1993-2012 TSI: AdDept Air Travel Adventures

Posted on September 12, 2021 by Mike

Getting to the clients and returning. Continue reading →

I always took the route from our house in Enfield to the airport that Google claimed took 28 minutes. At 5:30 AM I could make it in less than 20.

My routine: I always flew from Bradley International Airport in Windsor Locks, CT, which was usually identified on the departure boards at airports as “Hartford-Springfield” or BDL. We were fortunate in that almost every major airline had a presence at Bradley. The last to arrive was Southwest, which began its service at Bradley in November 1999.

I usually took one of the first flights in the morning, often around 6:00. At first Sue drove me to the airport and picked me up, but this became tiresome for me. I soon elected instead to park at Executive Valet Parking, the only lot that was north of the airport. It was easier on both of us.

The people who worked the early morning shift at Executive came to know me pretty well. The driver was usually an extremely friendly and loquacious guy named Larry. His style was too much for me at that early hour. I mean, it wasn’t even 6:00 yet. I was never in the mood for chitchat. Vacationers probably appreciated his approach more than business travelers.

The lady at the desk knew me well enough that I did not even need to show my frequent-parker card when I checked in. She even knew what I drove.

On every trip I brought exactly one suitcase and one briefcase that was large enough to hold my laptop. For several years my suitcase was a large bright blue fabric one with wheels. It was large enough to hold my pillow. I always had a hard time getting to sleep after a stressful excessively caffeinated day dealing with problems or requests at the client’s office. Having a familiar pillow helped. The suitcase’s bright color also made it easy to spot on the luggage belt, and the design made it light. I only got rid of it when the zipper broke.

When I arrived at the terminal, I checked in at the ticket counter. In the nineties I flew enough that I could use the express lane at Delta or American. Later, of course, the airlines installed kiosks that made the check-in process much easier.

Security was a breeze before 9/11/2001 (described here). Even during the busiest times (early in the morning and around 6 PM), it seldom took more than a minute or two. Since the employees worked (directly or indirectly) for the airlines, they were always courteous and tried to make sure that passengers arrived at their gate expeditiously. After 9/11 it was a good idea to plan for an excruciating period of at least twenty minutes.

In the first few years of my flying days Bradley had two terminals. Terminal B housed American Airlines and a few small carriers that I never used. Later this terminal was demolished and Terminal A was greatly expanded with two long “concourses” that connected to the central area.

In the mornings I usually bought a sausage biscuit with egg sandwich at McDonald’s in the airport. I also purchased a large coffee even though the restaurant at the airport did not participate in the long-standing promotion of “$1 for any size coffee” available at most McD’s in those days. If I was in a hurry I brought the breakfast bag onto the plane.

If I had a lot of time, I would try to find a place to sit near an electric outlet. Most airports were not designed for the electronics age. In the nineties almost no one brought a computer onto an airplane, and cell phones were even rarer. Furthermore most of the devices in those days could not hold a charge for more than a couple of hours. Consequently, as the use of electronics grew, those few seats near electrical outlet were in great demand. I knew the location of most of the outlets at BDL.

An inviolate rule was to use a men’s room in the airport before every flight. The restrooms on airplanes were not pleasant, and waiting in line in the aisle when you had to go was very annoying.

I tried to reserve window seats. I liked to look out and try to identify cities. Of course, no one wanted a middle seat. When I sat on the aisle someone always seemed to hit my elbow. I usually tried to get on the port side. If no one sat in the middle I could stretch out my right leg under the middle seat in front of me.

I always brought my computer, my Bose headphones, my CD player, several magazines, and at least one book. Some flights showed old television shows on a screen; I never watched or got a headset. I played opera music on my CD or the computer while the plane was in flight. I also played music in my hotel room, while I was running, and especially during the periods between flights in noisy airports. On one of my last trips I had been listening to Mozart’s Così fan tutte when it was time to board the plane. I left under my seat in the waiting area the CD player that contained the opera’s third CD. I never got the player back or bought a replacement for the CD.

I almost never slept on the flights out to the client’s location, but I regularly dozed on the return flights even when someone occupied the middle seat. I found the most comfortable position in close quarters was to lean my head against the little pillow that was provided to my seat braced against the window or side of the plane.

I never put anything in the overhead compartments. My briefcase, which had all my electronics and other diversions, was under the seat in front of me. If the plane was crowded, it was sometimes difficult to extract the stuff that I wanted. If I had an overcoat or a jacket, I used it as a lap rug.

I usually took the stairs down to the Baggage Claim area.

Most of the time my return flights landed late, sometimes very later. I tried to get to the baggage area before most of the other passengers in order to occupy a position near the beginning of the belt. I knew which direction all the belts ran. No airline ever failed to deliver my luggage¹ on a return trip. Nevertheless, by the time that my bag arrived—no matter how well the trip had gone—I was always angry at everyone and everything. For me air travel for business was inherently stressful.

There were a couple of banks of phones in the baggage area. Each parking lot and hotel had a direct line. I just picked up the phone and read the number on the ticket that I had been given when I checked in at Executive and told them which airline I had been on. Within a few minutes (usually) the shuttle bus would arrive. Executive would almost always have my car warmed up by the time that the bus reached the lot. Executive charged the credit card that I had on file there. The receipt would be on the seat of the car. My drives home were always uneventful.

I recognized quite a few celebrities while I was in airports or on airplanes going to or from AdDept clients. My spottings are documented here.

Weather and other close calls

In the winter I tried to avoid scheduling flights that required stops in Chicago, Detroit, or Minneapolis. Nevertheless, on quite a few occasions I ended up missing my connecting flight back to Hartford. Since my return trips were almost always in the evening, on most occasions there were no other flights that I could take. This was a nuisance, but after a while I came to appreciate that the inconvenience was just part of the aggravation inherent to traveling for business. The airline always found a seat for me on a flight in the morning and put me up at a nearby hotel for the night. I can only remember one bizarre exception. I have described it here.

Once, however, the disruptive weather had subsided in Chicago long before my United flight from Des Moines touched down at O’Hare. Earlier that day the winds in the Windy City had exceeded fifty miles-per-hour, and O’Hare had been closed for a short period. It was about 8:30 PM when my flight effected its landing there, and my next flight was not scheduled to leave until 10:00. So, even though United connections in O’Hare could require very long walks, I was not very worried about arriving at my gate in time to board my flight to Hartford.

Most of my horror stories involved United.

I did not account for what happened next. The plane usually taxied around for a few minutes and then pull into the designated gate. Not this time. The pilot parked it on the tarmac out of the way of the other planes. He then announced that there was no gate available for our flight. He did not explain why; he merely stated that he had been ordered to park where he did. Every few minutes he would make an announcement on the intercom, but fifty minutes elapsed before we finally reached the gate.

My recollection is that I ran from one of the B gates in Terminal 1 to an F gate in Terminal 2.

At that point there was almost no chance that my checked bag would be transported to my connecting flight. That failure had happened to me a few times. The airline just delivered it to my house later in the day. The big question was whether I could make it to the gate before the plane departed. I knew that it would not be easy as soon as I saw that my flight to Hartford was in a different terminal. On the other hand I was in the best shape of my life. Even carrying my quite heaby briefcase I rated that I had a pretty good chance.

I wasn’t as fast as O.J, but I was certainly not about to have a heart attack. They should have just let me board.

In fact, I did reach the gate ten minutes before the scheduled departure time. I was dismayed to see that the door was already closed. I went up to the desk with my ticket to demand that the two female agents let me on the plane. I was, of course, out of breath. One of the ladies told me to calm down. She warned me that I might have a heart attack.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I assured them. “I am a runner. In a minute or two I won’t even be breathing hard.” This was true.

They refused to open the door. That was bad enough, but they then also refused to authorize me to stay overnight at United’s expense. They claimed that it was weather-related and therefore not the company’s fault.

I explained that my flight had landed on time, but it then parked out on the tarmac for almost an hour because United did not have enough gates. The bad weather had ceased long before this happened. The agents were intractable. I have seldom been so angry. I might have said something inappropriate.

Fortunately for me, United had plenty of customer service desks in O’Hare, and they stayed open very late. I walked over to one and explained the situation to the clerk. He told me that he did not understand why the ladies would not give me vouchers for a hotel room and breakfast.

I understood the reason very well. They were planning to leave ten minutes early, and they were already packed up. Dealing with me might actually have required them to stay another ten or even fifteen minutes.

The customer service guy issued the vouchers without hesitation. I stayed at a hotel and arrived in Hartford the next morning on the same plane that had my luggage.

Tornado

I cannot remember even one occasion in which weather prevented me from arriving at a client’s office by the scheduled time. The one time that my plane faced really serious weather was when I was flying to Des Moines in the late afternoon. A serious tornado was approaching Des Moines from the southwest at about the same time that my plane was approaching from the east. The plane was forced to land in land in a much smaller airport in Cedar Rapids. Our aircraft and crew were going to spend the night in Cedar Rapids. The flight to Des Moines would resume in the morning. So, the luggage stayed on the plane. There were no flights available to Des Moines on the evening that we arrived.

“Go out the exit. Go south until you hit I-80. Then go west.”

I needed to be at the client’s² offices at the start of business in the morning. I decided to rent a car and drive to Des Moines. I usually patronized Avis, but Avis had no office in the Cedar Rapids airport. So, I went to the Hertz counter and rented a car. The agent assured me that I could return it at the airport in Des Moines. He also gave me a map and indicated the route. This was Iowa. You can always get from one place to another with only a few turns.

I was not too worried about the tornado. Airplanes cruise at about 30,000 feet. At that altitude a tornado is quite wide. The chances of it engulfing an airplane are good. I was driving at an altitude of five feet or less. The swath of a tornado when it touches down—and many never touch down—is usually not very wide. My chances in the car were much better than ours in the plane.

In fact, I encountered some wind and rain, but not enough to bother me or my vehicle much. I made it to my hotel not much later than I would have if the flight had continued in Des Moines. The problem was that I was wearing shorts, sneakers, and a Bob Dylan tee shirt. I had everything that I needed for work in my briefcase, but all my clothes were still on the airplane in Cedar Rapids.

