The Bon-Ton was a chain of department stores based in York, PA. For nearly a century the company was owned and operated by the Grumbacher family. In fact, Tim Grumbacher only retired from the company’s Board of Directors in 2017. So, for 119 out of the company’s 120 years of existence members of the family were closely involved with the ownership and/or management of the company.
In the years that TSI was involved with B-T, it was expanding fairly rapidly. I am pretty sure that the original call to TSI inquiring about the AdDept system was received in 1996 or 1997 and came from Jo Harnish1, who was the Production and Finance Manager for the advertising department at B-T. This was an extremely unusual combination of responsibilities. Ordinarily the production manager and finance manager were separate people with markedly different skills.
Doug Pease, TSI’s Marketing Director, talked with her and arranged for the two of us to come to York to make a presentation. We were surprised when they suggested that the easiest way to get to York was to fly to BWI Airport, which is south of Baltimore, MD, rent a car, and drive north for more than an hour. That’s what we did. At the time US Airways offered several nonstop flights to BWI every day.
My recollection is that the entrance was in that little alcove to the right of the Burlington Coat factory. That entire area later was transformed into a Walmart Supercenter.
The address that we were given for B-T’s corporate headquarters was 2801 E. Market St. It turned out to be in the middle of a fairly large strip mall. The door through which we entered was next to a Burlington Coat Factory outlet. There was only a very small sign on the door that indicated that the corporate offices lay within. I frankly wondered what kind of operation we were getting involved with.
Jo Harnish.
I am sure that on that first trip we met with Jo and Tom Vranich2, the Senior VP of advertising. I already knew Tom. My recollection is that I had talked with him briefly at the Retail Advertising Conference3 that Tom Moran and I had attended in Chicago in the early nineties. At the time Tom V. was the Advertising Director at Hess’s, a chain of department stores based in Allentown, PA.
I remember few of the details of B-T’s requirements. I seem to recall that the paper in York still printed twice a day. I am pretty certain that none of the requirements seemed insuperably difficult to me.
I also don’t recall much about the installation itself or the support trips to the Bon-Ton offices in the subsequent years. What I mostly remember was the time in the rental car. The drive to and from BWI was not particularly difficult, but it was time consuming.
I think that the hotel in which I stayed was behind the strip mall in which the Bon-Ton office was located, but the route to get back and forth was circuitous. I probably stayed at the Hampton Inn that was (and still is in 2022) located in that vicinity. I don’t remember any restaurants that I frequented in York. I think that I generally got take-out and ate in the hotel room. On the other hand, I can visualize parts of the highway and the Market St. area rather clearly.
Bethann Matroni.
At some point Bethann Matroni4 became the head of the advertising business office and our primary contact. The only notes that I could locate indicated that in 2001 she requested that we add a third rate for ROP (display ads for newspapers). The two rates that were already on AdDept’s media schedule file and the rate table represented the actual rate charged by the paper and a marked-up rate that was shown to the merchandise departments and, for co-op advertising, the vendors. The former was often called “net” and the latter “gross”, but because those terms were also used to mean something else, we just called them rate 1 and rate 2. I don’t recall that we ever added a rate 3 to these files.
At about the same time I talked with someone named Tina Hagarman, maintained the schedule for newspaper advertising and ordered the ads. According to my notes, she had just returned from maternity leave. I think that I was in York to explain to her how AxN5, TSI’s system for management of insertion orders over the Internet, worked. The Bon-Ton was one of the first users of that system. I also promised to send Tina a copy of the booklet that I had made about inserts, the preprinted flyers that are sometimes included with the newspaper.
I think that I went into this store in Westfield once, but I don’t recall if I bought anything.
In 1998 I was startled to learn that the Bon-Ton6 was opening a store on Route 20 in Westfield, MA, which was not far at all from where my sister Jamie and her family were living at the time in West Springfield. The surprising thing was that it was the only Bon-Ton store in New England. I had to wonder how it could possibly be profitable to run only one store in an area. This was not part of an acquisition either. Someone at the Bon-Ton just decided that it would be a good idea to locate one of their department stores in this strip mall on the outskirts of a rather small town in western Massachusetts. It was also the last outpost of civilization before the sparsely populated Berkshires.
In 2003 the Bon-Ton surprised most of the retail world by acquiring the stores run by Elder-Beerman, another department store chain that had been using AdDept to manage its advertising. This move approximately doubled the size of the company in terms of the number of stores. The signage for the acquired stores still referenced Elder-Beerman, but management of the advertising for the combined operation was done at the Bon-Ton headquarters in York. Because both of the advertising departments already used both AdDept and AxN, the transition was rather smooth. I don’t think that I even made a trip to York to oversee it.
I don’ t know how much the Bon-Ton paid for the logo.
In 2005 Bon-Ton somehow came up with $1.1 billion in cash to purchase the Northern Department Store group from Saks Inc. This group consisted of three former users of AdDept: P.A. Bergner, Younkers, and Herberger’s7. So, for the second time in two years the company doubled in size.
The advertising for this group was run out of Milwaukee. The facility in Milwaukee was much larger than the one in York. It had a large area devoted to the production of ads as well as a photo studio. The Bon-Ton closed the department with which we had worked in York and moved all of the advertising to Milwaukee. None of the people that we knew in York made the move to Milwaukee.
B-T’s incursion into New England did not stop at Westfield. This store in Concord, NH, was closed in 2018.
