Marshall Field’s was most famous for its store in downtown Chicago and for Marshall Field himself, who was a driving force behind the Windy City’s recovery from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. By the time that I came into contact with the department store chain it was based in Minneapolis and was owned by the Target Corporation.1
The skyway entrance was on the 2nd floor.
In 2004 the May Co. purchased the Marshall Field’s stores from Target with the intention of administering them from Minneapolis in the Marketing Department’s headquarters in one of the high floors of the store that was previously the flagship store for Dayton’s. Its address was 700 Nicollet Mall. The plan was for all of the advertising to be scheduled, purchased, and paid for using TSI’s AdDept system on an AS/400 at the Midwest Data Center in St. Louis. A meeting was scheduled for September 16 at Hecht’s2 Advertising Department in Arlington, VA. I attended, as did representatives of the May Co. and the Marketing Department of Marshall Field’s. Dave Ostendorf from Famous-Barr3 may also have been there.
Richard Roark and most of Dave Ostendorf.
The meeting was unlike any that I had ever attended. The people from the May Co. announced that Marshall Field’s would use AdDept, and the May Co. would pay for any necessary revisions! They made it quite clear that they were being given a blank check. Throughout the rest of 2004 I worked on documenting in some detail the changes that needed to be done. This resulted in a fifty-page design document delivered in December and a fifty-nine page tome sent to them in April of 2005. I found Acrobat files of these two booklets. They are posted here and here.
It seems likely that I took more than two trips to Minneapolis in 2004 but I only found notes from one in November and one in December. Perhaps Dave Ostendorf or Richard Roark from Foley’s4 in Houston helped me gather the information needed for the design documents.
Working conditions: On my visits to Minneapolis I flew Northwest and took a taxi or the light rail from the airport to downtown. I never rented a car.
The top arrow is Marshall Field’s. The bottom is the Hilton. The skyway is 9.5 miles long.
I stayed at the Hilton that was a few blocks south of the Nicollet Mall store. I almost never stayed at a Hilton; I preferred one of the affiliated hotels that awarded Hilton Honors points4, especially Hampton Inns. I have two strong memories of this Hilton:
I could walk from the hotel to the second floor of Marshall Field’s via the skyway without ever setting foot outside. This was a valuable feature in the winter.
There was no free breakfast. However, because I had achieved Silver status in the Hilton Honors program I could go up to the top floor where they had an executive dining room for road warriors like myself. The food there was terrific and free.
Working with the people at Marshall Field’s was a very enjoyable experience. There were, however, a few peculiarities.
The skyway entrance was on the second floor of the store. When I arrived in the morning the store was not open. So, it was a little spooky.
To get to the Marketing (NOT advertising) Department I had to take a fairly large number of escalators. There were elevators, but they were not as convenient.
How many marketing departments posted a map to help its team members.
The people at Marshall Field’s used a different word for many of the concepts with which I was familiar. Customers were called guests, employees were team members, advertising was marketing, ads were called promos, and so on. I kept a list of these, but I no longer have it.
Every time that I went to the bathroom (or anywhere else) I had to call someone to let me back in to the Marketing area, which was restricted. I was very excited in April of 2005 when I was given a badge so that I could come and go as I pleased.
The toilet paper in the bathrooms was the flimsiest that I had ever seen. They must have imported it from another country. I cannot imagine that anyone would buy it in the U.S. Maybe they did it to save money, but they didn’t save any on me. I just used more of it—lots more. I once asked Chuck Hansen5, one of the people involved in the installation, if others did the same. He said, “Oh, yeah. Definitely.”
While I was there in February of 2005 the temperature dipped below -20 Fahrenheit: not wind chill, degrees. I had to go out in that frigid air to walk to the taxi stand to catch a cab to the airport. It was only a couple of blocks, but I was very relieved to see a few cabs lined up and ready to go.
Amy and Becky are seated. Dave has a mustache. The other guy is Chuck. I don’t remember the other two women.
The “team members”: Our main contact in the first few months was Amy Spears, who was the assistant to the Finance Manager, Becky. I cannot remember her last name. They were both very conscientious and amiable. When Becky left the company on short notice in 2005, Amy was in something of a panic. Mari Pittman6 was brought in from Foley’s to take on Becky’s role.