In the morning I checked the phone book in my hotel room. I discovered a Walmart within a couple of miles of the hotel. I drove there at about 8:00 and purchased a pair of pants and a shirt. They were not exactly elegant, but they would pass for one day. The people would just need to put up with my inappropriate footwear.

The advertising director told me that it would have been fine to come in my tee shirt and shorts, but he was not familiar with the condition of that outfit.

The only time that I felt a little frightened on a business trip involved a landing at National Airport in Washington, DC. I had heard that the runways at the airport were shorter³ than those at other major airports, and the pilots did seem to apply the brakes rather hard as soon as they touched the runway. On this one occasion, however, the US Airways pilot did not hit the brakes at all. The plane did not roll on the runway; it bounced. The pilot then immediately placed the aircraft in takeoff mode. The plane cleared the far end of the runway, rose steadily, circled back around, and eventually landed.

The pilot never explained what had happened, and the extra circuit only cost us a few minutes. Maybe we were coming in too “hot’; maybe something was on the runway. Who knows?

Food

Most of my flights occurred before 9/11. The longer flights offered meals in those days; on the shorter ones snacks were served. If the meal had more than one choice, my initial strategy was to take the one that sounded the most appetizing. After several disappointments I reversed course and chose the one that seemed less appetizing. That seemed to work better.

In the morning I ordered tomato juice with ice and black coffee. At other times I chose Diet Cokes (or Pepsi)—with the can if they would let me. I never ordered an alcoholic beverage in coach, but I usually had one Scotch on the rocks if I was in first class and on my way back to Hartford.

If the flight offered only snacks, my choices were—in order—potato chips, peanuts, and Biscoff cookies. I always passed on pretzels and anything that I had never heard of.

I substituted broccoli for the French fries.

I actually liked the food at restaurants at a few airports. I liked the babyback ribs at the Chili’s in Concourse F in Atlanta. The Usinger’s brats at the Milwaukee airport were outstanding. The Italian beef sandwiches in the American Airlines section of O’Hare were delicious. I frequented a Mexican cantina at DFW. The Taco Bell in the Baltimore airport sold beefy burritos for a while.

I found something tolerable at most of the other airports. Chicken wraps of some kind were usually reliable. I avoided fried foods and tried to eat some fruit. I usually enjoyed Chinese food, but I had bad luck with it at airports.

Puddle-jumpers

Most of my flights were at least an hour long, and I usually rode on full-sized jets. I did have a few memorable trips on smaller planes.

I flew on a small plane from Fort Meyers to Naples when I was asked to make a presentation to the Frederick Atkins Group. That flight was uneventful. I also once took the very short flight from Minneapolis to St. Cloud, MN. That flight hardly even seemed to get off of the ground. On subsequent trips to Herberger’s I rented a car in Minneapolis. The short flight was from LA to Fresno provided me with my first view of both LA smog and Bakersfield.

One short trip was momentous, not for me, but for my flying companion, Doug Pease. The Continental flight from Bradley to Newark was pretty choppy. I was gazing out the window the whole time, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Doug reach for the air sickness bag⁵. After we landed he nonchalantly threw the bag in a trash can. I asked him, “Don’t you want to keep that as a souvenir?”

Miscellaneous: For some strange reason on at least three occasions a woman with a young child waiting to board a flight approached me. Each woman asked if she could entrust the kid to me while she went to the ladies’ room (or maybe to the bar for a quick stiff one). Nothing happened.

On another occasion I sat next to a boy flying alone from Washington. I don’t remember the destination. The weather was terrible when we took off, and we bounced around quite a bit. It dd not seem to bother him at all. He had books and toys with him and was a perfect little gentleman the entire time. I had the impression that he had flown as much as I had.

Once on a trip from Bradley to, if I recall correctly, Chicago I sat in the very last row next to another computer programmer. We both ran small software companies. Although he worked on Macintoshes, and our clients used IBM mini-computers, we discovered that we had experienced similar frustrations in trying to get our businesses off the ground. We were lucky to find a niche market that lasted just long enough.I wonder how his turned out.

I could just imagine the agents at the ticket counter saying, “Oh, God, here’s another one. Put him in the back row with that other geek.”

My trip to Portland OR, on February 21, had several strange features. This is from my notes:

I drove to the airport Sunday evening and discovered that there was no place to park. I went to six parking lots. They were all full. I ended up parking in short-term parking. It costs $20 per day. Although this is outrageous, it will hardly make a dent in the cost of this trip. My plane from Hartford was totally full (most of the passengers appeared to be high school-aged). I assumed that at least some people would miss the plane because they couldn’t find a place to park, but I was wrong. From now on I guess I have to call Executive Valet Parking before I leave. If they don’t have any room, I will just leave my car at 7B and call a cab. It’s bound to be less than $140.
I wonder where all the people parked. Bradley has closed off half of the short-term parking and all of the B lot.
By contrast, the plane to Portland had only about forty or fifty people on it. …
This is a first. The crew on the flight from Cincinnati to Portland also was on the flight from Hartford to Cincinnati. Different plane; different gate; same people.

To get from the airport to the parking lot after a trip I had to call Executive. Someone ordinarily answered on the first ring. One night no one answered the phone. I hung up, waited a few minutes, and called again. The third time that I called it rang ten or fifteen times before a breathless woman answered. She took my information and said that she would be there as soon as she could. About thirty minutes later the bus arrived, and she was driving. She explained that three or four people ordinarily worked the night shift, but the others did not show up that evening. So, she had to answer the phone, go out in the lot to find the cars, drive them to the office area, and then drive the bus to the airport to pick up the customers at three different locations.

Four or five of us were on the bus at the same time. No one gave her any grief. Nothing similar ever happened again. I stuck with Executive, but I imagine that the company lost a few customers that evening.

If I could arrange it, I would work in a visit to my parents on the way to a client. This was often feasible for trips to Texas or California. Direct flights to DFW, Houston, and LA were available from Kansas City’s airport.

Yes, my signature on the back might have been more legible 25 years ago, but …

I arrived at the ticket counter at Bradley for one of those KC trips, and, to my dismay, I could not find my driver’s license. The agent would not give me my ticket without proof that I was the person who had purchased it. They would not accept my many credit cards as proof of identity. In the end they accepted my library card from the Enfield Public Library. They said that it would suffice because it was issued by a government organization. Yes, but it did not have my name on it anywhere! Isn’t the purpose of a piece of identification to show that the name on the card matches the name on the ticket?

Needless to say, I did not object. However, I knew that this acceptance only deferred my day of reckoning for a couple of days. I would certainly need to produce real ID to fly from KC to LA.

Delaying worrying about the problem was a good approach. My driver’s license was actually resting comfortably in my shirt pocket the entire time. I had placed it there that very morning so that I would not need to dig through my wallet to find my license. This was a good example of being “too clever by half.”

Luggage

A different trip that included a stop in Kansas City resulted in the most frantic half hour that I ever spent in an airport. My final destination was Des Moines. Because there were no direct flights to Des Moines from KC, I decided to rent a car in KC and drive to Des Moines. I would arrive sooner than if I flew, and I could set my own schedule. I must have played golf with my dad on that trip. I remember that I had brought my golf clubs with me.

At the end of the training/support/research session in Des Moines I flew back to Hartford on TWA. This meant that I had to stop in St. Louis. By coincidence the flight to St. Louis continued on to Hartford. This was a rare occurrence. I almost always needed to change planes when we reached the hub airport.⁴

At some point after I boarded the flight to St. Louis I noticed an anomaly on the baggage check that had been stapled to the envelope holding my ticket. Although the destination on the ticket was Hartford, the bags were designated for St. Louis. I pressed the call button for the flight attendant. When she arrived I explained the problem. She conferred with other crew members and then advised me to go to baggage claim in St. Louis (leaving my briefcase on the plan), retrieve my checked luggage, bring them up to the ticket counter, check the bags again, go through security again, walk to the gate, and reboard the plane.

I guess that there was no way to tell them not to unload my luggage.

I did all that, but it was exhausting. I had to drag my suitcase and my golf clubs up the stairs to the ticket counter. Fortunately, I found a short line there, and the trip back through security was not much of an issue before 9/11. I made it to the gate with perhaps five minutes to spare, but I was completely spent. The rest of the trip was blessedly uneventful.

On quite a few flights a crew member attempted to say something humorous over the airplane’s intercom. I only remember one who was really able to pull it off. The flight was on United from Bradley to Chicago. My recollection is that it was in the evening. The head flight attendant was absolutely hilarious. Almost all of the people in the cabin—who usually pay little attention to announcements—were in stitches. I only remember one line. It occurred when she was advising us to fasten our seat belts to prepare for the landing. She began with, “The captain reports that he has found an airport…”

1. On one flight to Pittsburgh, at the time a hub for US Airways. I could not find my big blue bag on the conveyor belt. I went to the agent. She found it for me. She said that it was the only piece of luggage on my flight that was not directed to another flight.

2. The client was Younkers, a chain of department stores based in downtown Des Moines. Much more about the AdDept installation at Younkers is posted here.

3. In fact, the longest runway at National Airport was less than half the length of the runways at the other major airport in the Washington area. It was also much shorter than the runways at Bradley.

4. I can remember only one other time that my flight continued to my final destination after a stop at a hub. It was a Continental flight from Bradley through Cleveland to Houston. I was the only passenger who stayed on the plane, but the crew for the second leg was the same. This was in the days that the airlines served food. The flight attendant apologized to me because the meal on the second leg was the same as she had served me on the flight from Hartford. I ate both meals. I have almost never turned down free food.

5. While I was working at TSI I never got sick on an airplane. However, on our vacation in Tanzania in 2015 I had an absolutely awful experience on the first leg of our journey from Serengeti to Katavi. The tale of woe is told here.

1994-1995 TSI: AdDept Client: Michaels Stores

Posted on September 6, 2021 by Mike

This one was pure profit. Continue reading →

In retrospect it is difficult to choose among TSI’s AdDept clients. I enjoyed working with the people at most of them. If I were forced to pick the one that I liked the best, several would contend. However, if the question were changed to “Which of the AdDept accounts was the most profitable?”, the answer is clear. It was Michaels Stores, the national chain of stores selling arts and crafts. What a strange tale!