I knew very well that there was no possibility of persuading the Senior VP in Milwaukee, Ed Carroll, to use AdDept even if we agreed to let them use it for free. However, I did make an effort to contact the newspaper manager to see if we might interest them in using AxN. It would have been difficult to construct an interface, but the new organization ran a lot of advertising in a very large number of papers. If I had succeeded in convincing him to use AxN, TSI might have been able to limp along until the entire Bon-Ton retail empire after many consecutive unprofitable years gave up the ghost in 2018 and ended up selling all of its properties to liquidators.
I might have been mistaken about the Bon-Ton store in Westfield. It stayed open until the Bon-Ton declared bankruptcy in 2018. I don’t know whether it was ever profitable.
2. Tom Vranich’s LinkedIn page is here. On it he claims (three times) that he worked as Senior VP at the Bon-Ton for over thirty years. I am almost positive that for most of that period he was actually employed at other stores that were eventually acquired directly or indirectly by B-T. Also, since his name was not Grumbacher, I doubt that he started as Senior VP.
3. The adventures of Tom and Mike at the RAC in Chicago have been described here.
4. I could find little on the Internet about Bethann Matroni. I think that in 2022 she may be known as Bethann Brodbeck.
5. A detailed description of the genesis of the AxN system has been posted here. Details about its structure can be found here.
6. A very detailed account of the long history of the Bon-Ton is posted here. Unfortunately it stops in 2001 just before things got really interesting.
Parisian, based in Birmingham, AL, was a little different from the other divisions of Proffitt’s Inc.1 (later renamed Saks Inc.). Its stores were somewhat upscale, but they seldom went head-to-head with Saks or Neiman Marcus in major markets. Parisian was acquired by Proffitt’s Inc. in 1996, and the corporate headquarters was immediately moved to the beautiful Parisian building at 750 Lakeshore Parkway on the north side of Birmingham. By that time Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG) had already decided to implement the AdDept system at all divisions. Therefore, I never made a presentation or demo for Parisian.
I flew to Birmingham and installed the AdDept system in January of 1999. After that day I never laid eyes on the AS/400 or the system console. They were kept in a closet somewhere in the headquarters building. Parisian’s advertising department was located, if memory serves, on the second floor. PMG was on the ground floor. The AdDept users signed on through the network. TSI had nothing to do with the connectivity.
This was a very strange installation. The personnel in the advertising department were not like those that I encountered anywhere else. Aside from the Senior VP, almost everyone else at every level was female. Moreover, every time that I went there, there seemed to be a large number of new people who needed to learn how to use AdDept. Finally, a very high percentage of these women were strikingly good-looking and blonde, and almost all of them dressed much more stylishly than I had seen at any other location, including Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.2 At those two locations the executives and the people who dealt with customers dressed to kill, but those standards were not imposed on clerical workers.
From left: Kimberly Weld, Sally Carter and Cheryl Sides. Josh Hill from PMG is behind them.
I have found quite a few photos of the people at Parisian, and the names of the employees are indicated on some of them. I also have some notes beginning in 1999 that included more names. I have very clear memories of only two people, Cheryl Sides1, who was the official liaison for the AdDept system, and Sally Carter, the manager of the business office. Cheryl was there from the time of the installation up to the demise of the chain. Sally was replaced by Barry Cleavelin in 2001.
For the first year or so the Divisional VP was Alan Seitel5. The Senior VP for most of the period in question was Bob Ferguson, who came over from Younkers6. He was succeeded by Gary Yiatchos7.
Renita Lewis on the left with her back to the camera. Next, in order, are Diane Vogel, Cheryl Side, Kim Wolff, Regaye Fulcher, Annissa Kennedy, Kimberly Weld, Josh Hill, and Angela Dawkins.
David Dollar.
The people: I could hardly believe how many names were recorded in my notes or beside my photographs. I have almost no memories of any of these people. If my notes included a description of their role at the Parisian, I have included it in their entry in this list:
Diane (Vogel) Worthington’s LinkedIn photo.
It seems incredible that I remember nothing about Diane Vogel, who was the Advertising Director at Parisian from 1996 on. I must have had several meetings with her. Her LinkedIn page can be found here.
Kimberly Weld would have won the national title if there had been a Miss ROP Coordinator contest. Her LinkedIn page is here.
David Dollar was the Co-op Coordinator. I seem to remember that he kept a lot of food in his desk.
I think that Dottie Collins might have handled Co-op advertising before David Dollar. Her LinkedIn page is here, but it contains no useful information.
I mostly remember Kim Woolf as the other Kim. She might have been involved with direct mail I found her LinkedIn page here.
Regaye Fulcher sat next to Kim Woolf in one photo. She may have worked with or for her. Her LinkedIn page is posted here
Ginger Brown worked in direct mail.
Colin Mitchell (a woman) was in charge of insertion orders for the newspapers.
Karen Kennedy worked in the production side of direct mail.
In 2000 Kelley Carter was in charge of co-op.
The next year it was taken over by Mollie Donohue. Her LinkedIn page is here.
I met two new people on my last trip to Parisian in 2005. The first was named Justin Walker. I wrote, “Justin Walker, whose title is director of eBusiness, is, I think, the resident techy for the Parisian division.” His LinkedIn page is here.
The other newcomer in 2005 was Luann Carter who came from Proffitt’s I think that she was in charge of trafficking production jobs. Her LinkedIn page is here.
I remember nothing about any of the following people whose name I recorded at some point: Annissa Kennedy, Angela Dawkins, Renita Lewis, and Kelly Denney.
