed my exit going back to the hotel.
I changed TOSHA_B’s user ID to TOSHA_A8 and STEPH_K’s to STEPH_M. If they are going to use ID’s like those, they should prevent the women from getting married.
Todd set up the faxing incorrectly. I don’t know what he did wrong, but the software support person had me delete everything he did and key it in again. She also had me fudge one of their files using DFU9!
When I left everything was working. David Seeto said that he felt as if a huge weight had been lifted from his back.
I’ve spent considerable time in the L.A. airport three times this year. No movie producer has yet to approach me with a multi-picture deal.
That was not the end of the story. I submitted two invoices to Ernie Escobedo for my time at Gottschalks in August and November. I did not ask for reimbursement for the dozens of hours that I had spent researching the problem and trying to get IBM to take a second look When TSI had not received payment more than a month later, I asked Ernie about them. He said that he was “not inclined to pay them.”
I wrote him a long letter in which I described the efforts that I had undertaken to get that defective new system to work. I also said that I understood why Gottschalks was still upset about the situation, but the villain in this case was IBM. The company had installed equipment that did not work and refused to recognize that fact just because the diagnostics that someone at IBM had designed did not allow the customer engineer to detect the problem. Ernie promptly approved the payment of both invoices.
Stephanie Medlock.
AxN: In 2003 Bob Wroblewski and I made a trip to California to show TSI’s online insertion order system to Rob-May and Gottschalks. That trip and Bob’s involvement with the project has been described here.
The reception to the presentation seemed quite positive, bur Stephanie never agreed to try AxN. She stuck with faxing her orders until the end.
Life in Fresno: During most visits to Fresno I stayed at a Hampton Inn that was a short drive from Gottschalks’ headquarters. I always rented a car; public transportation was not a viable option in Fresno. I found no restaurant in which I felt comfortable dining alone. For most suppers I got takeout. There was no shortage of establishments that specialized in fast Mexican food.
My only recreation was running. I was able to map out a course through the suburban streets near the hotel. Traffic was a problem at only a few intersections.
The weather always seemed good. The most peculiar thing that I remember about Fresno was the tule fog. Occasionally a fog bank would abruptly drop the visibility to zero for a short period of time. This happened once while I was there. On Highway 41, the major north-south road in the San Joaquin Valley, it caused a collision that involved a large number of vehicles. The phenomenon has its own Wikipedia page.
Epilogue: In 2000 Gottschalks acquired the Lamonts department store chain. The acquisition gave Gottschalks a presence in the Pacific northwest and Alaska. In retrospect this must have been the impetus for the upgrade to the AS/400. However, the results did not meet expectations. In 2008 the company was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. In the next year it declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. By July of 2009 all the remaining stores had been closed.
Robert Guinn.
1. Robert Guinn’s career after Gottschalks led him back to his alma mater, Fresno State, as is described on this webpage.
2. Frederick Atkins Inc. was a non-profit company that bought merchandise for the companies in the Frederick Atkins Group. In the late nineties quite a few independent chains of department stores still belonged to the group. A description of the concept is posted here. The company went out of business in 2015. At that point the number of independent department store chains could be counted on one hand.
3. As far as I remember, he persuaded no other company to buy the system. Of course, I did not expect him to. However, he did arrange for me to make a presentation to members of the group at a convention in Naples, FL. That adventure has been described here.
4. The Club One Casino, which was really just a card room, moved away from downtown during the pandemic.
5. I do not remember Todd Burke, but I found his LinkedIn page here. For some reason his list of experiences skips over his time in Fresno, as well as everything else in 1999 through 2018.
6. RJE is one of the hundreds of TLAs (three-letter abbreviations) employed by IBM in those days. It stands for Remote Job Entry. I don’t remember precisely how it worked.
7. I don’t remember what DATEINFO was used for or why it was not in TSIDATA, the library that contained all information that pertained to the client.
8. According to LinkedIn Tosha’s user ID would be TOSHA_G if she was still working at Gottschalks. For some reason I was not allowed to see her LinkedIn page, but I did find a reference to her here.
9. DFU was shorthand for Data File Utility. We never told any of our clients that it existed, and we never used it. It allowed the user to go in and change any field on any record of any data file. There was no audit trail whatever. This violates sacred principles of database design.
For more than a decade after TSI began marketing AdDept, its software system for retail advertisers, the chain of department stores now known as Macy’s Inc. was called Federated Department Stores (FDS). The company was acquired in the eighties by Robert Campeau, a Canadian real estate magnate. For a short time it was merged with Campeau’s other stores and called Federated and Allied Department Stores. In 1992 the company emerged from bankruptcy as FDS, the same year that Macy’s filed for Chapter 11 protection. In 1994 FDS found enough cash in the cushions of the sofas in the furniture departments of its stores to purchase Macy’s shortly after Santa’s favorite retailer emerged from its own bankruptcy. Details of the takeover can be read here.
In the early nineties I was just beginning to learn about retail in America. It shocked me that a bankrupt company could stiff all of its vendors and then have the wherewithal to buy another company of about the same size. A lot of craziness like this happened in the nineties. I never did figure it all out, and the two companies involved in this transaction were a thorn in the side of TSI for the rest of its existence.
I don’t know why Val used a photo that cut off her chin.