A woman named Thu Le worked on expense invoices. I vaguely remember her. Nate Jeppson7 also worked in the finance area. I helped him fine-tune the entry in the sub-account table. Two ladies named Kimber and Adrianne worked in accounting. Either or both of them might be in the photo.
Soni.
Beginning in April of 2005 David Harris8 assumed the function of liaison with TSI. His main job was managing the Mac network. My memories of him are not very distinct. I remember his replacement, Soni (pronounced like “sunny”, short for Sonja) Froyen9 a lot better. At the end of the project she sent me a tee shirt that had an ad release form with the box for “Released” checked.
Sheila Wilson came from Hecht’s in 2005. She was deeply involved in the AdDept product.
My notes from February of 2006, when the division was officially dubbed Macy’s North, disclosed the names of two new employees in the finance area: Shannon Feuerhelm and Megan Boie. Jackie Smith was hired to place newspaper ads, a job that formerly had been done by Target’s ad agency, Haworth.
The last set of notes were dated in December. They indicated that Chuck, who had been in another department for a few months, had returned to the Marketing Department. They also mention that Lynn Robinson had been placed in charge of Direct Mail.
The projects: Getting Marshall Field’s system up and running was the last gigantic project that TSI undertook. It was so big and so complicated that the individual details have tended to fade. Here are a few things that struck me as I read through the design documents and the month end checklist that I set up for Becky
The most striking thing was that so many changes were required to the file structure, including several new tables. It is a tribute to our system of change management that we were willing and able to implement these changes without disrupting our other installations.
I wrote all of this. I made a few mistakes, but on the whole the presentation was very thorough and professional.
It is hard to understand why PageMaker, which was used to create these documents originally, had so much trouble with non-proportional fonts like Courier. The vertical bars on the reports (e.g., page 9 of document 1) should all align, but they don’t.
So much of what is described is unique to Marshall Field’s. For example, no one had ever used the term “production credits” at any other installation.
I have a dim memory of Item #3. Becky had a gigantic number of general ledger accounts (called “internal” in the document) that did not match up well with the May Co.’s accounts. The cross-reference table was huge.
Any changes to the cost accounting algorithms were risky. These programs were so complicated that they were barely readable. TSI’s programmers were reluctant to touch them because the people who used them were always under severe time pressure. “Yesterday” was the deadline for addressing problems.
I had totally forgotten about the “buckets” and “metro markets”.
The use of “campaign” instead of “event’ must have come from an ad agency. No one talked about campaigns in a retail setting.
I wonder if they actually used all the work that we did on production schedules and the job jacket.
Over $7,000 in changes to the insertion orders are in document 2! I don’t remember if they ever used AxN. It is mentioned on p. 34; I guess that they must have. The NAA# was assigned by the Newspaper Association of America. Prior to becoming part of the May Co. Field’s Haworth bought the newspaper space.
Document 2 mentioned CAPS, which was the May Co. system for expenses and G/L.
I did not remember importing sales by department.
The closing process is lengthy, but it is very specific. I wonder if they actually used the three-page checklist.
Denouement: I am certain that we did exceptionally good work for Marshall Field’s. They always treated me royally when I visited them. It would be nice to be able to say that the department ran like clockwork for decades.
However, that is not what happened. By 2008 Marshall Field’s was no more. The stores that were allowed to remain open were rebranded as Macy’s. Worse news was that Macy’s North (the people with whom we worked in Minneapolis) was consolidated into Macy’s East. The wonderful people and environment that I found there vanished.
I did not think too much about that. We did good work, we got paid, I made some friends, and we made their lives a little better for a short period of time.
The downtown store in Minneapolis was closed for good in 2017. It is in the process of being repurposed for multiple uses.
1. Prior to 2000 the company was called the Dayton-Hudson Corporation. Its name reflected the logos of the Minnesota and Michigan chains that merged in 1969. The company was renamed in 2000 in recognition of the fact that the Target stores produced 80 percent of the revenue. One year later the department store division rebranded all of its stores as Marshall Field’s.