Our first contact with Michaels was a telephone call from the IT Director in, I am pretty sure, 1994. I don’t recall his name. He told me that the people in the advertising department had contacted him about automating the department’s functions. He had in turn asked IBM whether there was a third-party software product for retail advertising departments. Someone at IBM provided TSI’s phone number.

Since I had never even heard of Michaels,¹ I had to ask him a few questions. He told me that they were a retailer that specialized in arts and crafts. Their headquarters was in Irving, TX, not too far from DFW Airport. They had no stores in New England yet, but they were almost everywhere else.

The best news was that Michaels was an AS/400 shop. That meant that there would probably be little or no expense for hardware. It was a lot easier to justify the cost of the AdDept system without additional hardware costs.

The IT director was very impressed with our client list. Foley’s, Neiman Marcus, and even Macy’s were very familiar names in Texas. I felt compelled to tell him that our programs were written in BASIC. He was surprised at this, but not put off. He had actually taught a course in BASIC for the System/36. I told him that the AS/400 version was much more powerful. He invited me down to give a demonstration to the people from advertising.

I told him that I would like to talk with them before the demo. He gave me the name and phone number of the lady who was the assistant to the vice president of advertising. I don’t remember her name either. In my conversation with her I learned that the department had no system at all; everything was done by hand. There were only ten or fifteen people in the department. There was little or no internal structure. The VP had been there for many years, and everyone in the department loved him.

I flew down to DFW, rented a car, and made the short drive to Michaels’ headquarters. I set up the demo data and the AdDept programs on their AS/400. It was not necessary to install BASIC because the compiled versions of the program did not need it. As I suspected, the whole AdDept system was like a fly on their elephant. No expansion would be necessary unless it was for connectivity.

Google street view of Michaels’ headquarters.

The demo seemed to go pretty well. After I returned to Connecticut, I wrote up a proposal. If we included any custom code, I don’t remember it. It definitely was not much by the standards that we were accustomed to.

They accepted our quote immediately and sent TSI the deposit check. Shortly thereafter, I flew back to Irving and installed the system. I then spent an additional day or so showing the employees how to use the AS/400’s—I had booklets to help with this. I also outlined what needed to be done to set up the tables and enter their ads.

I spent time working with nearly all the employees of the department. I cannot say that I was impressed with any of them except for the lady that I spoke with on the phone. I had to do quite a bit of hand-holding, but we reached the point at which they were ready to put in the basic tables so that they could subsequently build their advertising schedules. We also set a tentative date for the second training session.

The atmosphere in the department during this visit was much different from what I experienced before. In the short period of time that had elapsed since my demo the VP of advertising had “retired” and had been replaced with a much younger guy named Bill Dandy², who lived in Glastonbury, CT, a suburb of Hartford. He had been working at Ames, a chain of discount department stores in Rocky Hill, CT, as, if I remember correctly, advertising director. I knew that Ames had just come through a very rocky period after its disastrous acquisition of and merger with Zayres,

Bill had not yet moved to Texas, but he was there in the advertising department at the same time that I was. We were introduced. He was cordial. He was surprised to learn that I was from Connecticut.

Before I left Michaels I had a short meeting with the IT director. He told me that he was really upset that they had brought in a new VP of advertising just as they were putting in a new system. He was worried that they might never get the system working because Bill Dandy might tell them not to use it.

As it happened, Bill Dandy was on the same American Airlines flight back to Connecticut that I was. I took a few minutes to speak with him even though he was in first class, and I was in steerage. This was well before 9/11; airplanes were much friendlier places back then. He remarked that the people at Michaels “had no idea how to run an advertising department.” I replied that I had noticed that. I emphasized that, on the other hand, I definitely knew how to organize the work, and the employees will learn as they learn the system.

That’s not what happened. The day after I landed back at Bradley I sent the invoice for delivery of the system to the IT director, and he paid it. The lady with whom I had dealt soon quit the advertising department. Bill Dandy brought in one of his employees from Ames, who had developed a set of spreadsheets there.

I never made another trip to Michaels. No one in the advertising department ever called for support, and so I assume that they did not use AdDept. That was OK with me. At the time TSI did not need another reference account in Texas³, and we had a lot of bigger fish to fry.

1. There has been a Michaels Store in Enfield for several years now. I bought something there once, but I don’t remember what it was.

2. Years later I crossed paths with Bill Dandy at Dick’s Sporting Goods. He had had several jobs in between, and he has had several more since his stint at Dick’s. His LinkedIn page can be found here.

3. In fact, however, the AdDept system later was installed at Radio Shack, Computer City, Color Tile, and Stage Stores. Stage actually had two a separate installation for its Peebles Stores.

1996-2006 TSI: AdDept Clients: May Company

Posted on September 6, 2021 by Mike

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.

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.

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
1. People
2. History
  1. Founded in 1979.
  2. Advertising in 1981
  3. Retail in 1988.
  4. First May division (Hecht’s) in 1991
3. Custom programming
  1. Good at diagnosis.
  2. Incredibly efficient system of delivering custom code using BASIC.
  3. Two principles:
    1. There should be one version of the truth;
    2. Everyone should be able to take advantage of work done by others.
  4. People capable of completing difficult projects within parameters.
AdDept
1. Intent
  1. All administrative aspects.
  2. All media.
  3. Easily customizable.
  4. Require a minimum of local support — AS/400.
2. Retail advertising is difficult.
  1. All the difficulties of retail — stores, merchants, accounting, A/P, and co-op
  2. All the difficulties of advertising
    1. Multiple media, each with almost completely different structure
    2. Media scheduling, production scheduling, estimating, loan room, etc.
3. System design
  1. Scheduling:
    1. Every media represented in the ad file.
    2. Open on-line database works best when each person updates the system with information as soon as it is available.
    3. One main program, many well-normalized files.
    4. History of significant changes:
      - Production.
      - Financial.
  2. Financial:
    1. One main set of files (header and detail).
    2. Many front ends with supporting detail files.
    3. Two months, three amounts.
    4. Interfaces
  3. Cost accounting (data warehouse)
    1. Detail at the department level using May Company rules.
    2. Can also be used for other purposes:
      - Planning
      - Store-level analysis
  4. Add-ons
    1. Productivity
    2. Competitors
    3. Loan room inventory and transactions
    4. Photo studio
May future plans
1. Filene’s
2. Uniformity
3. Best practices
Technology
1. Explain CFINT
2. Explain performance of 5250 v. browser-based
3. Why “web-facing” doesn’t help
4. Explain V5
  1. BASIC compiler.
    1. Should we convert to C?
    2. Should we convert to Net.Data?
    3. Should we convert to WAS/Java?
    4. Should we look to Wintel?
  2. Can’t save back very far.
  3. InfoPrint server allows output as .pdf files.
5. Browser-based programming requires VPN or the equivalent for support.
Other things
1. AxN.
2. 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.

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.

2. The Hecht’s installation is described here.

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.

1997-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Stage Stores

Posted on September 4, 2021 by Mike

People and events at SRI/Stage Stores. Continue reading →

Everyone with whom I dealt—and there were a great many people over the course of seventeen years—-called the large retailer based on the south side of Houston “Stage Stores”. Even their LinkedIn pages refer to Stage Stores. However, our contracts¹ were definitely with a company named Specialty Retailers, Inc. (SRI). The checks that we received were from SRI. This always seemed strange to me, but I managed to piece together from various sites on the Internet something of an explanation.

I spent many hours at the headquarters building on South Main. The visitors’ parking was perhaps thirty to the right of the palm tree.

SRI was incorporated in 1988. I was unable to discover who the original stockholders were or who ran the corporation. I also have no idea what, if anything, SRI did in its first four years of existence.

In 1992 the company purchased a Colorado-based retail company named Fashion Bar, Inc., which had seventy-one stores. The larger ones were branded as Palais Royal or Bealls². The rest were known as Stage Stores. In the nineties SRI purchased a large number of other stores. Most of them bore the Stage logo. SRI’s headquarters at 10201 South Main³ in Houston was known locally as Stage Stores, and that name, as you can see in the photo, was displayed prominently over the entrance. The only stores that were actually located in Houston were branded as Palais Royal. I recall actually purchasing a leather belt in one of them. Many people in Houston knew about Palais Royal, but Stage Stores and SRI were probably not on their radar.

In late 1996 or early 1997 Doug Pease, TSI’s Director of Marketing, received a call from Brenda Suire⁴, the Director of Finance for Stage’s Marketing Department. Doug and I flew on Continental Airlines to Intercontinental Airport in Houston to meet with Brenda and some other employees. We were somewhat surprised by the length of the drive from the airport to Stage’s headquarters.

The blue route on the map at left suggests driving through downtown Houston. That route would only be considered if the trip was in the middle of the night. We always took the western loop on I-610.

On the second day in Houston I demonstrated the functionality and design of the AdDept system at the local IBM office. It went over very well.

I recently found in my notes from January of 2001 some of the items that were included in the contract that resulted from that presentation and subsequent negotiations.

I was surprised to discover that in 1997 Stage paid us over $8,000 for the expense payables, sales, MM Plus, and AdSEND (!) interfaces. No wonder we made so much money in those days. We have no choice but to give them the assistance they need to get the first three working. They don’t use AdSEND any more, thank goodness, and I am pretty certain that no one remembers that they paid for this. I don’t remember coding an expense interface for Stage, but we clearly did it in 1998.

As part of that initial contract the programmers at TSI wrote a great deal of new code. Stage Stores had more stores and fewer merchandise departments than the first few AdDept customers. In most of their markets they operated only one store. They were therefore much more interested in the ratios of media dollars spent on each store to the amount of sales that the store generated than in sales and expenses by department. To provide this information we wrote code to accept sales by store from the corporate systems. We also wrote a set of reports that showed the ratio of advertising expenses to sales for each store.

No one at Stage Stores had previously examined the broadcast (i.e., radio and television) advertising too carefully. The buys and audits were done by a lady (I don’t recall her name) from Reynolds Communications. She used SmartPlus⁵ software to make the schedule and audit the spots that each station ran. Stage soon discovered that she had been spending much too much money on television buys, especially in one-store markets in Louisiana. She knew that the company had a store in those markets, but she had no access to sales data.