I am completely stumped as to why I do not remember Mollie.
The installation: This was one of TSI’s most frustrating installations. The only difficult thing that they asked for was Bob Ferguson’s calendar. They printed it on a Canon color copier that used Postscript rather than a version of PCL, the Hewlett-Packer language. I said that I would look into it, but I don’t think that we ever even quoted doing it.
This should have been an easy installation, but it wasn’t. They seemed to have difficulty getting even basic programs to work for them. Some of the problems were just bizarre. In 2000 I reported, “CHKFAXSTS doesn’t work on Colin’s Mac. No matter what option you put in, the program interprets it as a 4. This is one of the more bizarre problems that I have encountered.” CHKFAXSTS is an IBM program; no other AdDept user ever had any problem with it.
Renita and Sally.
In April of 2000 I described some of the other difficulties.
Saks Inc. is putting pressure on Sally Carter to use AdDept to do closings. She told Sandy that she doesn’t want to use it because she doesn’t think that it works. We helped her through some problems today with the P.O. accrual program. I should have gone over the closing programs with her in more detail when I was there, but there was just no time. Wednesday I found a bug that threw off the journal entry by $1 million. I fixed it easily, but we looked bad.
This is another face of our usual problem. I have spent an inordinate amount of time at Parisian providing basic 5250 training to people that do not use the system at all and never will. I have also spent a lot of time writing custom programs (mostly their funky advertising schedule) and more than a little time twiddling my thumbs. I have spent no time with Sally to speak of before the last trip. Most of that was spent getting the store allocations to work.
I also reported that in November of 2000 I was asked to train a whole new group of employees in a classroom setting. It did not go well at all:
Barry Cleavelin.
The people in my class on Friday – who seemed reasonably intelligent to me – retained absolutely nothing. Either I am a much worse teacher than I think that I am or people in this type of setting do not think that they are expected to remember anything.
When Barry replaced Sally, I needed to spend several days with him to help him get up to speed on the AdDept processes. During that period we discovered several things that had been handled incorrectly in the past.
Life in Birmingham: I did not hate Birmingham as much as I hated Jackson, MS, the home of McRae’s. Jackson made me feel angry and frustrated. In Birmingham I just felt uncomfortable.
My records indicated that I ate a lot of lunches at Cia’s, which was inside the Parisian building. I have no vivid recollections of any of them
Most evenings I picked up a sandwich at Schlotzsky’s Deli. I remember that I ordered the same thing every time. It might have been a Reuben; that was my most common order at a deli.
I distinctly remember eating at a small Italian restaurant inside a mall. Ordering was done at the counter. I asked for spaghetti and meat sauce. The man at the counter mumbled something that I could not understand. I asked him to say it again. He did, but I still had no idea what he was asking me. I just said, “Yes.” Twenty years later I still have no idea what I agreed to.
At least once Steve VeZain of PMG took me out to his favorite restaurant, Joe’s Crab Shack.
La Quinta.
For most of my visits I stayed in the nearby La Quinta. It seemed to cater mostly to golfers who came to play the courses on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail. The thing that I noted the most about them was that many of them wore leather shoes with no socks. I had never seen this before, and it struck me as being both uncomfortable and unsanitary.
After work I usually jogged five or six miles on paths up and down the highway that ran between the hotel and Parisian. It was not the greatest place to run. Not only was it a little dangerous, but the noise was also disturbing. I had to wear my Bose headphones while I listened to operatic music or instructional tape.
The La Quinta had a pool and a small hot tub. Both of them were outdoors. The first time that I stayed I was able to use the hot tub after my run undisturbed. On all subsequent occasions the hot tub was occupied by golfers. On my last visit I gave up on La Quinta and stayed at a Hampton Inn.
I wrote the following on November 9, 2000:
When I was in Portland early in the year I had enough time to change my clothes before taking the red-eye back to the east. I changed in an extremely cramped stall in the men’s room. When I got home I realized that I was missing one of my wing-tips. I must have left it in the stall. I never threw the remaining shoe away because I thought that I might be able to find the missing one somewhere. After a while I forgot about it.
I went to the store to buy a new pair of dress shoes. I did not want another pair of wing-tips, but the only reasonable ones I could find were wing-tips, so that is what I bought.
This morning I was congratulating myself on forgetting nothing more important than a t-shirt to wear running. I started to put on my shoes. Both of them were right shoes. I evidently picked up the extra shoe by mistake.
I had to make an emergency run to Walmart. It was an unpleasant experience, but I managed to find one pair of shoes that are reasonably dressy (i.e., not hiking boots) in my size. They were on sale for $12.97.
They would not take my new American Express card at Walmart for some reason. I have used it twice.
This store in Pensacola was formerly a Parisian.
Epilogue: In August of 2006 Belk8 purchased the Parisian stores. The management of the advertising was immediately moved to Belk’s headquarters in Charlotte, NC. The five northern stores were sold by Belk to Bon Ton. Some southern stores were closed immediately. The signage on the remaining ones was changed to the Belk nameplate in 2007. Three northern stores continued to operate under their original name until 2013.
1. My experiences working with Proffitt’s Inc. and PMG are detailed here.
2. Most of my trips to Parisian were after the holding company had changed its name to Saks Inc. in 1998. My theory is that the women who applied for jobs in that building, which was the corporate headquarters for Saks Inc., thought that they were applying for a job at Saks Fifth Avenue. Thus, many of those attracted might have envisioned a career at the famous luxury store. After they learned about the other divisions and the pedestrian jobs involved in managing retail, they moved on. This is all just speculation, but I know that the guys in PMG spent as much time upstairs as they could.