In 1992 FDS had eight regional divisions. Each division produced and placed its own advertising from the divisional headquarters. The first FDS division that contacted TSI about purchasing the AdDept system was the Bon Marché, which was based in Seattle. I was called by Val Walser1, the Director of the Advertising Business Office there. She had received one of TSI’s mailings in late 1989 or early 1990, and she thought that the system might be what they needed. I talked with her in person twice, once at the Retail Advertising Convention in Chicago and once in Seattle. I gave Val a private demonstration in Chicago, and I showed the system to the rest of the team in Seattle. Those encounters have been described in some detail here.
No mention of Federated.
I don’t think that I knew at the time that the Bon Marché was part of FDS. Even if I did, I don’t think that I realized then that the parent company was about to declare bankruptcy. I was inexperienced; I probably made some errors in judgment. Perhaps I made a mistake by proposing a system that would only be minimally sufficient for their existing operation. Maybe we did not follow up often enough or in the best way.
Although Val informed us that she had requested funding for the system, it was never approved, and after a while we did not hear any more from her. We continued to send materials to her periodically. Until I began the research for this entry I was unaware that she had any involvement in deploying a system that was initiated by the FDS division most distant from Washington, Burdines in Florida. Val apparently oversaw the development of the administrative part of the FedAd (or whatever it was called at that time) system. By then her division was known as Macy’s Northwest, which was folded into Macy’s West, a long-time AdDept user, in 2008.
TSI’s fruitless contacts with Burdines have been documented here.
From the beginning I thought that Jordan Marsh, the Boston-based department-store chain, would be a valuable customer for TSI. Like the Bon Marché, Jordan Marsh was actually part of the Allied group before Campeau acquired Federated and merged all the stores into one gigantic chain. At one time there were also Jordan Marsh stores in Florida and San Diego, but by 1991 all of those stores had closed or were no longer controlled from Boston.
Kate Behart, whose career at TSI is described here, arranged for me to do a demo for people from Jordan Marsh’s advertising department at an IBM office. I don’t remember any of the names of employees at Jordan Marsh. In fact, the only things that I remember about our meeting with them were that Kate was very upset that I had used the word “gals” at one point and that they informed us that they wanted our system.
I am sure that Kate must have followed up on the presentation. She was very conscientious. However, nothing came of it.
Bloomingdale’s, the high-end department store with headquarters in New York City, contacted TSI several times. The last of these exchanges of telephone calls was handled by Doug Pease, whose successful marketing career at TSI is detailed here. We certainly sent them detailed materials about AdDept and the AS/400. I might have done a demo for them at the IBM office. I clearly recall that we went to their headquarters in Manhattan and gathered specs about their needs. I can still picture the Manager of the Business Office, who wore a three-piece suit and had a long pony tail. Guys with pony tails were not unusual in the creative and production areas of advertising departments, but he was the only one that I ever saw in the financial area.
Doug followed up on our visit with several telephone calls. At one point he became certain that Bloomies would buy the AdDept system. Nevertheless, not long after he had voiced his certainty, he got the telephone call that dashed his hopes. He never told me the details, but he was visibly upset about it.
One of the biggest disappointments in my career was not being able to land Liberty House, the department store in Hawaii and the Pacific, as a client. When Doug, Sue, and I flew out to Honolulu in December of 1995 to meet with Karen Anderson (detailed here), Liberty House was an independent chain of stores that included both department stores and much smaller stores in locations convenient to tourists. Those stores specialized in “resort ware”.
Macy’s on Union Square in SF.
Our presentation went very well. Karen told Doug in a subsequent conversation that she had requested funding for AdDept, but there was a freeze on capital purchases. The freeze persisted until the company entered bankruptcy in 1998 and closed most of the resort stores. When it emerged from bankruptcy it was gobbled up by FDS. At that point the remaining stores were relabeled as Macy’s, and administrative functions were transferred to Macy’s West in San Francisco, one of TSI’s clients.
So, this was as close as we came to a victory in our dealings with FDS/Macy’s Inc.. Many of the newspapers that had been used by Liberty House still subscribed to AxN in 2014.
AS/400s at FSG. I thought that I had a photo of Len, but I cannot find it.
At some point the AS/400 systems used by the three Macy’s divisions that used AdDept—Macy’s East, Macy’s South, and Macy’s West—were moved to the headquarters of Federated Systems Group (FSG) in Alpharetta, GA, a suburb of Atlanta. I flew down there to consult with Len Miller2, who was in charge of all of the FSG’s AS/400s. I don’t remember exactly what the agenda for this meeting was, but I remember that Len said that long-range plan of FDS was to replace the AS/400 systems with home-grown software running on other platforms. However, he assured me that at that point—soon after the merger with the May Company—it was a very low priority. They would still be using the AS/400s for several years.
My other vivid memory of that day was when we passed a room that contained perhaps twenty desks. At each desk sat someone working on a computer. All of the people were IBM employees who were consultants for Federated.
Len’s predictions both turned out to be true. All of the divisions except Bloomingdale’s were eventually folded into one gigantic Macy’s run from the Herald Square Building in Manhattan. The plan was apparently to use the system built for Burdines and the Seattle division, but it did not have all of the features that the people in New York needed. For several years they maintained AdDept in order to run the Loan Room (merchandise loaned to photo studio for shoots) module that TSI wrote for Macy’s East in the early nineties.
In May or June of 2005 I received a telephone call from Robin Creen3, whose title was Senior Vice-president of Macy’s Corporate Marketing. She wanted me to come to New York to discuss the AdDept and AxN systems. I made an appointment and took Amtrak to Penn Station. Robin instructed me to use the executive elevator at one of the 34th St. entrances rather than the employee’s entrance that I had always used on the other side of the building.