As often seemed to happen in AdDept installations, this unexpected revelation allowed Stage Stores to save enough money on an inefficient use of funds to justify most of the cost of the entire system.

Brenda, Floyd, and Denise Bessette at TSI’s office.

Training and installation: In 1997 Stage sent three employees to TSI’s office in Enfield for several days of intensive training: Brenda, Floyd Smith⁶, and Hugo DuBois⁷. The emphasis of the training was on how to get the most out of the AdDept software in their environment.

Floyd was Brenda’s right-hand man in the business office. For the first few years—which (for reasons unrelated to the system) were rather chaotic—Floyd was the liaison between TSI and Stage. Hugo, a native of Belgium, managed the department’s local area network. He mainly worked with the production and creative people. I am not sure why he came to Enfield. Hugo’s only role in the project was to connect the network to the AS/400 and to install and configure the software on individual PC’s and Macs so that the department’s employees could access the AdDept system.

After the AS/400 had been delivered, and the network was connected to it, I flew to Houston to install the AdDept software and configure the database. Over the next few months I returned to help them deal with problems, to show them how to use new features, and to gather ideas about further development. I soon discovered that there was a better way to get from Connecticut to Stage. On most trips I flew on Delta or American and landed at Houston’s smaller airport, Hobby. Not only was it much closer to Stage, but there was usually a better choice of flight times.

Denise, Floyd, Hugo, the top of Brenda’s head, and Steve Shaw at TSI’s office.

Within a year or so the system was running fairly smoothly. Then in 1998 Brenda left Stage Stores, and for a while Floyd ran the advertising business office. His primary assistant was Toni Young⁸. One of the primary AdDept users was Renee Mottu⁹, who managed the expense invoices.

Fortunately for TSI, for the next year our involvement with Stage was reduced to answering phone calls and resolving mundane issues. I say “fortunately” because even though Stage Stores declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1999, the effect on TSI’s bottom line was minimal. The effect on daily life in Stage’s advertising department was for a considerable period much more severe. My notes after a visit to their headquarters in January of 2000 stressed that “Those poor people spend half of their time trying to persuade newspapers to run their ads.”

Karen is in the red jacket. The man who is obscuring Floyd is, I think, the Advertising Director.

Brenda was replaced by Karen Peltz, who had held a similar position at Foley’s¹⁰, the chain of department stores owned by the May Company that was also based in Houston. At the time Foley’s had been using AdDept to solve various problems in its advertising department for five years. I had worked with Karen at Foley’s, but only a little. Eventually Floyd moved to another position at Stage Stores, and Toni Young managed the day-to-day operations of the marketing business office thereafter.

I had only a few interactions with Joanne Swartz¹¹, the Senior VP of Marketing, and the guy who was Advertising Director. I do not remember his name. I think that Karen reported directly to Joanne.

I dealt with two people in the media area. The woman’s name was Deidre Prince¹¹. I do not remember the guy’s name, and it is not in the notes. I also remember Sandra Green, who used AdDept for buying newspaper space. She seemed to have a lot more difficulty using the system than anyone else did.

My notes: I discovered quite a few email messages that I sent back to TSI’s office from Stage. They are dated between October 1999 and January 2001. I’ll start withe the earliest one

The New Skin bottle and the shaving/ medical kit that I kept it in.

Not a great start today. I woke up at 6 AM. I got up and stumbled around the hotel room for a few minutes. I ironed some shirts and pants. At 6:55 I shaved. I looked in the mirror and saw Dracula. The blood was pouring from my lip. It took over 40 minutes for it to stop bleeding. I painted the New Skin on it. I got dressed and went to Stage. The New Skin held until almost 5 PM. Then I bled all over my shirt and pants, but this time I got it to stop in only about five minutes. Life on the road is so glamorous.
Renee Mottu is looking for suggestions as to how to remove two possums that have taken up residence beneath her mobile home. She rejected my idea of sending in a dachshund. She said that the possums would eat a dog.
I didn’t get to run tonight. Toni Young told me about a good trail. I put on my running duds, followed her directions, and drove around for about 25 minutes looking for the place. I never found it. I drove back to the hotel, got some food, and settled into my room to watch “Norm” and “The Drew Carey” show.

I am pretty sure that the woman with the big hair to the right of Floyd is Renee Mottu. I don’t remember the names of the other two ladies.

The first paragraph refers to a blue-black circle that appeared on my left lower lip in the nineties. It has never caused any pain, and it has not bled in the last decade or so. The story of Renee and her possum continued for a few visits. Before reading the above I had totally forgotten that for a while Norm McDonald had a network television show.

The following are from the subsequent two days on the same trip.

It was in the 80’s here yesterday, but it felt cooler. There was almost no humidity, which is rare for Houston. Floyd’s office was freezing. He has an electric heater in his office. We had it running most of the day even though we had six people crowded around his PC all day long. I brought sweaters, and I will wear one today.
Stage has network printers. We sent a 40-page report to Floyd’s printer about noon. It was still in SND status when I left at 6 PM. Floyd said it will sometimes not print until the next morning. Have they ever complained about this? I think the culprit may be the faxing. They were faxing all day yesterday.
I noticed at Stage that their floors must not be very level. The pieces of their desk units come together at angles. I also noticed that some units were raised off the floor as much as an inch on one side.
I don’t think that I could possibly in good conscience approve more than five months for the palm tree research project at this time.
How much do you think is the monthly fee that Reynolds Communications charges Stage to handle (including auditing and approving invoices from stations) their broadcast advertising?

I don’t remember the precise answer to the last question, but I am pretty sure that there were two digits to the left of the comma. The next set of emails came from the trip that began on January 11, 2000.

This Silver Medallion card expired many years ago.

I was dreading the flight to Atlanta. I envisioned myself standing in line with the common people now that my silver medallion card has expired. I was delighted to discover that my ticket still says “Silver Medallion.” Half of the flight got on with the medallion status group.
The phone on my seat on the flight from Hartford to Atlanta has a little LCD display. It discloses the NASDAQ closing price every few minutes along with advertisements for various ways to spend your money on the phone.
A lady on the Atlanta flight has striped hair. Not streaks, stripes. She has brown hair intermixed with ½” blonde stripes. I guess it is a look.
The flight from Atlanta to Houston sat in the gate for about 20 minutes. Then we got in the usual long line to take off. It must have been over 100 degrees in the cabin by the time we hit the skies. The guy in the seat in front of me pushed his seat all the way back. I have therefore had to turn 45 degrees and put my laptop on my lap. Even so it is uncomfortable to type. Thankfully there is no one next to me.
Listening to Kiri Te Kanawa sure beats listening to salesmen. On my last few flights the planes were full of families and college students. The passengers on both of Tuesday night’s flights have been mostly middle-aged men.
I still have a 45 minute drive ahead of me after this flight, which won’t get in until about 11:00 central time. I need some caffeine.
I used the air conditioner in the car all the way from the airport to the motel.
… Renee Mottu asked me to hire her. I told her that we needed experienced, or at least trained, programmers. She pressed me on this. She said that she was sure she could learn programming and that Floyd would give her a good reference. By the way, she said all of this in front of Floyd.

I remembered to ask Renee what happened to the possums living under her trailer. She said they were still there. I repeated my recommendation about the dog. She said she didn’t have one. I said she should borrow one. She asked me (!) if I knew anyone who had a dog she could use. Later I heard her walking around intoning “Does anyone have a dog I can borrow?”

I think that by 2001 Stage Stores must have been emerging from bankruptcy and resuming their strategy of expansion by purchasing other chains. The biggest of those was the acquisition of Peebles, a chain of 125 department stores based in South Hill, VA.

For some reason the management at Stage wanted to keep track of all expenses and co-op income of the Peebles stores separately. This was the first, but not the last, time that I installed a second AdDept database on the same AS/400. There was still only one set of programs, but each user had two AS/400 user ID’s. Their profiles determined which database would be used.

Here are some of my notes from January of 2001:

Leaping Lanny Poppo became one late in his wrestling career

The meeting in the afternoon went well. Joanne, the advertising VP introduced me as “the resident genius.” The project has been scaled down. We need to be able to do accruals at the store level for media and production at the store level. We also need to be able to do prepaid to expense. One unusual wrinkle is that they do not want to allocate creative costs to stores. They want to be able to get ratios of advertising expense to sales from AdDept, but we must be able to reconcile this with what is in the G/L.
I was glad that I was an outsider at this meeting. The politics was just barely below the surface. Chuck, who I think is the CFO, put Joanne on the spot about something that was not even on the agenda. Their explanations were not at all impressive. The experience had the happy effect of reminding why I did not like working at a larger company.
Toni Young says that she thinks that Renee Mottu never got rid of her possums.
It turns out that what Stage really wants to do most is to start using what they have and what we have previously proposed—SmartPlus interface, sales interface, and expense payables interface. They spoke of the SmartPlus interface as if it were a done deal. I don’t recall them purchasing this module. I brought back the file layout for the expense interface. I did not come back with a lot of specs for new projects. Believe it or not, they want another week of my time. Both Karen and Joanne (the Senior VP) seriously asked me to stay over the weekend and spend next week in Houston. I didn’t tell them this, but I don’t think that I could have lasted for 24 days.
01/07/01: I was surprised to discover that in 1997 Stage paid us over $8,000 for the expense payables, sales, MM Plus, and AdSEND (!) interfaces. No wonder we made so much money in those days. We have no choice but to give them the assistance they need to get the first three working. They don’t use AdSEND any more, thank goodness, and I am pretty certain that no one remembers that they paid for this. I don’t remember coding an expense interface for Stage, but we clearly did it in 1998. I will write up a quote to change it to work the way that the new documentation states.
Toni Young said that she thinks that Renee Mottu had not solved her possum problem.
I saw a sign at Stage Stores offering a $3,000 bonus to any employee that refers someone hired as a senior analyst in IS. The candidate must have five years of COBOL or Oracle experience.