3. Cheryl’s last name was, according to the designations on the photos, Sides. However, I also found Sipes and Sykes in the notes. I am not sure what Cheryl did at Parisian beside act as liaison with TSI; she definitely was good at that. I searched the Internet using all three last names but found nothing.
4. I found nothing on the Internet about Sally Carter, Barry Cleavelin’s LinkedIn page can be found here.
6. The history of the AdDept installation at Younkers is posted here.
7. I met Gary Yiatchos when I flew to Seattle for the presentation of the AdDept system to the advertising department of the Bon Marché. That adventure is described here.
8. The history of the AdDept installation at Belk is posted here.
Saks Inc. division based in Des Moines merged into Carson’s. Continue reading →
I am pretty sure that Younkers contacted TSI about AdDept before the company was absorbed into Proffitt’s Inc. I have a rather vivid memory—not to mention a photograph—of a presentation that I did for them at the IBM office in Des Moines. Since Proffitt’s purchased the company in December of 1996, the starting date in the title is probably accurate. It might have been in late 1995.
The downtown Younkers store was connected by skyways to other downtown buildings in two directions.
Doug Pease accompanied me on the first trip to Des Moines for the demo. We stayed at a Holiday Inn that was just north of the downtown area near Mercy Hospital.
I remember that we went to a basketball game at the Knapp Center on the evening of January 27, 1996. The Drake Bulldogs came into the game with a 6-2 record in the Missouri Valley Conference. However, they were defeated by the Tulsa Golden Hurricane1 79-73. Drake seemed to be a little better overall, but they had only one guy who could dribble through a press, and in the second half when the starter had to be benched because of foul trouble. The freshman (Cory Petzenhauser) whom they inserted at point guard was just humiliated. It was painful to watch.
That defeat started a tailspin for Drake, which ended up with a 12-15 record. The coach resigned in March
The only photo that I have of the people from Younkers was taken at the IBM office. The only person whom I recognize is Roger. He is the guy in glasses in the back row near one of the enormous members of his staff.
Des Moines is legendary as a sleepy town, but I remember that Doug and I actually discovered a bit of night life in an assortment of restaurants and bars that were in a redeveloped area between the river and Younkers’ downtown store at 713 Walnut Street.
The system was not actually installed at Younkers until April of 1998.
The primary players in the AdDept installation at Younkers were the Advertising Director, whose name I think was Joe, and Roger Wolf, who was in charge of the advertising business office.
The Tea Room at Younkers.
My recollections of the details of the installation are few. The headquarters was on an upper floor of the flagship store. The Senior VP of Advertising treated us to lunch in the store’s famous tea room. It was quite elegant.
I think that Younkers bought the AS/400 directly from IBM. I don’t remember where it was kept, and I don’t think that I was required to install it. TSI wasn’t involved in connecting the various devices either.
Roger and Joe came to Enfield for training. I remember that practically everyone in the department except for Roger’s group used Macs. We had to research the availability of terminal emulation software for them. Joe had some very specific ideas about tracking the progress of production jobs. TSI was asked to do quite a bit of customizing of the trafficking programs to realize them.
Long after I posted this entry I discovered this photo of a meeting at PMG in Birmingham. Roger is the second from the left in the shirt with vertical stripes. Steve VeZain of PMG is waving on the right. Beside him is someone named Chris from Younkers. He must have been in charge of the Mac network.
I was not there for the flooding of the Raccoon River in 2003, but some of its effects were still visible years later.
Roger’s group of four or five accounting people was tucked away in a small area that was like a mezzanine up some stairs from the rest of the department. The ceiling was low. Everyone sat in a single row facing the wall. It was very cramped and felt rickety.
Roger was as almost as skinny as I was, but two enormous women also worked up there. I could not help wondering if the support beams for their floor were up to the task. For me it was a hellish place to work. Two people had radios on all day long. One played heavy metal rock; the other was tuned to the rantings of Rush Limbaugh.
My notes from 1999 indicated a peculiarity in the way that Younkers did its accounting:
They have implemented a great many things that have the result of increasing the budget for storewide ads. Some of this is at the expense of merchants, some at the expense of vendors. Roger understands this, but he is not good at articulating it.
Some of these “great many things” were quite difficult to program. Several years after the beginning of the installation Roger’s group was still not using the system to the satisfaction of the corporate people at Saks Inc.2
The rest of Saks Inc. thinks that Roger is a fuddy-duddy and an obstructionist. The PMG3 approach to solving problems is to put pressure on people to solve their own problems. I think this is why Joe quit. They have put a lot of pressure on Roger to give up his overly intricate accounting procedures and get with the program.
At first I too thought Roger was an obstructionist. The last two trips he has made a strong effort to use AdDept. However, he won’t give up his calendar until he is confident that every single number in AdDept’s calendar can be defended. They now have the worst of both worlds. Roger does the calendar in AdDept. He checks every number by hand. Then he gets frustrated and goes back to his manual calendar.
Steve’s4 idea was to send Ivy5 to show Roger how McRae’s does thing. Roger, who is at least as intelligent as Ivy, understands how McRae’s does things. Ivy has no clue how Younkers does things. Another problem is that Ivy is even less articulate than Roger.