Robin’s office was not in the advertising department. It was on executive row. I don’t remember too much of the meeting, and I cannot locate my notes. I recall that I only got to meet with her once or maybe twice, and I never heard from her or about her again.
I did, however find a copy of a letter that I sent to her on October 7, 2005. Here is the text:
At our last meeting you told me that it was still too early to talk about the future of the existing May Company divisions. Since there have now been several definitive press releases about the makeup of the new Macy’s after the merger, I assume that those restrictions no longer apply.
Needless to say we are concerned about what effect the realignment will have on TSI. We have spent the last 17 years developing AdDept, the software product which has become the standard of the industry for administration of retail advertising departments. The May Company was our largest client.
We know that Federated Department Stores has been working with its Florida division for the last decade or so on a system which overlaps considerably with ours. I am sure that the company has by this time invested a considerable amount of time, money, and manpower in it. It may surprise you to know that I was supposed to be an integral part of the original plan. I met with Mike Rafferty and Gilbert Lorenzo in Huntsville, Alabama, back in the mid-nineties. Their plan at that time was to use AdDept for the accounting functions.
They wanted us to convert our system to run on a PC network using a home-grown relational data base and Microsoft Visual BASIC on each client. To me this seemed like a huge step backwards for us. Their approach would definitely have improved the appearance of AdDept’s front end and provided an integration with the production area, but no one could explain to me how we could possibly support such a system in many locations. The principal problem was that with their proposed architecture someone—presumably TSI—would be required to support both server software and client software. We have never had to support clients—the individual desktop PC’s and Macs. At the time networks were unreliable, Windows was not a mature product, and the Internet was in its infancy. TSI was already supporting a half dozen or more companies, including the two Macy’s divisions, which at the time were not affiliated with Federated. I honestly think that had we participated in the project at the level that they expected, TSI would not have survived as a company. Gilbert and Mike must not have liked my attitude, because we never heard from them again.
Since that time, as I wrote you earlier, most of the rest of the department stores in the country—as well as several other large retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods—have successfully implemented AdDept in their sales promotion departments. They were able to get affordable systems tailored to their requirements. AdDept is not a sexy system, but it gets the job done.
No one in the entire country—no one—has the experience that TSI has garnered over the last 17 years in understanding the intricacies of administration of advertising systems. We are offering that experience to Macy’s Marketing. Four of the seven newly aligned Macy’s divisions—East, West, Midwest, and whatever the Marshall Field’s division is called—are long-time AdDept users. Lord & Taylor also uses AdDept. Moreover, a large number of May Company employees have considerable experience using AdDept in many different areas. If I were in your shoes, I would consider this as a valuable asset.
TSI has a very strong relationship with its users—both at the corporate and division level. If you talk with the people at the May Company, I am sure that they will verify that we have always done what they asked, that we do an excellent job of supporting our product, and that we give them a lot of bang for the buck.
There is one big additional factor. We are not on their payroll. When they wanted to spend money to make the system do new things, they used us. When they were tightening their belts, they did not have to worry about paying the salaries of programmers, system architects, data base administrators, etc.
So far in our discussions TSI has done most of the talking. What we would really like now is to learn what you and the other people in Federated’s management need to get out of the system. A goal-oriented approach works best for us. We have moved mountains for other clients, and we would definitely appreciate the opportunity to tell you how we would attack your biggest problems. We have never shrunk from such a challenge in the past. Our track record in this regard is essentially flawless. If someone will tell us what they need, we will provide it.
Do you think that we could schedule a face-to-face meeting with you and whoever else is involved in this project about this challenge? We have always been straight-shooters, and we would be eager to listen to whatever you have to say.
My last two encounters with Macy’s were both about insertion orders for newspaper advertising. TSI had developed and successfully marketed an Internet-based system for insertion orders to newspapers. Macy’s West, Macy’s South, and most of the May Company divisions that FDS acquired in the merger used it, and they all loved it. We called it AxN, which was pronounced “A cross N”.
I knew that, compared to our other AdDept clients, Macy’s East used a small fraction of the programs that comprised AdDept. Still, they were entering the ads, and, therefore, they were a good candidate to use AxN. I wrote to the Media Director, whom I had never met, and requested a meeting about AxN. He seemed very interested. We scheduled a meeting, I made a dozen or so copies of our sales materials for AxN, I packed them in my briefcase, and I boarded the 6:30 train again. I was alone because TSI had no marketing/sales person at the time.
The meeting was not what I expected. It was conducted by a man named Roman from the IT area, not the advertising department. My presentation was very well received. Roman said that it was very impressive.
He pressed me on whether TSI planned to provide a way to send the layouts for ads over the Internet. This surprised me. I thought that this was a problem that had been addressed years earlier. The market leader was the Associated Press’s AdSend service, but I also knew of several competitors. I said that TSI had no plans to enter that market. I explained that we had neither the infrastructure nor the expertise necessary to compete in that arena. Besides, none of our clients had asked for it, and they were not shy about requesting our services.
He said that we should consider it. Macy’s was looking for someone who could enable them to use the Internet for both insertion orders and the delivery of ads, “because, you know, one-stop shopping is better.”
What should I have said?
I had three hours on the train to mull this over. I had made a mistake by letting this remark go unchallenged. It seemed like such a silly thing to say. I thought that they would want expertise and experience, not fewer phone numbers.