Evidently I had already scheduled most of the rest of the month of January 2001 to travel to other clients so that if I had agreed to stay in Houston over the weekend and the following week, I would have been on the road for twenty-four days in a row! In those days we were charging $1,000 per day for my time. If Stage had still been in Chapter 11, I doubt that they would have proposed spending another $7,000 for another week of my presence. The bankruptcy court would have needed to approve the expense.

AdSend was a service offered by the Associated Press for sending the images of ad layouts to the newspapers. Hugo once told me that the company had twelve T-1 lines (TSI had one), and, according to him it was not nearly enough.

The neighborhood: Stage seemed to be a nice place to work. The headquarters was a fairly nice building located on the south side of Houston. They always provided me with a comfortable place to work, and there was ample parking in spaces reserved for vendors. The building also had a cafeteria that offered good food at very reasonable prices. I always ate lunch there, usually by myself. Many employees arrived at work early and ate breakfast there.

I took this photo of Enron Field under construction. It is now called Minute Maid Park.

It was not too easy to reach by a car driven from the south. Just north of the building Main Street became a divided highway with restricted access. Since I always stayed in a hotel north of the building, I had to drive my rental car to the first exit, drive under the highway, and then take the access road back to Stage’s driveway.

Most of Houston’s explosive growth had been in other directions. There was not much south of Stage’s location. However, just north of the building were the medical centers for which Houston was famous and Enron Field, which is where the Houston Astros played after the Astrodome was abandoned in 1999. I got to see (and photograph) the construction of the new stadium.

According to Yelp Marco’s is closed, but it still has a website.

I usually stayed in a Hampton Inn a few blocks from the stadium. My favorite restaurant was a Mexican place called Marco’s. Located in a hard-to-reach strip mall near my hotel, it was where I first became acquainted with tacos al carbon, one of my favorite dishes. Marco’s had ridiculously low prices. I often told the manager that they should open restaurants in the northeast. They could have doubled their prices and still filled the place every night.

During a couple of multi-day trips to Stage I met up with Sue’s cousin, Mark Davis, for supper. He worked for Exxon Mobil. We usually at an Olive Garden. The conversation was better than the food.

I jogged on the streets near the hotel nearly every evening when I visited Stage. I worked out a route that kept me on streets that had very little traffic.

Eventually I discovered a delightful dirt track that surrounded a golf course in Memorial Park. I drove there every chance that I got. A loop around the track was a little less than three miles. I usually did two loops. There is no chance that I would ever move to Texas. However, if I did, it would be to Houston, and the primary motive would be to gain access to this track every day.

The people: I was quite surprised by the LinkedIn pages of the people with whom I worked at Stage. We had not done much work for the company after 2008 or so. Consequently, I really had no idea who was still working there after that. I discovered that many of them remained at Stage Stores quite a long time after I last saw them or talked with them.

TSI’s initial contact, Brenda, departed in 1998. I don’t know why she left Stage so soon after we did the installation. There might be a story there. I don’t recall ever hearing her name mentioned again.

I have many memories of Floyd. He was definitely a family man. He was always cheerful and business-minded. He always ate lunch at his desk. His office was not very large, but it had two doors, which he kept open. Some people used his office as a shortcut to get from one part of the marketing department to another. I was surprised when he and Toni seemed to switch jobs after Karen arrived. That was never explained to me. Floyd was employed by Stage Stores until 2011.

I was acquainted with Karen from her days at Foley’s. When she arrived at Stage, she made it clear to me that one of her top priorities was for the department to make better use of AdDept. A Republican, she assured all of us in January of 2001 that George W. Bush “will not be that bad.” After his two incredibly stupid wars and an economy that totally tanked while he and his cronies watched helplessly, most historian vehemently disagree.

Karen was, to my amazement, an avid biker—not mountain bikes, Harleys. She and her husband rode up to the big gathering in Sturgis, SD, at least once. I have always told people that if you saw me on a motorcycle, you can be certain that I will also be smoking a cigarette and showing off my piercings and tattoos.

Karen worked at Stage until 2013, twice as long as her stint at Foley’s. Her LinkedIn page lists no jobs after she left Stage Stores.

I remember that Hugo drove a Saturn—as did I during that period. His, however, was a coupe. If I had known that Saturn sold two-door cars, I would have bought one. Hugo stayed until 2017.

I did not really have much personal contact with Joanne, aside from that one meeting that they asked me to attend in 2001. I do remember that on one occasion I overheard Renee accosting her in the hallway. Renee said, quite loudly, “Joanne, I need a raise!” If Joanne replied, I did not hear the answer. Joanne left Stage Stores in 2012.

Toni apparently never left Stage Stores. The more that I worked with her the more that I respected her.

When I met Deidre I asked her if she was related to Diana Prince. She did not know whom I was talking about. I guess not everyone was a fan of Wonder Woman on TV and in the comic books.

I think that Deidre was our main contact when I showed the A^xN¹² system to the department in 2003 or 2004. They enthusiastically endorsed it and used it until they outsourced the buying of newspaper space to an outside company. Deidre left Stage in 2011.

Epilogue: I think that our last major dealings with Stage were the implementation of A^xN and the Peebles project. Nevertheless, they were still using AdDept when TSI went out of business in 2014.

Unlike most retailers Stage Stores continued to expand in the twenty-teens by acquiring other chains. In 2017 Stage acquired the assets of the Gordman’s chain of department stores and quickly converted all of them to sell off-priced items. This worked so well that they began to convert most of their other stores to the same format. In the November 2019-February 2020 quarter sales were up 19 percent¹⁴.

Then the pandemic struck and Stage Stores was stuck with a lot of debt and 738 stores that could not be expected to generate any revenue in the immediate future. The price of the company’s stock plummeted. In May of 2020 Stage entered Chapter 11 again, and in August it announced that it was liquidating all of its holdings.

1. For some reason SRI insisted on a new contract every year. We had contracts with all of our AdDept clients, but all of the others were open-ended.

2. There is also an unrelated chain of department stores with the Bealls moniker that is based in Florida. My unsuccessful pitch to that company is detailed here.

3. Years after TSI was closed SRI moved to an office building at 2425 West Loop South. I tried to use Google Maps to find the Main Street building with which I was so familiar, but I failed. I think that it must have been demolished.

4. Brenda’s LinkedIn page is here. I had trouble remember her last name. I sent an email to Floyd Smith asking if he knew it. He replied, “Sure. She is also on Facebook..” Confused, I asked again. Floyd wrote, “Suire is her last name. Sorry about that spell check changed it last time.”

5. The Media Management Plus product was renamed SmartPlus. I think that this may have happened when the company was purchased by Arbitron, the rating service. On the Internet I found a very detailed description of what SmartPlus did. It is posted here.

6. Floyd’s LinkedIn page is here.

7. Hugo’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

8. In 1997 I was only 49. I was shocked that year to learn that Toni Young, who was younger than I was, had a grandchild who was by no means an infant. Her LinkedIn page is here.

9. I found no LinkedIn page for Renee Mottu. Her Facebook page is here. I was surprised to discover that it contained even less than mine does.

10. A great deal more has been written about the AdDept installation at Foley’s. The account is posted here.

11. Joanne Swartz’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

12. Deidre Prince’s LinkedIn page is here.

13. A^xN was the name that I gave to TSI’s Internet program for management of insertion orders that AdDept users sent to newspapers. Its system design is explicated here. The marketing history is described here. Stage’s use of the system was one of the main reason that the number of subscribing newspapers grew so large—at one point over four hundred!

14. The Philadelphia Inquirer picked up this story from the Washington Post and posted it here.

2005-2009 TSI: AdDept Client: Macy’s South

Posted on August 30, 2021 by Mike

The last AdDept client. Continue reading →

By the time contract had been signed. and we had started the installation, Macy’s Inc. had officially renamed its division based in Atlanta from Macy’s South (MSO) to Macy’s Central. This was done to reflect the fact that that division was scheduled to absorb most of the stores from Hecht’s and Foley’s after the big acquisition of stores from the May Co. However, I never heard anyone at TSI or at Macy’s refer to the people in Atlanta as Macy’s Central. Only New Yorkers could think of Atlanta as being central.

I cannot prove it, but I am pretty sure that TSI won the MSO account because of the efforts of Beverly Ingraham and the other other employees in Foley’s advertising department (introduced here). I know for a fact that people from the advertising department at MSO had made a trip to Houston to investigate the AdDept system there. They came away very impressed with what the system had allowed them to accomplished. The strong relationship between the department’s employees and TSI over a period for more than a dozen years was a point of emphasis.

The advertising people at MSO had been struggling to use an outdated version of FedAd named Assets.¹ It was no longer supported by the development team, and no one thought that it could handle the increased load of two new divisions. The FedAd developers also had warned the seven (!) advertising planners that they would not be able to produce software that would allow them to plan in the way that they did. Several areas of MSO’s advertising department had developed PC systems to handle their tasks. The one used for direct mail was quite sophisticated, but it was also unsupported and undocumented.

I learned about MSO’s interest in a phone call from Aurore Murphy², the Advertising Director, in November of 2005. She told me that the decision to use AdDept had already been made and that the hardware was being arranged. She asked me to come to Atlanta to talk with them about what changes would be needed to make AdDept work for them.

I could hardly believe my ears. No sale was ever this easy, and this was a division of Federated/Macy’s! I asked Eileen Sheehan-Willett (introduced here), TSI’s administrative person, to book me on a Delta flight to Atlanta for November 29. Aurore advised me to take a MARTA train from the airport to the Buckhead area. She insisted that I stay at the Marriott Courtyard that was near their office. For three days I met with people in every area of the department. It was probably the most productive trip of my entire career. Everyone was prepared to talk with me.

Note: This blog entry contains much more detailed information about the installation than the entries for most other clients. I discovered a large number of very detailed and complete notes as well as many other documents. I thought that it would be a good idea to give a feel for the scope and difficulty of the work that TSI did for its clients during the installation of the AdDept system to assure that it performed to the client’s satisfaction.