I don’t know what the solution is, but it has to come from someone above Roger. Most people think that they are going to fire him. This won’t solve the problem.
They did not fire Roger, but they did try to make him quit. Liz Ewing6 replaced him as manager of the business office, and Roger was demoted to accounting clerk.
On most of my visits I stayed at a hotel that was within walking distance of the Younkers building. My recollection is that it was a Radisson.7 It was very nice, and Younkers had a discount rate. The thing that I liked best about it was that it had a Jacuzzi that was seldom used by the other guests. I found a good park in which to run, and afterwards twenty minutes in the Jacuzzi felt fantastic.
I had several adventures traveling to and from Des Moines. On one afternoon I was flying from Chicago to Des Moines on United. A tornado that was passing through the area forced us to land in Cedar Rapids. The entire story is recounted here.
I made it to the scheduled meetings on time and worked with the users according to the original schedule. Just another day at the office.
The other adventure involved a stop in Kansas City to play golf with my dad. The details have been posted here.
I have two startling memories from Des Moines. The first came when I was working up in the advertising business office. One of the overweight ladies was regaling the rest of us with a tale of an acquaintance of hers who had a foot fetish. He offered to pay her to allow him to suck her toes.
The other one came from Joe, the original Advertising Director who resigned and then was replaced in 2000 by Kristen Gray8. A group of us was having lunch at a restaurant. The topic of conversation was the difficulty of handling teen-aged offspring. I, of course, offered nothing. Joe mentioned that he had once received a telephone call from the police when his daughter had driven a car into a mall. Evidently no one was hurt.
In 2003 Saks Inc. made Younkers part of its Northern division. The offices in Des Moines were closed, and all administrative functions were transferred to Milwaukee. The stores continued to operate with the Younkers name. In March of 2006 the entire division was sold to the Bon Ton.
The downtown Des Moines store was closed in 2005. In 2014 a huge fire consumed the empty building that I knew as the downtown Younkers store.
Any remaining Younkers stores were closed as part of the Bon Ton’s liquidation in 2018.
1. Evidently the coach in 1922 wanted to name the team the Golden Tornadoes, but he discovered that it was already taken by Georgia Tech. So, he changed it to Hurricanes. At lest that’s what it says here. Of course, hurricanes seldom, if ever, bother Tulsa. I don’t know why or when it was made singular.
2. As is explained here, after Proffitt’s Inc. purchased Saks Fifth Avenue, it changed its name to Saks Inc.
3. PMG stands for Proffitt’s Marketing Group, the people at the corporate headquarters in Birmingham who oversaw the advertising departments.
4. Steve VeZain was the person at PMG charged with monitoring the progress of the installations in the various advertising departments.
5. Ivy Klaras worked at McRae’s in the business office. The AdDept installation at McRae’s is described here.
6. Liz Ewing’s puzzling LinkedIn page can be viewed here.
7. There are no Radissons in downtown Des Moines in 2023, The hotel that I stayed in was either sold or destroyed.
Herberger’s (known locally as Herbie’s) was a chain of department stores arrayed across the northern tier of the Midwest. It was the last Saks Inc. division to employ the AdDept system to manage its advertising. Prior to 1997 it was apparently an employee-owned company and, at least according to an article posted here, a wonderful place to work. The writer speculated that Herberger’s went downhill rapidly after it was acquired by the company then known as Proffitt’s Inc.
The Herberger’s on St. Germain St. in St. Cloud was still unoccupied in 2023.
One of the moves that occurred shortly after the acquisition was the direction by Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG) to install TSI’s AdDept system in the advertising department on an upper floor (there were only three floors) of the flagship store in St. Cloud, MN.
I visited St. Cloud a total of three times in 1998 and 1999. I found only a few notes and two photographs to help me remember the experience. Furthermore, I cannot recall the names of most of the people with whom I worked, and I was unable to find any references on the Internet. So, this account will mostly depend upon my increasingly unreliable memory.
The purposes of my first trip to St. Cloud were to install the AdDept system on the AS/400 that had been purchased from and installed by IBM and to train the people who would be responsible for setting up the tables and entering the ads. St. Cloud is north of the Twin Cities, just far enough away to be considered an independent city. On that first occasion I flew Northwest Airlines from Bradley to the very nice Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. I then took a long hike to my connecting flight, At the time1 a regional company flying with a Northwest flight number made the trip back and forth several times a day. I described it in one of my emails to Denise Bessette:
We boarded for St. Cloud at 8:20. We rode on a seatless bus to the plane. Then we sat on the plane for a while. Then we taxied for a while. We left at 9:05. We arrived at St. Cloud at 9:22. 45 minutes on the ground; 17 in the air.
On the subsequent trips I just rented a car at the airport in Minneapolis and drove to St. Cloud.
On all of my visits I stayed at a hotel2 that was only a couple of blocks from Herbie’s. I walked there and used the employees’ entrance from the parking lot behind the store.
Anne Hof.
I think that Josh Hill from PMG was present for all of my visits. PMG owned the system and insisted that there would be no custom programming. This made it extremely difficult for the president of a company with “Tailored” in its name. It came at a time when our programming staff was up to its armpits in alligators; that was good. However, for the first time in my life I knew that I sometimes could not provide what the client wanted or, sometimes, even what they needed.
Al DeCamillis and Christie Vierzba in the training room.
The people: I have pictures of three Herbie’s employees: Al DeCamillis3, the Business Office Manager, Christie Vierzba3, the Direct Mail Manager, and Anne Hof. I remember little or nothing about Christie, Ann, and the other workers in the department.