If one-stop shopping really was the objective, then I had no chance of ever persuading them to use AxN. Therefore, nothing could be lost by asking for proof of any real value associated with having one vendor doing both tasks. I knew very well that the people who placed orders for newspaper ads were completely separate from the employees who created the actual layouts and sent them to the papers. This was true at Macy’s in New York and at every other large retailer that I had met with.
We never heard from them after that.
I learned later that Macy’s East’s advertising department had never used AdDept for insertion orders, even though they could have easily faxed the orders from the AS/400. Instead, each coordinator had developed ways to communicate with the reps at the paper. It sounded chaotic.
My last frustrating encounter with FDS (by then known as Macy’s Inc.) occurred in, I think, 2007. This one revolved around Dave Ostendorf, whom I had known quite well when he had been the liaison between TSI and the advertising department at Famous Barr, the May Company division based in St. Louis. Much more about my relationship with Dave and the installation at Famous Barr is posted here.
This is the only picture I could find of Dave Ostendorf. He is on the far left side of the table in the white shirt.
Dave called me about the use of AxN. He said that the people for whom he worked in Macy’s Corporate Advertising department asked him to find out how much we would charge for an interface between AxN and the system that had been developed internally. Dave was a very straight arrow. I trusted him (unlike everyone else mentioned in this entry) implicitly.
Of course, I asked for more details, but Dave would not provide them. He was rather sheepish about this. He advised me just to write up a proposal in our usual format with as many disclaimers as I wanted to include. He also specifically warned me not to low-ball it. So, I wrote up a quote for $20,000 that may have set a world’s record for use of phrases like “assuming that”.
A short time after I talked with him Dave resigned his job at Macy’s and moved back to his home town of Indianapolis. Needless to say, no one ever called about the quote. I have always suspected that it had been used as a justification for further investment in the corporate system.
So, my interactions with FDS and its successor Macy’s Inc. were completely fruitless. If FDS/Macy’s Inc. was the Brass Ring of our field of software, it was in sight quite a few times, but we were never able to snatch it.
My only real regret is that I do not completely understand why we continually failed. Our success with every other department store chain was close to universal, and the employees in the advertising departments at FDS and Macy’s divisions seemed enthusiastic about what TSI had to offer. However, in these situations we were up against an amorphous alternative, the system developed for Burdines and the Bon Marché, about which I knew very little.
One thing that struck me when rereading the letter that I had written to Robin Creen. I seemed to be asking for an opportunity to see the alternative. As a debater and a debate coach I was much better on the negative. I seemed to feel confident that if they just told me what they were using or planning to use, I could demonstrate what was wrong with it. Even if our software was lacking in some areas, I felt confident that we knew how to change AdDept to make it better.
Fortunately TSI found plenty of work outside of FDS/Macy’s up until the time that Denise and I were ready to dispose of the business. If some of these opportunities had gone the other way, it seems likely that we would have missed out on some of our other achievements.
1. Val Walser worked int the advertising department in Seattle until Macy’s brought all of her division’s administrative functions to San Francisco in 2008. Her LinkedIn page, which is here, says that she “directed development of a sophisticated, integrated software product, which was Macy’s premier marketing/advertising system managing all departmental functions.” I presume that this refers to the system once known as FedAd that was begun by Burdines.
2. Len Miller apparently still works for Macy’s in 2022. His LinkedIn page is here.
3. Robin Creen left Macy’s in 2008. Her LinkedIn page is here.
In the second half of 1995 Doug Pease, TSI’s Director of Marketing, had been in fairly constant communication with Karen Anderson, the Advertising Director at Liberty House, a chain of department stores in Hawaii. One day he came into the equipment room, which also served as my office, and told me that Karen asked for someone from TSI to fly to Honolulu to show the AdDept system (described here) to them. We arranged to meet with them on two days in the first week of December.
I was very excited about this opportunity, not so much for the potential business as for the chance to go to Hawaii. Sue and I had been through a very rough period (as described here), but the one thing that we really both liked to do was to travel to new places. Moreover, the weather would be starting to get nasty in New England, and it was almost never nasty in Hawaii.1 I decided to extend our stay in Hawaii to allow enough time to sample all the islands.
I went to Barnes & Noble on the way home the evening that I learned about the trip and purchased two books: The Maverick Guide to Hawaii and Kauai Trails, written by Kathy Morey. I had determined from previous trips that the more that I planned a trip the more that I enjoyed it. Sue and I did a really good job of planning this one.
Doug was not very happy that Sue was coming along. He worried that her presence would be a distraction to the main purpose, which was to land another AdDept client. I listened to his concerns, but I was not about to tell Sue that she had to stay home.
I tried to persuade Doug to take some time at the end and make a vacation out of it as we were doing, but he said that he needed to get back to his family. So, Doug scheduled a separate flight back to Connecticut by himself.
On the morning of our scheduled departure, neither Sue nor her car were around. I called her at her business in Springfield, MA, that she called Dance Space. She said that she had been working on the wiring all night. I told her that it was almost time to leave. She had no idea what time it was.
I later came to understand that Sue’s approach to long-distance travel was to leave exhausted, sleep fitfully on the airplane, and totally crash upon landing. Needless to say, this was not my approach. I did not want to waste one second of daylight in Hawaii.
The three of us flew together from Bradley to Honolulu. It was a very long trip, but we gained five hours, and so, despite the time lost in the layover in Los Angeles, it was still daylight when we landed. I fell in love with Hawaii the instant that we landed. There were palm trees on the airport grounds, the terminal was, for the most part, defiantly open to the elements, and the weather was perfect—sunny, dry, and around 80°.