2. The story of the installation at Hecht’s can be read here.
3. Details of the Famous-Barr installation in St. Louis are posted here.
4. My card from those days calls them Hilton H Honors points. I never understood what the middle initial stood for.
5. Chuck Hansen stayed on and is working for Macy’s in 2023. His LinkedIn page is here.
7. Nate Jeppson’s LinkedIn page is available here.
8. David Harris’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.
9. I discovered on Soni’s LinkedIn page (found here) that she studied Latin and history in college. I was also surprised to learn from my notes that she knew how to code in php, which I did not yet know enough about to know that it never shown in caps. She was also the only one of my business associates who followed me on Twitter. In retrospect I feel as if we might have potentially been soulmates. Of course I was eighteen years older than she was.
I have been putting off the writing of this page for the last few months. Macy’s West was a big and important client, but my memories of most of the people and the projects that we did for them are hazy. To make matters worse, I have found very few notes about the installation and no photos whatsoever.
Macy’s flagship store and Union Square.
Macy’s was acquired by Federated in 1994 shortly after both companies emerged from bankruptcy. TSI had been pitching Macy’s West, the division that was administered in San Francisco, about purchasing an installation of the AdDept system for some time.
I am pretty sure that the original inquiry from Macy’s West came from Gary Beberman, who had been our liaison for the very first AdDept systems at Macy’s East in New York City (described here) and who had also consulted on the installation at Neiman Marcus (described here). He and his wife, who also worked at Macy’s, had moved to the Bay Area, and Gary had taken a job at Macy’s West. The advertising department was looking for a system, and Gary recommended that AdDept be considered. He told them what we had accomplished in Manhattan and probably also mentioned things that could have been done but weren’t.
I vaguely remember doing a demo in San Francisco, and I think that Doug Pease might have come with me. I have a vague recollection that someone from the I. Magnin stores, by then managed by Macy’s West, was in attendance. It may very well be that the Macy’s West advertising department was able to use an AS/400 that had formerly been used (probably for accounting) by I. Magnin.
In the first few years most of our dealings were with Gary. I did quite a bit of consulting on my trips to San Francisco, but he did most of the training of the users in San Francisco. Since they used hardware they already owned, we were not involved in quite a few aspects of the installation that we often were.
That arrangement was positive in that it allowed me and the rest of the people at TSI to spend more time on more productive activities. The down side, however, was that none of us at TSI had a good feel for how well the installation was going. Macy’s West seldom called for support and used AdDept for fifteen years. Our association stopped only when the corporate bigwigs brought all of the administrative functions to the Big Apple.
My visits to Macy’s: I made a half dozen or so trips to Macy’s West over the years. I flew to San Francisco on whatever airline had the best rates at the time. It might have been United, Delta, or American. The flight back was always on a red-eye.
The advertising department at Macy’s was located in a building that was a few blocks from the huge store in Union Square. It might have been on Fremont St. I stayed at a Holiday Inn that was on either Mission St. or Market St. I don’t think that the hotel is still there. It may have been sold to another chain.
I did not rent a car; I took BART from and to the airport, and I walked from the hotel to Macy’s headquarters. I may have taken a taxi once or twice. I only remember one meal that I ate in San Francisco. Gary Beberman and I walked to one of his favorite restaurants that was, I think, in Chinatown. I remember no further details. My meals on other occasions were probably grabbed in passing from fast food places.
I am pretty sure that on one occasion I took the cable car from the turnaround on Powell Street up to the top of the hill. I did not visit the Cable Car Museum. It was in my price range. So, either I did not know about it, or I might have been pressed for time.
The people: I only have notes and memories of two people whom I worked with in the first twelve or thirteen years. Emily White was the Senior VP of the advertising department from May 1996 to October 1998. Doug knew her from their time together at G. Fox in Hartford. I later worked more closely with her at Meier & Frank in Portland.
Around the turn of the century there was a major upheaval in the department. This is what I wrote in 2000:
They have recently undergone wholesale personnel changes. We have done a lot of work for them designing interfaces. We have designed very few reports. They must use a number of queries to create reports. The original training was done by Gary Beberman, who lives in San Francisco, and was our first liaison at Macy’s East.
I do not have a good feel for what they are doing at Macy’s West. I imagine that they could benefit a great deal from a few days of our time.
Dan Stackhouse was our liaison in later years. He was in charge of the local network used in the department. He did not really know much about either the AS/400 or the AdDept system, but he was able to gather specs for new projects for us and address connectivity issues.