I think that Al was hired between my first and second trip. He was eager to use AdDept for all of the accounting, but he could not use it for his closing. The method he used was “closing to plan,” which meant that the expenses and income that he reported to corporate accounting always matched the planned amount to the penny. The offsetting entry was to a slush account. Evidently this was what he had always done. It meant that the monthly figures in every advertising account were, for purposes of analysis, worthless. No one could ever determine from the general ledger where too much or too little was spent.
My life in St. Cloud: My first visit to Herbie’s was an eye-opener. By that time I had visited the headquarters of twenty or more retailers. Each was either a free-standing structure or the upper floors of a huge store. Herbie’s was indeed in an upper story of a store, but although the building occupied the entire 600 block on St. Germain Street, it was only two or three stories high. It would never have been considered as a setting for a movie about a department store. It was just a store with departments. It even had a good-sized parking lot. The town itself had a much more Midwestern feel than any that I had been in.
I have remarkably few memories of my time in St. Cloud. I cannot remember any restaurants. My only recollection of the hotel was that there was definitely an iron and an ironing board in my room.
Not much of great note or interest actually happened either in the store or in the town while I was there. By far the most memorable event for me was the stress that I underwent while worrying about what was happening back in Enfield. That tale has been related here.
The location for one very unusual event involving Herbie’s occurred during one of my visits to Birmingham. It has been described here.
The logo that was used after the move to Milwaukee.
Epilogue: The installation at Herberger’s was not a happy one for anyone. In 2000 Saks Inc. decided to transfer the administration of the stores to Carson’s in Milwaukee. The jobs for 260 administrative employees in St. Cloud were eliminated. The stores retained the Herberger’s name but they also replaced the flower with a circle of red hexagons that Carson’s displayed on all of its stores. Eventually Carson’s was renamed the Northern Division. It was then sold to the Bon Ton in 2005. By 2017 all of the Herberger’s stores were closed. In 2023 there were still rumors that the brand might be resuscitated, but I found no evidence that any Herberger’s stores had been reopened.
1. In 2023 the only flights to and from the St. Cloud Regional Airport connected the town with Mesa AZ, Punta Garda FL, and Laughlin NV.
2. It was not part of a chain then. I think that it might be a Marriott Courtyard in 2023.
Proffitt’s (under the name of the Elliott-Proffitt Co.) began in 1919 as a department store in downtown Maryville (locally pronounced MARE vuhl) TN. Decades after it became a chain of department stores TSI’s AdDept system was installed in its advertising department. The account of that process is detailed here.
In 1984 the company and all of its stores were purchased by the RBM Acquisitions Co. It was led by R. Brad Martin, who had previously been a very young member of the Tennessee Legislature and a real estate mogul. Proffitt’s Inc. soon began an ambitious series of acquisitions and openings of new stores. In 1994 it purchased McRae’s, a chain of department stores based in Jackson, MS, that was actually larger than Proffitt’s by any measure except ambition.
Previous new stores that had been purchased by RBM were run under the Proffitt’s logo and administered from the company’s headquarters in Alcoa, TN. McRae’s was allowed to run as a separate division, as were subsequent acquisitions of the Parisian, Younkers, Herberger’s, and Carson Pirie Scott.
The lobby in Birmingham was rather impressive.
After the Parisian division was acquired, the corporate headquarters was moved to a beautiful office located at 750 Lakeshore Parkway2 on the north side of Birmingham, AL. However, all advertising was still administered by each local division in its home location. The data center and the IT department were at McRae’s headquarters in Jackson, MS.
TSI had repeatedly sent promotional materials to advertising directors at each of the divisions. Doug Pease, TSI’s marketing director, followed up on the mailings and eventually encountered Fran Jose2, who was a top executive of Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG), the organization that supervised the advertising departments in the divisions. He was impressed enough with the AdDept system that PMG made the decision to implement it in each of the advertising departments. By the time that I got involved in this endeavor Fran had moved on. This was fine. Doug referred to him as “a little Napoleon”.
In 1998 Proffitt’s Inc. bought Saks Fifth Avenue and immediately changed the name of the company to Saks Inc. AdDept had been installed in all of the divisions, including Saks, although Carson’s was no longer using the system (as explained here). In 2000 Martin divided the company into two divisions. One was Saks, the other was everyone else. Martin then moved to New York and ran Saks with little success for a few years before he had to sell it and all of the other pieces of his crumbling empire.
Steve’s LinkedIn photo.
The people: I dealt mostly with Steve VeZain3, who hailed from Louisiana and LSU. He joined PMG in September of 1997. Steve had rather grandiose plans about managing the advertising departments of the various divisions. He made a couple of trips to visit TSI to discuss some of them. Only a few of those were ever put into play. I have rather extensive notes dating from 1999 about our interactions.
Steve’s wife worked in the same building in Birmingham as he did, but I think that she was a buyer or maybe the boss of buyers for the Parisian.
Steve took me to supper several times when I was in Birmingham. His favorite restaurant was Joe’s Crab Shack. I think that his wife accompanied us on one occasion.
I fond the above photo after I had posted this entry. I think that it must have been taken in 1996 or 1997 after the installation at Younkers but before the installation at Proffitt’s. I have no memory of this meeting, but attached post-its identified the participants. From left to right they were Tom Henry from Proffitt’s, Roger Wolf from Younkers, Tom Waltz and Cindy Karnoupakis from Proffitt’s, a guy named Chris from Younkers, and Steve VeZain.
