Daily Archives: January 30, 2022

1995-2003 TSI: AdDept Client: Elder-Beerman Stores

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AdDept at E-B. Continue reading →

The Elder-Beerman Stores Corporation owned and operated a chain of department stores based in Dayton, OH. That is, the flagship store was in downtown Dayton. However, the corporate offices were on El-Bee Road in nearby Moraine, OH.

In 1994 or 1995 Doug Pease, TSI’s marketing director, received a telephone call from Jack Mullen1, the Senior VP of the advertising department at Elder-Beerman. Jack had known Doug from the years in which they both worked in the advertising department at G. Fox, the Hartford-based department store chain that was owned by the May Co. We flew to Dayton (on Delta through the Cincinnati airport, which is actually in Kentucky). I don’t remember much about the department’s requirements or the demo except that everyone talked as if the purchase of the AdDept system were a done deal. I suspect that Jack must have already secured funding before inviting us.

Jack invited us to his house for supper. I remember a few things about the experience:

  • Jack had a weird handshake. He extended his forefinger to the inside of my wrist. I found this vaguely threatening. Is this a Masonic handshake? In the photo the guy on the left demonstrating the same grip is George W. Bush.
  • Jack and his family lived in a very nice house in the suburbs. We sat for a while on the patio in the back There was a brook or something in the back yard. It seemed to be an embodiment of the American dream. I am sure that Doug, who had a family of his own, felt the same way.
  • Dayton is about as far west as possible in the eastern time zone. It was still light after 9:00 in the evening.

I made several trips to E-B for training and exploration of further software development. On most occasions I flew to the Cincinnati airport, rented a car there, and drove north. I usually stayed at the Holiday Inn2 in Franklin, OH. The door in every room in this hotel opened onto a corridor that went all the way around a huge pool. I was never tempted to enter the pool, but for some reason this configuration appealed to me. Perhaps it was the persistent odor of the chlorine.

I usually arrived at the hotel rather late at night. In the morning I ate breakfast somewhere and then drove to Moraine. On the way I was startled to see a sign at the office of a company with the name Tailored Systems Incorporated3.

EB’s glamorous headquarters on El-Bee Road in Moraine.

In the preparatory phase of the installation I worked mostly with Debra Edwards4, E-B’s Advertising Director. Doug and I had met her in Cleveland when we were pitching an AdDept system for May Ohio. That division was abruptly folded into Kaufmann’s before TSI even made a proposal. A description of that event has been posted here.

Thereafter TSI’s primary contacts at E-B were with the business office manager, whose name I don’t remember, and Julie, the ROP manager who had the misfortune to attend the large state university in Columbus. Fortunately, all of this occurred during a stretch of dominance by the Wolverines in The Game.

We did not do a lot of custom programming for Elder-Beerman. I am sure that they had a few peculiarities, but the only two that I can remember were 1) the advertising calendar, which had separate columns for the days of the week, but Sunday had two columns, and Monday and Tuesday were crammed into one, and 2) the six-digit department numbers. AdDept’s system design provided for only three-digit. One thousand different departments was for some reason not enough for E-B. I came up with a workaround, but it would not have worked if they had wanted to enter measurements or use the productivity or cost accounting programs. They never did.

From October of 1995 to December of 1997 E-B was under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Nevertheless, I don’t remember that TSI suffered much, if at all, from this situation. The regional department store model that had generated huge profits in the eighties and early nineties was clearly no longer reliable. For the most part the retailers that used AdDept seemed to adapt to this new reality better than the ones that didn’t.

Lori is on the right. I did not record the names of the other ladies, and I don’t remember them.

Lori Brunswick worked in the advertising business office when we started the installation. By 1999 she was the manager. In 2021 I found some notes that I had written about her management style: “Lori is an interesting case. She doesn’t even let me talk to any of the people that work for her.” Nevertheless, I found everyone at E-B rather easy to work with. We never had a crisis that I can recall.

I found another note from the same period that asked, “What ever happened to the project to convert Elder-Beerman’s debit memo system?” At a distance of over twenty years, I could not tell you what a “debit memo” was in the context of their operation. I certainly don’t remember whether they hired TSI to code a system to replace the one that they had.

For the next couple of years the hardest work that TSI did for E-B was opening the envelopes containing the checks for software maintenance. However, in 2003 E-B, a publicly owned corporation, was acquired by another TSI client, the Bon-Ton5 of York, PA. Almost all of the jobs at the EB headquarters were immediately eliminated. By 2018 all of the E-B stores had been closed and sold to liquidators.

A very thorough documentation of the entire history of Elder-Beerman is available at this website.

Jack Mullen

1. I dealt with Jack Mullen several times after he left E-B in 1999. His LinkedIn page is here.

2. This Holiday Inn has, I think, been converted into a Holiday Inn Express with two much smaller indoor pools.

3. This company still has a status of “active”, but its principal contact is a lawyer whose office is in Dayton.

4. Debra Edwards’ LinkedIn page is here.

5. My recollections of the AdDept installation at the Bon-Ton are provided here.

1997-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: The Bon-Ton

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The Bon-Ton is where? You get there how? Continue reading →

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.

1. Jo Harnish’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

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.

7. Detailed blog entries have been posted about each of these installations: P.A. Bergner, Younkers, Herberger’s.