I remember that Dan was fired by Macy’s, and he sued them over this action. He asked me to submit an affidavit explaining our relationship. I did what he asked, but I doubt that it helped his cause much. I searched the Internet for references to his lawsuit. I did not find much.
AxN: Because of Gary’s close involvement with the project, almost all of the work that we did for Macy’s West was in the establishment of interfaces with their corporate accounting systems. We customized very few reports for them.
One very unusual project was the coding and installation a menu that could be used by people in the merchandise departments to look at information about their ads. They set up user IDs for each department or group that were restricted to the programs and queries available from this menu.
The only other project that I remember in much detail was involved with AxN, TSI’s system for sending and managing insertion orders for newspaper advertising space. Unlike Macy’s East1, the people in San Francisco were very enthusiastic about delivering insertion orders via the Internet.
TSI’s initial contact with the newspapers that would hopefully be subscribing to the service was a letter written by me and signed by someone at the advertising department. I remember vividly that the woman whom we asked to sign it had no additions or changes to the letter, and she definitely wanted us to send it. However, she did not want to take the time to sign the letters herself. She said, “You can just sign them.” So, for the first and only time in my career I added the role of forger to the long list of activities that I did for the company.
The AxN installation at Macy’s West provided TSI with a few far-flung clients. Macy’s purchased Liberty House, the chain of department stores and resort-wear stores based in Hawaii, in 2001. One of those stores was in Guam, and the Pacific Daily News subscribed for several years.
The last trip: My last trip to Macy’s West was for two days at the end of July 2007. I learned that Sheila Field was the Senior VP of marketing. She had in fact been there for several years and before that at Foley’s in Houston, where I spent a lot of time in the mid-nineties. I never had met her, and she was also not available on this occasion. I did meet with many other people. I did not do a great job of learning names. Here is the unedited list from my notes:
Sheila Field.
Sheila Field2 is the Senior VP. She is from Foley’s. I almost certainly know her, but I did not get to see her on this trip. Kedar Stanbury3 is in finance, which means planning at Macy’s West. So is Von Jones4. Their boss is Chuck Allen5. The business office manager is Gary Veran6. His assistant is Diane _______. Laurie Hamilton7 is the print media director. Jennifer Hung8, Kelly ____, and Terry _____ work for Laurie.
They reported quite a few anomalies that they had been living with. I made it clear that they should report these to TSI. We always fixed things promptly. They gave me a list of areas that they were interested in using AdDept for:
Contracts.
Work group limitations for purchase orders. Does this even work? They want to make sure that the direct mail people create nothing but direct mail purchase orders. Do we have a way to do this?
The plan was for me to return in “a few weeks”. I cannot overstate how psyched they were for using AdDept more productively. My notes stated that I thought that they would approve whatever programming was needed for every item on the list.
Alas, the plan never was carried out. In February of 2009 management of all advertising for all Macy’s divisions was consolidated in New York. Within a few years none of the people mentioned above were still working for Macy’s. I don’t think that any of them made the transition to New York.
This consolidation was a major blow to TSI. I knew that there was little or no chance of persuading the consolidated Macy’s to use AdDept. Macy’s West was a big client for both AdDept and AxN.
1. For some reason Macy’s East never used AdDept for insertion orders. They did not even use it to print copies. Instead they called each paper and described each ad that they wanted to run to the newspaper’s rep. It baffled me that they could not appreciate how much faster and easier it would be to use AdDept, which had all of the information on the order, to send orders to all papers at once. Everyone who used AxN—both newspapers and advertising departments—were very happy with it.
2. Sheila Field’s LinkedIn page can be found here.
As soon as the AdDept system at Macy’s in New York (described here) was running reasonably well, the May Department Stores Company became the most attractive marketing target for the system. The largest advertiser (at least in newspapers) in central … Continue reading →
The G. Fox & Co. store in downtown Hartford.
As soon as the AdDept system at Macy’s in New York (described here) was running reasonably well, the May Department Stores Company became the most attractive marketing target for the system. The largest advertiser (at least in newspapers) in central Connecticut was—by far—G. Fox, a traditional department store similar to Macy’s that was based in Hartford. They even had a store that was within walking distance of our new house in Enfield.1 I was well aware that G.Fox was part of the May Company and that the May Company was largely responsible for the development of the mall.