The Honolulu airport was noteworthy for many things. One that I remember clearly was the ubiquitous stands that contained booklets and leaflets describing things to do in Oahu. I later discovered that similar stands at the airports on the “neighbor islands”. We soon learned not to put too much stock in the recommendations in the booklets, which seemed mostly limited to the heaviest advertisers.
We rented a car and drive to our hotel. The “Interstates” in Hawaii start with the letter H rather than I. It is a safe bet that the two systems will not connect any time soon. I don’t remember the name of the hotel, but I am pretty certain that it had free parking and was near the canal ,only a few blocks north of Waikiki. It was not luxurious, but it seemed nice enough to us. I remember that our room had a balcony, which in Hawaii is called a lanai (lah NIE).
The business visit: I think that we did the demo at IBM’s office before we talked with the people at Liberty House. I much preferred to arrange the visit in the other order. Perhaps we could only get time at IBM on the first day. Karen was extremely positive about the system after my presentation. She also told us that we did not need to wear suits at the Liberty House office. She said that most people there wore “aloha-wear”. We wore suits.
We learned the next day at the Liberty House headquarters in downtown Honolulu that the chain had two types of stores: large department stores that were equivalent to the regional department stores on the mainland, and much smaller boutique stores that catered to tourists. The newest department stores was actually on Guam.
At the end of our meetings we told Karen that it had been snowing when we left Connecticut. She said that she would really like to see it. I told her that she could have it. She insisted, “But it’s so beautiful.”
I replied, “Well, it’s white, if that is what you like, but that’s only for the first day or two, and it sometimes stays around for weeks or even months turning dirtier and uglier by any standard.”
A ;arge Liberty House store was in the Ala Moana shopping center on the southern side of Honolulu. This shopping center was essentially just like a mall on the mainland except that this one has no roof over the interior courtyard. People in Hawaii are not afraid of “Liquid Sunshine” even when shopping. Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus, and Nordstrom have stores there, and there are innumerable boutique stores.
While Doug and I were in meetings, Sue explored Honolulu. At the time she was really into ballroom dancing. She walked to a place near the hotel that had a famous dance floor. I can’t say that I was sorry to miss that visit.
The pitch to Liberty House went as well as could be expected. When we got back to New England, we sent them a proposal, and Karen put in a request for funding. I had every hope for a second trip to paradise to install, train, and investigate a few things that Sue and I had missed. Unfortunately, Liberty House’s corporate management imposed a freeze on capital spending. In fact, Liberty House declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1998, and when it emerged from bankruptcy in 2001, it was acquired by Federated Department Stores and merged into Macy’s West, an enthusiastic AdDept client.
So, the return trip to Hawaii was delayed for twenty-three years. That adventure is described here.
Fun on Oahu: We knew that we needed to get our Luau Cards punched. No one is allowed to leave Hawaii without attending one. I think that we asked Karen and her staff which of the luaus we should was the best. They all recommended Germaine’s, and insisted that it was worth the drive.
Sue, Doug, and I attended, and we all had a good time. The entertainment was pretty good. The food was plentiful if not spectacular, and, best of all, we learned that we had not missed anything by never eating poi. I am sure that Sue took many photos, but I could not find them. Germaine’s website contains an abundance of photos. They can be viewed here.
ABC stores could be found on almost every block of the touristy parts of Honolulu. I spent some time buying postcards to make acquaintances back in New England envious. It occurred to me that people in Hawaii probably never receive postcards. So, I bought one and sent it to Karen.
Notes on the images displayed here: I am virtually certain that somewhere within the house at 41 North St. in Enfield, CT, are hundreds of stunning photographs of this trip. I have only located two of them, and those two have been on display in a collage on the wall of my office for at least ten years. They have faded badly, to the point that their only real use now is to prove that I am not making all of this up.
So, I have been forced to use images copied from the Internet. If anyone objects to the use of any of the images, I will remove the objectionable ones.
Sue, Doug and I drove to the memorial in Pearl Harbor. It was OK, but I did not feel like tearing up or anything. I enjoyed the drive past Aloha stadium better.
Doug and I climbed to the top of Diamond Head one morning. At the time I was in pretty good shape from running, and Doug did a lot of riding on his mountain bike. So, neither of us held up the other. The view from the top was easily worth the effort.
After Doug flew back to New England, Sue and I stayed on the heavily populated island of Oahu. That adventure is described here.
1. Hurricane Iniki had struck the islands (especially Kauai) very hard in 1992. Otherwise you could count on periods of rain every day in the rain forests in the center of every island and clear and warm weather everywhere else.
By the mid-eighties Sue and I really needed help with marketing. We had some good products to sell, and our service was fantastic. However, our salesmanship was poor. I could often persuade people that I could develop a solution to a difficult problem, but I was not very good at persuading them that TSI’s product and approach were better than those of our competitors.
The first person whom we engaged to represent us was Joe Danko, who lived on Cape Cod. At first the relationship was on a commission-only basis. Later we considered hiring him as our salesman, but we decided against it. The details are described here. Joe was never actually an employee, and we never paid him for his services. I don’t know how much effort, if any, he put in on our behalf.
Trust me; Paul was nothing like this guy.