The first trip: Here are excerpts from my notes:

Some things are done in a system named Aims. ROP (and maybe something else) is done in Assets. Many things are done on spreadsheets. They use one six-digit system of “ad numbers” for ROP. They use a different system of job numbers for other media. The latter start with a three digit event code. They said that they would not mind changing numbering systems.
The reassignment of stores will take place on a staggered basis over the next nine months. This will be very confusing.
The Home Division does not place any ads. However, they do handle the co-op and production of the pages for home merchandise. They then transfer these transactions to the retail divisions. The people at Macy’s South seemed to think that this is a mistake.
Federated determines their merchandise department numbers. All divisions use the same numbers.

My first meeting was with Cliff Webber³ and Beth Lane⁴, the pair who ran the Advertising Business Office. It lasted almost four hours. I reported that “They gave me every report that they use for closing. Nothing seemed insuperably difficult.” The list of issues that I brought back to Connecticut was too long to include here.

My second stop was in planning:

I met with Steve Weinbaum⁵ for a couple of hours. He now works in another area, but he was the planning manager for years, and he is the one who knows how their system works. The person who does this job now is named Miriam Pechar⁶.

It is hard to believe, but they primarily use seven different spreadsheets, one for each GMM. Each ad is on each spreadsheet!
They want output files for all of their reports.
I think that they will work with status P ads. When the plan is approved, the ads will be changed to A and handed over to the appropriate media manager.
They supply data for database marketing. Lots of new fields.

I then spent a half hour with Laurie Stenwall⁷, the Database Marketing Manager. She said that she would like to be able to get the information that they need to schedule a piece from AdDept. Most of that information is from the ad planners.

I likewise spent thirty minutes with Karla Schottle⁸, Advertising Effectiveness Manager. She and her group analyze the costs by event, merchant, and market. She would probably love it if she had access to DAPANDL, DACOMMD, DAACTST, and DACOMMST, the files created by the cost accounting programs. One troublesome issue popped up:

I think that we may finally have to address the polybag problem, namely how do we handle it when the project involves a polybag that contains a book with stitch-ins and blow-ins and several other pieces.

I met with Jeanna Corley⁹, the Production Manager, for about an hour. Nothing that she showed me seemed that difficult.

My meeting with Andrea Harrison¹⁰, the Traffic Manager, was a short one. She was not on the original schedule. She showed me how she kept track of the progress of production jobs. Nothing was out of the ordinary. Only two issues emerged:

They would like a project list for each team. Do we still have a way of specifying the creative/production team for each ad?
They sometimes have swing pages for merchandise, but it does not seem to be necessary to keep track of this in AdDept.

The two-hour meeting about newspaper advertising involved Karen Martin¹¹, Vice President of Advertising, Annemarie Poterba¹², the ROP Manager, and Bill McFadden¹³, a Media Planner. It lasted for a couple of hours. Here is what I wrote:

They are very backward in this area. They do not even send insertion orders; they just print a schedule and send it to all of the papers! They were overwhelmed by what we could do for them, especially with A^XN. The only slightly challenging thing will be in the area of competitive lineage, which they enter in as a summary number for each competitor-newspaper combination.

Here were some of the issues in the newspaper area:

They need to show what markets the ads run in. Their schedules use a mishmash of methods – lists of market groups like Stage’s, checkmarks, and names of individual papers. I think that they might like something like Foley’s schedule.
They would like a method of getting a list of the papers that have actually received the inserts from their printers. Maybe we could give them a checkbox field in A^XN so that they could confirm each one when it arrives. Then the unchecked ones could be reminded with the nightly update program.
We may need to do some work to provide them with a change report that is as easy to read as the one that they currently use.
They have a This Year-Last Year report by day that might be a little challenging. We will have to provide them with a substitute for the shading that they use to flag the sections for last year.
They use one ad per page for sections. Is this our recommended method?
They said that they might be interested in entering completed dates for ROP. They said that Foley’s told them that their creative people enter completion dates in ROP.
They have a separate ad number for each version, but they were amenable to using version codes instead.

“Stage’s” refers to Stage Stores, a large chain of stores that was also based in Houston. The AdDept installation there has been described here.

My last major meeting, with Gretchen Watkins¹⁴, the Direct Mail Manager, was different from the others:

This was the only disconcerting part of the trip. She uses a very sophisticated FileMaker Pro system that was developed by her predecessor. It has an unbelievable number of functions in it. The guy who developed it used it for every single aspect of his job, including calculating postage and approving invoices. However, I don’t think that replacing this system needs to be part of phase 1 of this project.

Of course the developer mentioned above no longer supported the program that he used, and there was no documentation.

I flew back to Connecticut with a spiral notebook full of notes, a briefcase full of sample reports, and a list of telephone numbers of everyone in the department. It was late on Friday evening when I arrived, but I was back in the office on Saturday morning to work on the Design Document.

I found a copy of the original Design Document and a supplement that covered new planning projects. Unfortunately, they are in PageMaker format, and I no longer have any software that can open them.

December 12-14, 2005: Within two weeks I was back in Atlanta. This time—and on all subsequent trips—I stayed at a Hampton Inn in Buckhead. It was about a mile south of the MSO headquarters, but I was still in good shape in those days, and I did not mind the walk. The weather was much more pleasant than it would have been in New England.

What I did mind was the inconvenience when nature called while I was in the advertising department. The bathrooms in the building were in the elevator area. To get from the elevator area to the offices you needed a badge. I didn’t have one.

By this time the department was connected to an AS/400 owned by Federated that was located at an IBM installation in Raleigh, NC. It was managed by IBM employees in Raleigh. The first thing on my agenda was to give a data entry class to about ten people in a small theater set up for training classes. I gave each of them the book that explained how the screens worked, and the conventions used in AdDept.

I spent most of the rest of the day setting up the AdDept system for them. For the most part I used the settings from Macy’s West’s version, which was on the same box. Using data files that MSO provided I was able to populate a few of the tables in the MSO AdDept system: regions, pubs, rates, vendors, and G/L accounts.

The PC that I used was very slow, and every so often it would go into an interminable stall while a program on the company’s intranet scanned it for malware.

On Tuesday James Jordan, the network guy in MSO’s advertising department, and I sat in on a conference call with Dan Stackhouse from Macy’s West (introduced here) and several people from IBM. Fran Ponder managed Federated’s account. Harry Burnett was in charge of things from a sales angle. Anthony Berry was in charge of security. Steve Tesch and Richard Antle are the technical support people. I never met any of them, but at least the mystery of where the AS/400 resided was cleared up.

Amy Diehl. For the first time I had a tiny point-and-shoot digital camera made by Cascio. I had only a vague idea how to use it.

Amy Diehl, whose title is FedAd Manager and who was the liaison with TSI, told me that she planned to enter ads the following week. She would be on vacation the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Amy could not believe how fast ads can be entered in AdDept. She told me that entry of one ad in Assets required 172 mouse clicks.

When I left to return to Connecticut the AdDept system was usable, but there were still major glitches that I could not address. For example, neither user profiles nor output queues had been created. So, one employee could use the training user ID to sign on, but there was no way even to print.

It was still unclear as to when they would be allowed them to create these. As always, there was a freeze on programming at this time of year. They were reluctant to do anything. Aurore said that she would address this.

I noticed that Macy’s West’s DAPANDL file had an enormous number of deleted records. I wrote to Denise that itshould be changed to reuse deleted records. The deleted records should be removed to recover disk space. Since there is a freeze on changes, we need to get the project of removing the deleted records approved by the change committee. I sent myself a reminder message to work with Dan on this when I got home.

A few small problems were discovered, but so far so good.

January 10-12, 2006 trip: I wanted to get the ROP portion of the system working. It was always important to show positive results quickly, and I could usually accomplish that in ROP. My notes reported that I addressed many little things, including some problems with the way that IBM had set up the system:

I had to start the batch subsystem.
We created a pub group with the first four pubs. We then ran the ROP schedule for the one day that Amy had entered.
We created day-of-the-week rates for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
I conducted a short query class with Amy and Jeanna.
I created three libraries for them: S_QRY, S_OUTFILE, and S_UPLOAD.
Bernice Bailey¹⁶, who works with Cliff, sent me the layouts for the upload to expense payables and to the general ledger.
There are two output queues, MCAP0314 and MCAP0315. They seem to work. However, Amy’s user profile was associated with an output queue in California. James got Fran Ponder from IBM to fix the existing profiles.
They have negotiated with several papers that a limited number of full color full page ads get a special rate. I showed Amy how to set up special rate codes for these, D/xx, S/xx, etc. I also showed the ROP people, but the planning people, whom I have yet to talk with, are the ones who actually do this.
Bernice Bailey sent me a file with the entire hierarchy. I wrote a program to create the five hierarchy file and the department file. They are using descriptions, not people’s names. I also created a 999 entry in all five files for Storewide, which is the default department.
I turned off the feature of change management for positions.
I set up their stores using codes that were identical to their market codes.
I ran contract reports using Macy’s West data, and I showed it to Annemarie and Bill. They thought that the reports would really be useful.
I showed the insertion order process to Annemarie and Bill. I also showed them how to create boilerplate for the special instructions.
I showed the A^XN letter to Annemarie and Bill. I told them what we needed from them to get the process going. They were very interested, but it is nearly impossible to get them to commit to anything.

When I returned to Connecticut there were still a number of things that IBM had not addressed:

Only two user profiles have been created.
Someone needs to change the startup program to restart the S_BATCH and S_INTER subsystems.
They do not have their own job description, but I don’t know whether they actually need one.

Of course, there were also eleven action items for TSI, and the most stressful period was yet to come. January was the last month of the fiscal year, and I had been challenged to match their closing numbers for January in order to feel comfortable closing February, the first fiscal month.

February 13-16, 2006, Trip: Things were still rather shaky in Buckhead:

Cliff did not know his password for the AS/400. I reset it for him. I had to do this for one other user as well.
It took a long time, but we finally figured out the ROP accrual for January. They underaccrued by a staggering amount. I put all the ROP discrepancies in ad #052-1. They will probably need to split the items on this ad. I doubt that they will want to take all of this expense in one month.
I had a Vietnam flashback on Tuesday. The PC that I was using suddenly turned into a Mac. Seriously. Evidently the monitor and keyboard were connected to some kind of switching device which was connected to a Mac as well as the PC. If you pressed the right Ctrl key twice, you toggled over to the Mac.
Thursday afternoon was rushed, but I did manage to show Cliff and Amy how to record purchase orders both ways and how to record both media and production invoices. I thought that it would be easy to record the first media invoice from the Cincinnati Enquirer, but the ads for the first week in February had not been checked. So we had to bail out of it.