Josh.
One of Steve’s first moves was to hire Josh Hill, a native of Minnesota who was a recent graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In fact, Despite his accent, Josh was designated as Mr. UAB in 1997.
I spent a fair amount of time with Josh at various divisions. Steve sent him to oversee some of the AdDept installations, and he accompanied Steve on at least one of his visits to TSI.
Josh liked to lift weights and to ride his motorcycle at high speeds. I don’t know why he (or anyone else who grew up north of the Mason-Dixon line) decided to come to Birmingham for his education.
In late 1999 my sister, Jamie Lisella, quit working at TSI and moved to Birmingham to work for Steve VeZain at PMG. The circumstances have been detailed here.
In January of 2000 Jamie told me that Josh’s car had been involved in a serious accident, but he was OK. She also informed me that the employees at Saks Inc. were allowed to sign on to the Internet, and many of them wasted a lot of time there.
Kathy in her cubicle.
I have only sketchy memories of others who worked at PMG (or whatever it was later called). Kathy D’Andrea kept the corporate books for marketing. I don’t remember her, but I found a photo of her. One of the documents that I found mentions that she would be at Herberger’s at the same time that I was scheduled, but I do not remember seeing her there.
Dave Weeast was in charge of the AS/400’s for all of the divisions. We dealt with him fairly often, but I don’t think that I ever met him. I think that he worked in Jackson, MS, for Windell Manuel5.
Corky’s LinkedIn photo.
I have no recollection of Corky Wicks6, who worked as a business analyst for the company from 1997-2006, but his name is in my notes.
By March of 2001 Jamie had left Saks Inc. I found an email from her to Dave Weeast and Windell Manuel, about the five AS/400’s that had been running AdDept.
What was the purpose of PMG? I had the impression that it did not have a specific agenda. Perhaps the idea was to impose standards upon the advertising departments of the divisions that had, in most cases, been operating independently for decades. What standards? I think that was a big part of the problem. TSI probably did not help. One of our selling points was that the system was easily adaptable to different philosophies of the administration of marketing. Some of the procedures used by the divisions were real outliers.
I think that Steve, Josh, and Jamie had all left Saks by early 2001. Perhaps the marketing group itself had been disbanded. The other organizations that we had worked with had nothing that was similar to PMG.
SPM: All five divisions (and even Saks Fifth Avenue) had been using an ad agency named SPM to place their newspaper ads. Saks dropped them some time in 1997 or 1998. All of the divisions hated working with SPM. Steve decided to drop them in the Spring of 1999. This was a break for TSI. All the divisions suddenly needed to produce insertion orders. We were rapidly able to implement insertion orders and faxing without too much difficulty.
Three interesting visits: This event was not mentioned in my notes, and so it probably happened before July of 1999. When I arrived in Birmingham on the first day of that visit Steve told me that he wanted me to attend a demonstration of a system that was being used for some aspect of either creation or production of ads at Carson’s.
The demo was conducted by two people from a software company that I had never heard of. These two guys were accompanied by Ed Carroll, who was still the Senior VP there. I knew him fairly well. He was the SVP at P.A. Bergner when the company declared bankruptcy in the middle of the AdDept installation. When Ed Carroll saw me he greeted me with a sarcastic “What are YOU doing here?”
I wasn’t quite sure myself. Steve had said that they were interested in implementing an interface with AdDept. After the demo—which I did not think was very good—I went to wherever I was supposed to be on this trip, probably upstairs in the Parisian advertising department. I later asked Steve if he wanted me to pursue this and quote an interface. He quickly dismissed that idea.
On another trip the SVP of advertising for Herberger’s—I don’t remember his name—was there for a meeting. At the time Herberger’s was about open two new stores in the Minneapolis area. They had scheduled an open house to hire people to work in the stores, but they had forgotten to run ads in the local newspapers. He spent several hours on the phone with local radio stations dictating copy to them and begging them to run ads for his company. I found it amazing that he did not trust anyone back in St. Cloud to handle this for him.
I also encountered the advertising director from Saks Fifth Avenue, the company that had just been acquired. I don’t remember her name, but at the time I knew her fairly well. I always wondered why she was in Birmingham that day. Maybe they were just telling her not to worry about any interference in the way that SFA did business.
The big project: At the end of July in 1999 Steve and Josh came to TSI’s office and described how they wanted a system for the corporate marketing group that was fed by the other five systems. Apparently they were able to sign on to the systems and get some of the information that they wanted. However, they wanted all of this to happen automatically when the departments closed their books at the end of the month.
I could see many problems. The divisions did not all play by the same rules. The May Company and Macy’s had methods of standardizing the reporting of their many and diverse divisions. I knew that some of the Saks Inc. divisions were keeping their records in ways that were anything but standard. I am not sure that some of them were even legal. This sounded to Denise Bessette and me like a huge amount of work with no evident benefit.
Problems at the divisions: My notes from 2000 foreshadow some big problems that were beginning to appear:
The infrastructure at the divisions needs attention. Each division has only one printer, and it fails often. They should get the most recent version of Client Access and set up sessions for the printers (at least some of which were put on the Mac networks for some reason). Some divisions use a version of 5PM Mac software that has bugs. Dave Weeast is in charge of all of the AS/400’s in Saks Inc., and he is hard to get in touch with.