We hired some consultants to help us. They, in turn, hired a graduate student named Paul Schrenker, to sit in Sue’s office in Rockville when she was on the road. We provided a list of presidents of ad agencies and their phone numbers. In only a few cases was it a direct line, but, even so, quite a few people agreed to talk with him. Ad agency executives were all about relationships. Whether Paul was a potential client or a potential vendor did not matter that much; many agency heads were always on the lookout for connections. So, a surprising number of advertising executives accepted a cold call from a graduate student who knew a lot about biology but very little about any aspect of the business world.
The Patriots debacle was not O&P’s finest hour.
One of the ad agencies, O’Neal & Prelle in Hartford, agreed to an appointment, and we eventually closed the sale. Paul did not participate in closing the sale, but he did make the first appointment.
TSI severed its relationship with the consulting firm. We decided instead to hire a full-time salesman, and we approached it in the same way we had recruited programmers and administrative people—by placing an ad in the newspapers. I think that we interviewed a couple of people. One stood out, Michael Symolon. He seemed excited about the job, and he was quite well-spoken. He was a graduate of Central Connecticut. He had worked in marketing for five years at Triad Systems, a company that specialized in software for dentists.
What about TSI?
I think that we hired Michael at some point in 1987. His LinkedIn page, which can be found here, was no help in this determination. Although he included previous and subsequent employers, he left TSI off of his list of experiences. We paid him a pretty good salary as well as commissions.
I remember that when he first began to work at TSI Michael was gung ho about setting up a nationwide sales organization. He advised me to schedule annual trips to exciting destinations exclusively for the most productive reps of our software systems.
Michael.
This attitude shocked me a little, but he eventually revised his expectations when he discovered how complicated the GrandAd product was. Our competitors could undercut us on price on the hardware, and there was not much that we could do about it. The key to selling was almost always our willingness to customize the system for the prospective client. The idea of setting up a network of sales agents seemed unworkable to me. If I could not deal with the people personally, how could I assess what changes were necessary and feasible?
We gave Michael room to be creative in his approaches, but I was not ready to discuss how to celebrate sales generated by imaginary salesmen.
9.5 rounded up.
Terri Provost left the company shortly after Michael was hired. Michael interviewed and hired Linda Fieldhouse to take her place as administrative assistant/bookkeeper. Both of them are described here. Michael assured me that Linda was “at least a nine and a half.”
I am pretty sure that Michael and I went on a couple of ad agency sales calls together. I remember driving up to Vermont with someone—it probably was Michael. When I got out of the car I realized that I was wearing the pants for my pin-stripe suit with my blue blazer. We did not get the sale, but I don’t think that my fashion faux pas was the cause. Vermont is not known for haute couture.
I also remember that Michael accompanied me to Keiler Advertising once. Evidently he had once dated Shelly, who at that time was in charge of bookkeeping there. Michael was very embarrassed by the incident. I did not ask him for historical details.
I don’t remember him closing sales of any new GrandAd clients.
We took Amtrak from Hartford’s Union Station to NYC.
Michael also came to New York City with me for at least one very important presentation to Macy’s in 1988. He was almost a hero, as is described here.
Michael invited Sue and me to supper one evening at his house in Farmington. We got to meet his wife and kids. It was a very nice house, but I don’t remember any details.
I am sorry to report that Michael was at the center of TSI’s first great crisis, which is described here.
I ran into Michael at Bradley International one day in late 1988. He told me that he was working for a company that sold advertising software to magazines. I told him that Macy’s had finally signed the contract, that I had been working my tail off to get all the software written and installed, and that TSI would send him his commission check as soon as we got the final check from Macy’s. There did not seem to be any hard feelings.
For a couple of years TSI muddled along without a salesman and with very little effort at marketing. Those were very difficult years in a number of ways. By the spring of 1991 the AdDept system had two pretty substantial accounts, and we felt that it was time to start marketing it seriously nationwide.
Meanwhile, our ad agency clients seemed perfectly content with their current hardware and showed no interest in converting to the AS/400, the system that IBM had introduced in 1988. It is described here.
We hired a young man named Tom Moran to help with marketing. He was a very nice guy, but he knew next to nothing about computers, advertising, retail, or, for that matter, marketing. He was definitely eager to learn, and he was willing to follow up on leads, which was the most important thing. Plus, both Sue and I liked him.
I remember going on two trips with Tom. The first was for a meeting with Hecht’s in Arlington, VA. Sue, Tom, and I drove down to the Washington area. A Motel 6 on the Maryland side of DC kept the light on for us, and I am happy to report that no murders were committed (or at least none reported) there that night. It was the first and last time that I stayed at a Motel 6.
The three of us met with Barbara Shane Jackson, who was in charge of Hecht’s patchwork PC system and her boss, the advertising director, whose name I don’t remember. Tom did not contribute much, but it was a good meeting on the whole. In the end we got the Hecht’s account.
The RAC was held at the Hilton in downtown Chicago.
Tom and I also attended RAC, the Retail Advertising Conference, in Chicago. It was a huge pain to get everything prepared for our booth there. We had to rent an AS/400 from IBM and to hire union employees to set everything up. Nevertheless, we did manage to get our demo computer system working by the time that the attendees came to visit the vendor area.
Some vendors who were familiar to us were there. Camex, the company from Boston that specialized in programming and selling heavy-duty Sun workstations for the production of ads, had an exhibit that was ten times as large as ours and had a dozen or more people. Tapscan, the broadcast software company. was right across the aisle from our booth. One young lady who worked there must have accidentally left her skirt at home. It appeared that over her black pantyhose and high heels, she was wearing a wash cloth that she purloined from her hotel room.