I had purchased a book from somewhere that contained marketing information on large retailers. In it I learned that the May Company, which had been in business since 1877, operated the following divisions in 1989:
G. Fox & Co. based in Hartford.
The Hecht Company with headquarters in Arlington, VA.
Filene’s, a former Federated division based in Boston.
Foley’s, a former Federated division based in Houston.
Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh.
Famous-Barr in St. Louis
J. W. Robinson Co. in Los Angeles.
May California in Los Angeles.
May D&F in Denver.
May Ohio in Cleveland.
Lord & Taylor in New York.
Meier & Frank in Portland, OR.
Venture, a chain of discount stores based in O’Fallon, MO.
Payless, a chain of shoe stores based in Miami.
That’s fourteen independently run divisions that were, except for maybe the last one or two, good prospects for the AdDept system. I figured that if we could persuade the parent company to commit to using AdDept in all of its divisions, TSI would be set for life. Maybe they would even buy us! That was the way that small software companies thought (and dreamed) in the late eighties.
In fact, the May Company during that period was busy acquiring other department stores, and that attitude put a lot of stress on the advertising departments of the divisions that acquired the new stores. There is no doubt that the May Company’s acquisition of thirteen Thalhimer’s stores in 1992 was the impetus for Hecht’s to purchase the AdDept system that year.2 Hecht’s advertising department had been using a PC-based system for producing corporate reports. It was completely incapable of handling the extra load. Similarly, when May D&F was folded into Foley’s in 1993, the Houston division suddenly was facing a greatly increased workload. That caused them to call TSI for help, and we installed an AdDept system for them.3 Capacity was never an issue for AdDept; we always proposed hardware near the lowest end of the available AS/400 models. If a client outgrew its hardware, it could migrate to a more powerful model.
Filene’s store in Boston.
In 1993 G. Fox was absorbed by the Filene’s division. Having a pretty good idea of the problems that this would cause for the advertising department of Filene’s, we tried to interest them in using AdDept. However, for reasons that I have never completely understood, we were unable to get our foot in that door for many years. Filene’s advertising department never took advantage of a significant portion of the system productively enough that we were able to use them as a reference.4
Instead, our third May Company installation was at Lord & Taylor5, where I learned that L&T did not play by the same rules as the other divisions. In some ways that caused headaches; in other ways it was delightful.
Doug Pease: In 1993 Sue and I hired Doug Pease to handle our marketing. One of the primary reasons that we selected him was because he had formerly worked in G. Fox’s advertising department in Hartford. He was looking for a job because the G. Fox stores had been converted to the Filene’s logo, and the advertising for those stores was planned and purchased from the office in Boston. Doug was quite familiar with the work flow of an advertising department that was similar to the ones that TSI was targeting, and he also had some contacts in the industry. Our hope was that he could grab the brass ring of the May Company for us while I was busy trying to get the systems for the three divisions—and a few other retailers—that we had sold up and running.
This was a very important time for TSI. My image of those days resembles a hockey stick. Until that time TSI had experienced rather flat earnings. We were basically just getting by. By contrast, in the last seven years of the twentieth century we had as much work as we could handle, and our financial statements were much better.
Unfortunately, I have almost no notes for that entire period. I talked with Doug on a regular basis, but my focus was on the current installations. I depended on him to establish a relationship with prospective customers. As soon as we hired him we did a mailing to prospective customers, and Doug took to the phones. He talked with several people at the May Company.
The main liaison person between the May Company and the advertising departments of its divisions was named Fred Christen. I never heard anyone say a bad word about him. He had, of course, heard about our work at our three installations, and he seemed to be impressed.
I am pretty sure that we had another “guardian angel” at the corporate headquarters. I often seemed to be at an advertising department at a division at the same time as a corporate auditor whose first name was Linus. His job was to assess the way that divisions were reporting their advertising expenses and income from co-op programs for their vendors. He seemed to be impressed with the way that AdDept handled these things.
May D&F store in Denver.
Fred Christen left the May Company shortly after Doug arrived at TSI. I heard that Fred left to manage his family’s business. Doug established a relationship with Fred’s successor, Dennis Wallace. I am pretty sure that Doug made at least one trip to St. Louis, but I don’t remember the details. At any rate, at some point the May Company decided that AdDept should be installed in all of the department store divisions. At that point Robinsons and May California had merged, May D&F had been folded into Foley’s, Kaufmann’s had taken over the May Ohio stores6, and the May Company had divested the Venture stores. So, we learned about five new clients in one swell foop: Famous-Barr7, Filene’s, Meier & Frank, Robinsons-May, and Kaufmann’s.