The divisions cannot approve requests unless they take it out of their own budgets, which they will do under practically no circumstances. The current process for approving requests is difficult. The divisions request something. Denise and I write a description of it and send it to Jamie. She runs it by Steve when she gets a chance. There are dozens of issues from the divisions from the pre-Jamie period that have never been addressed. If Steve thinks there is some merit in the request (which usually means that one of the Senior VP’s has been yelling at him), he tells me to quote it. I quote it and send the quote to Jamie. She tries to get Steve to look at it and approve it.
I can’t look at hobbles, and I can’t stand fences. Don’t fence me in.
The email: By 2000 AdDept systems had been installed on separate AS/400 systems in Des Moines IA (Younkers), Alcoa TN (Proffitt’s), Jackson MI (McRae’s), St. Cloud MN (Herberger’s), and Birmingham (Parisian). When the responsibility for advertising for McRae’s was transferred to the Proffitt’s division, and the ad scheduling for Herberger’s was moved to the Carson’s division, Jamie arranged for the McRae’s and the Herberger’s AS/400 systems to be shipped to the computer room in Birmingham. I know this because I was a cc on an email that she sent to Dave Weeast and Windell Manuel on March 29 of 2001.
Dave, Windell,
I understand there is some confusion regarding the location and status of the five AS/400’s that I administered. I will be happy to work with the two of you to facilitate any restructuring of these systems. I would prefer to communicate only with you, as I have not had much, if any, cooperation from the personnel in Birmingham and I am tired of doing charity work. I reviewed this information repeatedly with management and IT staff at Saks Inc. prior to my departure. I would like to reiterate that sending one of these AS/400’s to Jackson for their big ticket system was being done as a favor.
There are three systems on hand in Birmingham; PARADV, HERBADV and MCRAEADV. All three boxes are located in the computer room on the second floor. The PARADV system is active and used by the advertising department of Parisian. Operating system level is V4R2, but the upgrade package V4R4 is on hand in Birmingham.
HERBADV and MCRAEADV are the surplus AS/400 systems due to fusion. I had these boxes transported to Birmingham last fall and upgraded the operating systems on both to V4R4. The IP addresses for network connection for these systems has been issued through Jackson and changed on both of the AS/400’s. However, the connection failed. I had been working with Jerry Aultman in Birmingham’s IT Department to get this resolved. My hunch is that the problem lies with the DNS entry, or lack thereof. Additionally, the advertising personnel also utilize the IBM FAX/400 product which requires installation of an inbound and outbound fax line via 7852 modem.
I ordered these lines through Jeff Bass. Although I provided him with account numbers to pay for installation and usage on these lines, as of my departure on 3/14, I had not been advised that they were installed and functional.
The fourth system, YNKADV, is physically located in Des Moines. This machine is an older model 40e. This is the system I had planned to ship to Jackson for the Big Ticket application. Before it can be shipped, the network connection on the HERBADV AS/400 must be resolved and the MAC connectivity issues addressed. Two phone lines must be active. The base AdDept software application is intact on this box. The data libraries for TSI’s AdDept application need to be copied and installed. TSI will need to consult on this process, as well as the installation of any subsequent custom software programming and the fax configuration. I have cleared out the user profiles on the HERBADV box and added the current Younkers’ users.
I had also planned to move the existing PROFADV system (located in Alcoa, TN – V4R2- also an older model) to the MCRAEADV box. The MCRAEADV system holds the base software previously used by McRae’s advertising personnel. This will be an advantage on the software side. Once again, the network, phone, fax and software issues described above apply to PROFADV, also.
All of these AS/400’s are covered by a software subscription valid through December, 2001. PARADV, HERBADV, MCRAEADV and PROFADV are all covered by a one-year, 24 x 7, focal point contract for IBM hardware and software. The YNKADV system is set up on monthly maintenance, so that the monthly payment could be assumed by Jackson after it is transported there. However, I did purchase a software subscription for YNKADV, so the Jackson personnel could order the OS upgrade at no cost. Mike Wavada at TSI should be able to assist with any questions regarding the IBM maintenance, as they were purchased through his company as a business partner with first right of refusal.
If there are any additional issues, please let me know.
I found this email remarkable. I don’t remember what model of AS/400 Younkers had, but there was never a model e40. However, the most remarkable thing was that Jamie had, at least according to this email, arranged for the two boxes to be shipped from St. Cloud and Jackson. I doubt that anyone cared much about the box in Herberger’s advertising department, but the one in Jackson was in the corporate data center. I cannot imagine how she had managed to get it out of there. It took a lot of chutzpah and, I imagine, some maneuvering.
After Steve, Jamie, and (presumably) Josh left Saks Inc. in 2001, we still had rather good relationships with the advertising people at Younkers, Proffitt’s, Parisian, and, especially, Saks Fifth Avenue. We were never able to convince Carson’s to use the AdDept system even after the division was purchased by the Bon Ton, which had been using it for years.
1. Incredibly, Brad Martin has no Wikipedia page. A biography is posted here.
2. Beautiful photos of this building were posted here. It is apparently occupied in 2022 by Evonik Industries.
3. I don’t think that I ever got to meet Fran Jose. He does not appear to have a LinkedIn page.
4. Steve VeZain left Saks Inc. in 2001. His LinkedIn page is here.
7. SPM was affiliated with an agency that handled newspaper advertising for Sears and a few other retailers. The two agencies were across the street from each other. I met with them when I visited Sears. That adventure is recounted here. In 2023 SPM was still in business. Its website could be found here.