Most of the conventioneers were drunk or at least tipsy by the time that they reached our area. We made one contact with the ad director of Hess’s, a department store chain with headquarters in Pennsylvania. Tom gave him a copy of our sales materials and got all of his contact information. Unfortunately, almost as soon as we had begun correspondence with him, Hess’s was acquired by another retailer, and his position was eliminated.
The convention would have been a complete fiasco except for two things. The first was that I got to introduce Tom to the indescribable pleasure of Italian beef sandwiches purchased from street vendors in the Windy City.
The other redeeming event was the appointment that I had made to do a demo at the convention for Val Walser, the Director of the Advertising Business Office at The Bon Marché, a department store chain in the northwest. The programs worked without a hitch, and she was very impressed with what the system could do. She even invited us out to Seattle for a presentation to the relevant parties at the IBM office there.
Tom accompanied me on that trip, too. Our plane landed in Seattle very late, well after midnight. We checked into our hotel, but we only managed to get a couple of hours sleep. We went to the IBM office, where I checked that all of the software was working correctly. By this time I had been chain-drinking coffee for several hours, and still I felt very sleepy. This was an important presentation, and I had to be at my best.
The demo seemed to go pretty well. Everyone was attentive. The people from the IT department were asking tough questions, which usually boded well for us. I was so tired that I could barely concentrate. As we were putting away our materials I realized that I had been drinking decaffeinated coffee all day.
Nevertheless, I convinced Val and the other important parties. We put together a hardware and software proposal, and they submitted a requisition to the IT department, which also approved it. However, the powers that be at Federated Department Stores1, the mother ship, vetoed it.
This episode taught me that TSI needed someone who could navigate his way through the bureaucratic structure to find out what the hold-up was. Tom was not ready for this kind of responsibility. In the end, we decided that we could not afford someone who just tagged along for demos. In fact, we were really in the position where we could not afford anything.
Fortunately, we were able to use the Hecht’s installation as an entrée into the May Company, which at the time had about ten divisions. Not long after that I persuaded Foley’s in Houston to install the system, too. I also convinced Neiman Marcus in Dallas to get the system.
A grainy photo of Doug in an airport.
Those sales gave TSI both a solid base of accounts and enough revenue that we again looked for a marketing person in 1993. We found what we were looking for in Doug Pease, who had actually worked in the advertising department at G. Fox, the local May Company chain.
At first I had hoped that Doug could do some of the demos, but I soon gave up on that idea. I knew exactly what the system did, what it could potentially do, and what was beyond us. The programmers were generating a lot of code every week, and so these lists were in a constant state of flux. Besides, I had a great deal of experience at public speaking, and Doug did not. I don’t think that I would ever have trusted anyone with the demos.
Doug was a real bulldog once he had a hot lead. He was extremely good at following up on everything. In his first year we closed extremely profitable sales to Lord & Taylor, Filene’s Basement, and Michaels Stores.
Susan Sikorski
In April of 1994 I received an email from a woman named Susan Sikorski, who worked at Ross Roy Communications, Inc. in Bloomfield Hills, MI. The company at the time had eight hundred employees (!) and seven satellite offices. They wanted a production billing system that would feed their Software 2000 accounting system and some internally developed applications.
A few years earlier I would have considered this opportunity a godsend. We had already written interfaces for Software 2000 accounting systems for two AdDept clients. We loved to do interfaces, and the more complicated they were the better. However, we were so busy with programming for clients that Doug had landed that this was my response:
Unfortunately, as I looked over your package, I realized that our system does not really measure up to your requirements. We would have to make very substantial modifications to meet even the minimal requirements. Since we specialize in custom programming, this would not ordinarily be a great issue to us, but at this time we would not even be able to schedule the work for many months. So, I guess that we will have to mass.
And it was almost certainly a good thing that I was forced to make that decision. In 1995 Ross Roy Communications was purchased by the mega-agency called Omnicom Group. If TSI had been chosen for the project, I strongly suspect that the plug would have been pulled on it before the system became fully operational. Susan found a new job at Volkswagen in 1996.
Meanwhile, in the next few years Doug managed to get TSI’s AdDept system into all of the remaining May Company divisions, as well as Elder-Beerman, the Bon-Ton, Stage Stores, two Tandy divisions, Gottschalks in California, and all but one of the five divisions of Proffitt’s Inc., which later became Saks Inc..
Doug and I took many sales trips together. The most memorable one was in December of 1997 to Honolulu to pitch Liberty House3, the largest retailer on the islands.
Doug using a client’s AS/400 for something.
We had a little free time while we were there. Doug and I used it to climb to the top of Diamond Head together. He was an enthusiastic mountain biker, he had been a soccer player in college, and he was quite a bit younger than I was. I was in pretty good shape from jogging. So, neither of us held up the other.
Sue accompanied us to Honolulu, and after Doug returned home, she and I had a great time on four different islands, as is described here.
The other trip that was the most memorable for me was when we flew to Fresno, CA, to pitch Gottschalks, a chain of department stores in the central valley.
In those days you could save a lot of money by flying on Saturday rather than Sunday—more than enough to pay for a day’s food and lodging and a car rental. Doug and I considered going to Yosemite on our free day, but there was a problem with the roads there. Instead we decided to drive along the coastal highway from north to south to maximize our views of the coastline.
Somebody else’s photo.
I did not have a camera, but Doug did. His was a real camera of some sort. I was not yet into photography, and I had not brought a disposable camera on the trip. Doug took lots of photos. In fact, he ran out of film. When we stopped for lunch he bought some more film.