In retrospect I find it rather incredible that I have so little recollection of the details of how or when this decision came about. It was definitely a momentous occasion for TSI, but I remember no fanfare or celebration at all. I don’t think that the deal was finalized until 1996 or 1997. In the interim I installed quite a few AdDept systems at other retailers.
Employees at the May Company treated us fairly from day one right up until the time that the company was purchased by Federated in 2006. Most of TSI’s dealings with the May Company were at the division level. The following is a summary of my notes of our dealings with the corporate entity after all of the systems had been installed.
Notes: The first note that I have is dated October 18, 1999. It makes reference to a “sales tax fiasco”. I think that this must be about whether it was necessary to charge sales tax on our software and services. Because all of our AdDept clients were in other states, we were generally able to avoid doing so. However, there is an Excel file with a similar date that lists three invoices for Robinsons-May, which was in California, and three for Filene’s, which was in Massachusetts. Massachusetts and Connecticut had an agreement by which each collected taxes for the other. So, we definitely needed to charge Filene’s tax.
We also had a problem with California. TSI’s second accountant, whose name I do not remember, was hired in the early days of the AdDept system. She advised us to register with every state in which we had clients. This was poor advice, and we changed accountants shortly after that. However, there is no way to take back a company’s registration.
I vaguely remember an issue from several years earlier that involved an arrangement that my partner (and later wife) Sue Comparetto had made with Gottschalks, another store in California. In this case, the invoices were probably sent to St. Louis and paid by the May Company. We had never registered in Missouri, and we never paid sales tax there.
On January 2 of 2000 I wrote the following email to my other partner, Denise Bessette:
I think that we need to get something established as soon as possible with the May Co. to get compensated for your time and mine. Do you have any suggestions? I also think that it might be time for one or both of us of us to go to St. Louis and talk turkey with them. I am serious about this. I really am tired of not knowing where we stand.
I found a six-page document dated February 7, 2001. It concerned the specs for a Planning System Interface. Evidently they had an application called WD that they wanted to feed. They provided me with a document describing the system that had at least sixty-seven pages. Evidently we had been talking about this for at least two years. The document lists my questions and their incredibly vague responses. No one could conceivably quote an interface based on the responses that we received. I only vaguely remember this whole process. “WD” sounds familiar, but I am pretty certain that we never quoted it, much less coded it.
Denise and I went to visit the May Company together, but I think that it was in 2002. I went to St. Louis in 2001 to install AdDept for use by Filene’s on an AS/400 in the Midwest Data Center. I stayed in the Adam’s Mark Hotel. I did not like where they told me to stay. This is what I wrote to Denise.
My hotel room in St. Louis is absurd. It is a huge suite. I located a microwave and refrigerator inside what looked like a chest of some kind. For some reason it is much easier to find these two features in places where it is impossible to buy food (because I am downtown). The bathroom is right by the door, about a quarter mile from the bed. There are two TV sets, but no Jacuzzi, at least not in the room. The thermostat is out of whack. You have to set it to nearly 80 to keep the room from being frigid. I fear that they may not offer free breakfast here. They did not mention anything when I checked in.
It is supposed to rain all day here. There may even be thunderstorms. I was too lazy to run on Sunday. I will probably regret it today.
I hope that the May Co. has a comfortable nap room. I have become quite accustomed to the two-hour post-breakfast naps.
I think that the guy on the phone is Dennis Wallace. I don’t recognize the other two.
I remember that room and the rain much better than I remember what I did at the May Company. On subsequent visits I stayed at a nearby Hampton Inn. Incidentally, more than two decades later I still take lots of naps.
I found an agenda for a meeting with the May Company dated August of 2002. This must be the trip that Denise and I took together. Here it is:
TSI
People
History
Founded in 1979.
Advertising in 1981
Retail in 1988.
First May division (Hecht’s) in 1991
Custom programming
Good at diagnosis.
Incredibly efficient system of delivering custom code using BASIC.
Two principles:
There should be one version of the truth;
Everyone should be able to take advantage of work done by others.