I need to explain the “underaccrued” paragraph above. I worked with Jackie Foulds¹⁷ to find the problem.

The “ROP accrual” was for ads that had run but for which no invoice had yet been received. Since nearly all newspapers billed by the month, the list included nearly all ads for January. Accrual accounting demanded that the expenses be incurred in January. On this occasion the list included all of the correct numbers for each newspaper, but it was in Excel, and the total as defined on the spreadsheet somehow did not include the Atlanta Journal-Inquirer, MSO’s largest paper. So, their accrual entry had been off by over $600,000, and no one had noticed! It took Jackie and me nearly an entire day to find this error because I expected the devil to be in the details.

I was gobsmacked when I found this. The fiscal year had been closed, at least in theory. The department had reported far less expenses than it had actually incurred. That meant that the expense would hit in the wrong fiscal year, which could be disastrous for the department’s budgeting. Since no one seemed to be too upset about this, there must have been a way to correct the accrual.

Only eight items were on the to-do list that I brought back to Connecticut.

March 13-16, 2006, trip: This trip focused on insertion orders, claims (charging co-op vendors), and reconciling the February closing. Here are notes:

I had to give Cliff a new password. He forgot the one that I gave him the last time that I was there. I had to do this for several other people, too.
Amy and I met with Bill and Marie. They have a sour attitude about the whole project. I am not sure why they are so in love with the system that they have. It is not very good.
I created a program DM220RMSX for them based on Foley’s insertion order program. I expanded the headline to 30 characters and made a few other small changes. I ran a sample to show Bill and Marie from the newspaper area. I can’t say that they were very impressed. They do not seem to be able to imagine how this will work.
I gave a class on entering claims. The ladies entered all of the claims for February. I ran one of the programs on SSIMONTH so that they could have a list of what they keyed in. If there is a better program for this, we should put it on the MSABO menu.
We reconciled the accruals for almost all of the papers. There were a lot of mistakes, but the discrepancy was not as large as last month. When Jackie ran the reports, she accidentally ran them from January 30 through February 26. February 26 is in March. Someone also keyed in 255 instead of 225, so they over-accrued in Pittsburgh by $30K. The business office is very eager to use AdDept for accruals.
I need to call Don Detelj¹⁸ to find out what he needs to replace the “data dump” from Aims.
Can AdDept generate the next claim number? They want to use the numbers generated by Aims for now, but they would like AdDept to assume this role in the near future.
The IBM people assigned an output queue from Macy’s West to all of the new users from Macy’s South. I talked with James Jordan about this, and he said that he would bring it up with Fran Ponder.
Annemarie is insistent that they get faxing capability for their insertion orders. Aurore says that they are trying to get them to do this. They will have to get a modem and a phone line. This could be a hassle.

It was unclear who “them” was in the last paragraph. Aurore presumably knew. It might be some combination of IBM, FSG, and someone in accounting to approve it.

The list of action items for TSI was much longer this month. That was, in some ways, a good sign. It meant that the department had enough confidence in the system that they were using it in different areas.

April 10-13, 2006 trip: Another large new wrinkle had been added to the installation: getting historical data from Foley’s and Hecht’s (introduced here).

New players: Wendy Ellis works in the newspaper area. She will probably be maintaining the newspaper ads once they have been activated. Andrea Harrison also works in the newspaper area. Kristal Brown¹⁹ is the planner for the home division. Linda Ashe²⁰ is the planner for storewide, cosmetics, and ready-to-wear.
They want to include Foley’s ads in AdDept for 052 and 061. Since people at Foley’s are available for data entry, I recommended that people from Foley’s key them in. They will set up a series of ad numbers for Foley’s to use. Someone is going to have to translate the ad types, pub codes, and cost codes. There may be other things involved, too.
I was able to sign on to Foley’s with no trouble.
The machine in Raleigh will soon have faxing capability.
The business office did their March accruals in AdDept by themselves without any evident difficulty.
Amy held a class to show people how to sign on to Foley’s and Hecht’s. I don’t agree with the way that she did it, but it would have been overreaching for me to criticize her. I suspect that she does not realize how dangerous that iSeries Navigator is. I would never tell any user about it if I were she.
I set up a menu named MACYREPTS on the Macy’s South, Foley’s, and Hecht’s systems so that they can sign on to the Foley’s system to run reports. It is currently identical to the SRADV menu. I later had to change the one on Macy’s South so that the Foley’s options did not show up.
I told Jackie and Cliff about the reports which I added to the MSABO menu. I had previously e-mailed them about this, but evidently they needed to hear it personally.
I created an output file for Cliff.
I had to reset quite a few passwords.
Cliff’s user ID was set up with the wrong library for the output queue. I fixed it.
I uploaded about 1,000 vendor addresses. There were actually more than this, but they did not have usable vendor ID’s on their records, so I had to program in some guesswork into the program that wrote out the records.
Jackie does not want to use multi-part forms for claims. They want to dump the impact printer. She prefers that we print three copies. The first should have the word “Original” on it somewhere. The second should say “Vendor Copy.” The third should say “Merchant Copy.”
They like the latest version of the newspaper calendar!

I don’t think that Cliff ever used AdDept except when I was there forcing him to do it. He was a weird guy.

Amy must have learned about iSeries Navigator in classes at IBM. It was (and is under its new name of Navigator for i) an incredibly powerful tool. I was definitely right to feel nervous about her talking about it with users. I probably should have at least warned her about it after the class that she taught.

The list of open items that I brought back to TSI contained one for the Roadmap produced by the planners. That one item contained at least a dozen sub-items.

June 6-8, 2006, trip: Amy had several meetings lined up for me: The first meeting was scheduled for 8:30 on Monday. Randy Reeves²¹, the new Divisional VP, was in a meeting and could not attend. Here are my notes.

We started with the ROP people. They now have three coordinators – Bill, Andrea, and April Dunn. Each is in charge of groups of markets. We signed on to the web site. I walked them through setting up their own contact information using the Default Contacts page and claiming their own pubs using the Individual Contacts page. We went through the entire process of ordering ads several times to make sure that everyone had it.
Bill was worried about the Lima, OH, newspaper. I called Eileen at TSI and asked her to call them to make sure that they were with the program.
They told me that they did not want to show costs. I had Eileen suppress costs for advertiser M055. I created a printer file named IO and associated it with M220 and M230 (insertion orders for ROP and inserts, respectively). I had to make some changes in DM220RSX. The pagination did not work right, and it did not show the header comments. I had to make some changes in DM220RSX. The pagination did not work right, and it did not show the header comments. I copied DM230RBTX to DM230RMSX. I made some changes to suppress the costs and to show blank lines of header comments. I also removed the “Authorized by” line.
We ran the insertion orders on Wednesday. They all went to A^XN without error. We discovered that there was a problem with the special instructions. I had to add a statement to line 72000 to initialize the SI$ variable each time. This problem was inherited from Foley’s. Faxing is not yet in place.

The second meeting was with the people who record expense invoices. My notes stated:

We went through the entire process of creating an invoice upload file. It all seemed to work smoothly. They know that they have to key in the addresses if they want them to appear on the aprons. If they have a kickback, they will fix it on the .csv file and then fix it on AdDept. They do not plan to upload invoices a second time.

I also met with the people from the Business Office.

Cliff and Jackie attended a training class on co-op commitments. The only problem that they saw with the way that we did it was in regards to leased departments.
We talked about how they will enter leased.²² I was given a copy of the roadmap for Leased. It is not that different from the others. They will enter the actual media costs and, for books, the non-home cost from Gretchen. They will enter the marked-up amount as co-op with contra type LD.

The meeting with the people in direct mail did not go as well:

I showed them how to paginate books. They were extremely discouraged. I tried to convince them that the work that they had done in option 4 (number of pages by merchant) was not wasted, but I am not sure that I succeeded.
I set the default for the GRFLAG to G. I could swear that I did this the last time that I was here. They never enter departments except for co-op.

A fair number of new problems were encountered, but most of the system was operating smoothly by the time that I left Atlanta.

One of the MSO meeting rooms. I carried my oversized laptop and business materials in the large bag. The little one was for my camera.

July 9-13, 2006 trip: This was an important visit. July is the last month of the spring season. I wrote a lot of notes.

New players: Brigitte Billingslea²³ processes expense invoices in the business office; Deonne (Dee) Wolters also works in the business office; Kristyn Page²⁴ from Foley’s works on multi-cultural ads in the planning area.
We had a meeting to set up a strategy for the soft closing. Cliff, Jackie, Beth, Aurore, Amy, and Randy attended. Most newspaper invoices for June were keyed in. However, no other invoices and no purchase orders were entered. Active ads were created for ads from Foley’s and Hecht’s. We needed to come up with a way of excluding them from all financials.

The notes listed eight steps that were taken to isolate the ads from Foley’s and Hecht’s. Note was then made of an unexpected and unwanted situation:

Aaaaarrrgh! The transition from Foley’s occurs in the middle of July between week 2 and week 3. This will make closing July extremely difficult. So the above process applied only to ads running in weeks 1-24. The last two weeks of the season must use a different process.

I included at this point an outline of a comprehensive plan to close June and then July. It took up most of a page single-spaced. Most of it concerned how to get all the data entered for June, but the short items for July and August were interesting.

Mary Wiseman²⁵ will accrue Foley’s expenses and send them to Cliff, who will enter them as a manual journal entry. Aims will be used for Macy’s South expenses. We will go through this whole process again next month. For August they will use AdDept somehow. There is no choice.