Doug took a lot more photos on the rest of the journey, or so he thought. When we got to Fresno he discovered that he had no photos at all after lunch. I don’t remember whether he forgot to load the camera after he took out the film. Maybe he did not wind it, or there was a technical problem. That was not the worst of it. He also somehow lost the first roll of film when we stopped for lunch, and it also contained the photos of his newborn child taken before we left.
But, hey, we got the account.
I guess that Doug is unloading new equipment in Enfield.
Doug and I almost never disagreed about what the company should be doing. However, near the end of his tenure he came up with an idea that I just could not sanction. He wanted us to start a new line of business in which we contracted for large chunks of advertising space from newspapers at a discount and then resold it to small businesses at a profit. Maybe he could have sold a lot of space; maybe he couldn’t. In any case such an undertaking would leverage no TSI products or services and none of the skills that the rest of us possessed. In short, he was asking me to backstop a new source of revenue for him. I declined to do so.
Doug and I made a great team. I gathered specs and did the demos. He attended, met the players, and subsequently followed up on everything. When the prospect had signed the contract, he made sure that all the i’s were dotted and the t’s crossed and ordered the hardware if they bought from TSI or a business partner.4 By 1999 we had more work than the programmers and I could handle. I told him to stop selling new software systems until the programming backlog could be reduced to a more manageable level, which would not be for at least a year. He made the imminently reasonable decision to look for another job.
After TSI moved to East Windsor in late 1999, we hired one more AdDept salesman, Jim Lowe. His previous experience was with a company that marketed hard cider. The challenge was to get retailers to give them adequate shelf space. It was retail experience, but not exactly the kind that we had dealt with.
Jim was a smart guy, and he could have been a good salesman for us. We went on a trip together to Wherehouse Music in Torrance, CA. Wherehouse was a large chain of music stores in California. Jim and I stayed in a nearby Holiday Inn the first night. We used MapQuest to find to the Wherehouse headquarters the next morning. At the very first turn MapQuest advised us to turn right. This seemed wrong to me, and I turned left instead. We reached the building in less than ten minutes. I don’t know when we would have arrived if I had turned right.
It was a very strange meeting. Rusty Hansen, whom I knew from Robinsons-May, had told them about us. We never got to meet with him or anyone else who seemed to know what they wanted. We did get to meet the president of the company, who was wearing jeans and a tee shirt. I never did figure out what this whole episode was about. The company went out of business within a couple of years.
Jim only worked for us for a few months. He took an offer that was very similar to his old job. Before he left he helped me with a mailing that produced some good leads. I sold the last few AdDept systems to some of those retailers by myself.
Jim’s advice to me when he left was that TSI should concentrate on AxN, which is described here. I don’t think that he ever really understood that the horse must precede the cart. We needed retailers to be sending us insertion orders in order to be able to send them to newspapers.
Bob in Denise’s office.
Bob Wroblewski was, as I recall, a relative of Denise’s husband. In November of 2003 Denise came up with the idea of paying Bob to get the newspapers signed up.
I got to know Bob on a trip taken by the two of us to California to persuade Rob-May and Gottschalks to use AxN. We both misjudged how well the two demos went. The people at Gottschalks seemed excited; Rob-May was somewhat cool. However, Rob-May soon came around, and I never did persuade Stephanie at Gottschalks to use AxN.
Here is how the marketing process worked. After a retailer’s advertising department that scheduled its newspaper ads in AdDept agreed to use AxN for insertion orders, it provided us with a list of its newspapers with contact information. I wrote a letter to each paper asking them to subscribe to the service. The letter was printed on the retailer’s letterhead and was signed by the advertising director or ROP manager at the newspaper. However, it was sent by us along with a contract that I had signed. The monthly rate was approximately what the newspaper charged for one column inch in one issue. This was a negligible fraction of what the advertiser spent. Then Bob called each one and persuaded them to sign up.
I don’t know (and I don’t want to know) what Bob said to the papers, but he had a very high success rate. He also earned quite a bit for himself in commissions. At one time we had over four hundred newspapers that subscribed for the service!
Bob’s wife died while he was still working with us. I drove to Providence, which is where he lived, for the wake.
1. Federated Department Stores owned many large chains that were all very promising potential AdDept clients. The rejection of The Bon Marché’s request may have been a blessing in disguise. In January of 1990, shortly after this meeting, Federated filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It could have been really ugly.
2. Susan Sikorski is apparently working as a consultant for Avaya in 2021. She is featured as a graduate of Wayne State on this webpage.
3. We learned later that the advertising department at Liberty House had approved the purchase of the AdDept system, but the order was never placed because in March of 1998 Liberty House filed for Chapter 11, and the funds for new systems were frozen.
4. TSI was throughout its existence a certified member of IBM’s Business Partner program. However, because of the size of the company we were bit allowed to sell IBM hardware directly. Instead, we needed to pair up with a “managing Business Partner” who actually could place orders. We dealt extensively with several of these companies—Rich Baran, BPS, Savoir, and Avnet. There may have been others.
Needless to say we are concerned about what effect the realignment will have on TSI. We have spent the last 17 years developing AdDept, the software product which has become the standard of the industry for administration of retail advertising departments. The May Company was our largest client.
Since that time, as I wrote you earlier, most of the rest of the department stores in the country—as well as several other large retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods—have successfully implemented AdDept in their sales promotion departments. They were able to get affordable systems tailored to their requirements. AdDept is not a sexy system, but it gets the job done.