People capable of completing difficult projects within parameters.
AdDept
Intent
All administrative aspects.
All media.
Easily customizable.
Require a minimum of local support — AS/400.
Retail advertising is difficult.
All the difficulties of retail — stores, merchants, accounting, A/P, and co-op
All the difficulties of advertising
Multiple media, each with almost completely different structure
Media scheduling, production scheduling, estimating, loan room, etc.
System design
Scheduling:
Every media represented in the ad file.
Open on-line database works best when each person updates the system with information as soon as it is available.
One main program, many well-normalized files.
History of significant changes:
Production.
Financial.
Financial:
One main set of files (header and detail).
Many front ends with supporting detail files.
Two months, three amounts.
Interfaces
Cost accounting (data warehouse)
Detail at the department level using May Company rules.
Can also be used for other purposes:
Planning
Store-level analysis
Add-ons
Productivity
Competitors
Loan room inventory and transactions
Photo studio
May future plans
Filene’s
Uniformity
Best practices
Technology
Explain CFINT
Explain performance of 5250 v. browser-based
Why “web-facing” doesn’t help
Explain V5
BASIC compiler.
Should we convert to C?
Should we convert to Net.Data?
Should we convert to WAS/Java?
Should we look to Wintel?
Can’t save back very far.
InfoPrint server allows output as .pdf files.
Browser-based programming requires VPN or the equivalent for support.
Other things
AxN.
Peggy Southworth labels.
What else?
Some of this has fled my memory. I do remember that CFINT was a program that regulated performance. Prior to version 5 of the operating system the users could allocate priorities for jobs between “interactive” jobs (5250 sessions on terminals or PCs) and “batch” jobs (everything else, including jobs that relied on something between themselves and the operating system, such as a Java server). IBM wanted to show that the Java jobs had good performance. To do so it slowed down all jobs that were running as interactive. Nothing that IBM had previously done was as hated as this tactic.
I also remember the Peggy Southworth labels. Every division was required to create these labels for each print media job in a precisely specified format. We wrote a program for one of the divisions to do this for them.
The notes indicate that Denise and I met with Rob Cole and Mike Henry. I only vaguely remember them. I have a more vivid memory of Lew Allder, who was a Vice President in the IT department. He showed us around the machine room and assured us that the small size of our organization was not an issue with him or anyone else at the May Company. Everyone with whom we talked was very supportive of what we had done and what we were planning for the future.
Don’t take the bridge across the river.
I also remember one incident that occurred when we were driving either from or to Lambert, the St. Louis airport. I made a wrong turn, and we found ourselves on the bridge that goes across the river to East St. Louis, IL. I had no interest in taking a tour of that town. When there was a break in the traffic I jerked the rental car’s steering wheel to the left, made a clean U-turn and headed back to St. Louis. I think that this maneuver shocked Denise, at least a little.
I tried to find information on what became of the May Company employees mentioned in this entry. However, I was not able to find any information on the Internet about most of them. After a good bit of digging I found Dennis Wallace’s LinkedIn page, which is here. In 2022 he appeared to be working for a company in Houston that provides technical assistance to the hospitality industry.
1. All right, I never actually walked to G. Fox’s store in Enfield Square mall, but I could have.
3. The account of the installation for Foley’s is provided here.
4. The troubled AdDept installation at Filene’s has been documented here.
5. The Lord & Taylor installation is described here.
6. Doug and I made a strong pitch to Debra Edwards at May Ohio, but the division was eliminated before we could close the deal. That “whiff” is described here.
7. I think that Famous-Barr may have already committed to getting AdDept before Doug arrived on the scene, but their decision was probably made because of the May Company’s commitment to the project. The installation at Famous-Barr is described here.
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.
Someone wrote this book about Woodies.
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.
First stop: Norfolk.
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.
All of these stores are gone.
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.
Flagship store on 60th Street.
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 AxN, 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.
The competition.
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.
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.
L&T’s Fifth Avenue store.
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.
Tom had an office.
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.
Chris only had a cubicle.
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.
Jennifer, Denise, and Ali.
Denise Bessette, Bob Wroblewski (who helped TSI with marketing of AxN 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, AxN (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.
HBC started in the fur trade.
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.
Swenson & Kaufmann.
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.
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.