Then I listed what had been done on this trip to implement the plan:

I found three ads that had illegal values for the “Ad Type for Pages.” I fixed these and made sure that there were no others.
I twice scheduled the cost accounting to run in the evening, and I ran the actual version of the roadmap. It seemed OK to me, but there was nothing to compare it with.
For the purpose of catching up on entering expense invoices I recommended that they enter them in batches that were sorted by the month that the items were paid. Their natural inclination is to enter them by the month in which they were expensed. The business office people keyed in production invoices all week.
Cliff wanted a way to be able to see an audit trail of all of his manual journal entries. So, I planned to show him DA201, but I never got around to it.
The TSI user ID’s for both Dee and Brigitte had been set up so that they could not upload invoices. I changed both of them.
Amy told me that they do not exclude discounts when calculating percentage leased charges. I therefore changed that value in the specs. I also took out the default markup. She adds the markup to the percentage. I did not change the setting for co-op calculations. Amy was not in the office on Thursday. She had an emergency with her daughter.
I showed Cliff and Dee (who handles them) how to key in broadcast invoices. [Specific instructions for six tricky steps were listed.] I had to fix all of their existing broadcast invoices: All the DAMEDVD and DATRNSD records were off by 11.11%. I divided the amounts by .9. They pay gross at the market level! I created indirect sub-accounts AGCF5 (television) and AGCF6 (radio) to hold the credit for 10% of the gross. I added the credits to the invoices using DA282. When I fixed the broadcast invoices, it left the transactions out of balance. I needed to fix the OFFST entries.
Amy said that she thought that the process that I wrote up (suggested by Miriam) is too complicated. However, she did not have an alternative.

I brought back a list of problems. It was not overwhelming, but several items were gnarly.

This was the training room. It is also where they often let me work.

July 24-25, 2006 trip: There was a lot of tension. We were running out of time, and the game plan was to no one’s liking.

Amy, Beth, Cliff, and I spent Monday reconciling expenses for June. The newspaper accrual that they submitted included expenses for the last four days of May. This was a mistake. I wrote a query named MAY3DAYS in S_QRY to isolate these expenses for them. They eventually were able to tie it out. The broadcast accrual that I manipulated two weeks ago tied out. The P.O. accruals eventually tied out, too.
Beth got me a file of the invoices paid in June (except for prepaids). I made a database file name MSGL/AP0606 out of it. I then wrote a query named ALLAP in S_QRY to try to match it with invoices in AdDept. I created a second query named APTRNSMO to list the invoices with transaction month of June to try to get these to match up. By comparing the two we were able to find invoices with a posting month of June that were actually paid in earlier months. Amy moved them to the proper months using DA282. There were still unmatched invoices on the list of invoices for June, but they were for jobs in future months.
While we were doing all of this, the people in the business office were working on July.
On Tuesday Amy came in late because she had a flat tire. Beth worked on the ROF for July in the morning and had to leave about noon. We only got a few minutes of her time. I ran the open co-op report. It was much shorter than I expected. I soon learned that none o the co-op commitments for direct mail or preprints had been entered. I ran the Co-op Status by FOB report for June. I was able to match up the ROP pretty well. However, I could not use this to match up the actual co-op because the report from Aims included claims from July.
I created a few purchase orders for accruals that Cliff made in June.
I think they have given up on reconciling AdDept with Aims and the G/L for June and July. They just can’t seem to get the data entry done. However, they must use AdDept in August. That is now the highest priority. They will call me on Friday with their decision about when next I should come to Atlanta.
I explained to Amy how to key in the fax numbers for newspapers that do not subscribe to A^XN. Amy asked me for the umpteenth time about faxing, and I gave her the same answer as before. She called IBM in Raleigh. They said that there was no need for a prefix in dialing out. They also said that everything was configured, but I could see no fax jobs running.

A lot had been accomplished, but many difficult items still needed to be addressed.

August 21-24 trip: I wrote a very long report about this trip.

Cliff showed me an invoice upload that did not work. There were no DUNS numbers on the vendor records. I wrote a query named NODUNS in S_QRY to find these for them.
They finally balanced their gross expense for June.
I wrote a process for Cliff to check the expenses in the G/L against AdDept. It consists of a program named RMV40, a command with the same name, and four queries: GLSUM, GLMATCH, GLNOMATCH1, and GLNOMATCH2. The queries are all in S_QRY. I documented the process in the document named GLMATCH, which I will put in the Macy’s South client folder. GLSUM must be run after the program and before the other queries. Later we discovered that the invoice upload process was stripping off starting 0’s and converting to upper case. I wrote a program to replicate this. I ran it after GLSUM.
They had had trouble faxing to Hampton. I added some more delays before the 4, and it seemed to work. Later April got a new fax number from Hampton. The faxing works with the new number. I don’t understand how Hecht’s was able to use the old number.
They had a pep rally at the Ravinia Crown Plaza on Tuesday. No kidding.
They decided that they want to use real PO’s with real vendors for Spring 2007. They will create blanket PO’s for accrual purposes for the fall. Randy said that they want to use 061 actual costs for direct mail for Hecht’s, Foley’s, and Macy’s South. I ran the DM647 to get actual costs for each direct mail book on Hecht’s system and Foley’s system. I ran DM489 for each book in the month for February for Hecht’s to see if that was what he wanted.
I gave a little P.O. class to Amy – DP260 and DP261 – so that she could help the other people learn about P.O.’s. I deleted USEDP271. This was a vestige from Macy’s West.
We discovered on Tuesday that no estimates had been entered for preprints. Then we discovered that all changes to estimates had been entered in Aims rather than AdDept. Evidently the people in that area did not understand that Aims was no longer being used.
I wrote off all open purchase orders. They did not close July in AdDept, so all of the P.O.’s were left over from June or earlier. That meant that somehow we needed to get the P.O. accrual for July into AdDept in order for the cost accounting not to consider 100% of the late invoices as August expense.
I entered the radio, television, direct mail, and insert accruals for July. Cliff decided that he did not want to reaccrue any of these. I therefore entered two zero invoices to write them off in August. I ran the accrual for July. The items showed up. I ran it for August. They were not there. Cliff has been carrying a short-rate accrual for ROP. I entered it as an indirect P.O. that hit the ROP account. He wanted to continue carrying it in August.
I wrote a process for Cliff to check the prepaid invoices in the G/L against AdDept. It consists of a program named RMV40PPD, a command with the same name, and four queries: PPDSUM, PPDMATCH, PPDNO1, and PPDNO2. The queries are all in S_QRY. I documented the process in the document named PPDMATCH, which I will put in the Macy’s South client folder. PPDSUM must be run after the program and before the other queries. Later we discovered that the invoice upload process was stripping off starting 0’s and converting to upper case. I wrote a program to replicate this. I ran it after PPDSUM.
I do not think that the programs to strip zeroes (STRIPGL and STRIPPPD) will be needed in September. The invoice upload will have been changed so that the 0’s do not get stripped off, and they no longer can use lower case.
I created TSIFAXOUTQ in QGPL. I then associate this output queue with TSIFAXPRTF and TSIFAXPRTI in TSIDATAS.
I checked the results of the ROF worksheet (which Cliff said is now obsolete because of management changes) against the accounting. It seemed to balance for everything except for ROP and magazines.
I set the earliest month for co-op accruals to be 062-1. If there were accruals from 061, they are not compatible with the way that we do it. I then ran the report and gave it to Cliff.
They asked me to change the specs so that they could pay any ad, no matter the status.

Needless to say, I did not attend the pep rally.

I brought back nine issues. Most of them were problems, not requests for new programming.

November 9-13, 2006 trip: Things had settled down a bit according to my report;

I put together makeshift processes for them to use to print the detail of their non-media expense by G/L account. I documented both of these processes. Basically they create output files from their accruals. Then they do a query for their actuals. Then they combine the results into one file and query that file.
Their accrued co-op was way off because they had not relieved any commitments for ad load. I showed them how to do this with claims for $0.
I wrote a query S_QRY/ACTVBYFOB for Jackie to get a list of actual co-op by FOB. She will use this until DB522 is fixed. This query creates an output file. I also gave one to Cliff named ACTVBYFOBP that prints. There were some authority problems, but they were both working when I quit.
I wrote a query S_QRY/INDIRECTS to get actual expenses for indirects for a season. They need this for the “Macy’s West Report.” The directs will come from DD #27.
I wrote a query named S_QRY/LINATLBU to provide a backup for the contract status report (DM767). The query S_QRY/INVADJ06 must be run first.
I changed the definition of the FILTER condition in the SLSXFR menu so that the filter program would appear.
Cliff gave me a file of sales by department for a month. A separate tab shows the sales by store for a month. Unfortunately the stores in DASTORE are actually markets. We tried to determine whether there actually is a requirement for either sales by store by month or sales by market by month. Cliff did not think so. Karla does not need the sales by month, but she would definitely like the sales by day. Miriam was not available.
I went over the prerequisites for running the store cost accounting with Amy. Basically she needs to run the BOOKQ query and option 7 on menu DAYEND.
I changed the default printing for DA102 so that the default is to put the printout on hold.

A few problems were discovered, and a few requests were made.

January 2-4, 2007: Both the notes and the list of issues were shorter than usual.

I had previously provided them with a query to find the amounts to charge their leased departments. They had three problems with it: One department was overcharged for an ad that was only 50% leased. I gave them a query named NOT100LEAS in S_QRY to find these. On two ads the amount that she charged them did not match the query. Cliff thought that the query was wrong, but he was off by one ad when he tried to match up a report with a query.
Cliff uses DB653 to do his journal entries for “accrued co-op.” He “accrues” the difference between season-to-date actuals and season-to-date committed. He and I have a different idea about what accruing means.
I had to increase the record length of DASLSTSI from 30 to 35.
I made a couple of changes to DA168U to make it match the file that Cliff can easily deliver. It also multiplies the amounts by 1,000. I checked individual entries and the totals for the November file that Cliff provided me. Everything seemed to work.
I wrote up instructions on the sales upload process. I e-mailed the instructions to Cliff and Amy.
I met with Gretchen Watkins and the two ladies who work for her in production. I showed them how to create purchase orders using option 26 of WRKADS.
They wanted to split freight between printer freight and mailer freight. I created a new sub-account FRML3 based on FRGT3 and a new cost code 705. They also wanted to split the computer charges to estimate the cost for “tracking and tracing” separately. I created a new sub-account TR&T3 for tracing and tracing based on COMP3. I also created a new cost category 515. I checked a direct mail ad. The new cost categories both showed up in option 28.
They are in the process of installing a new workflow system called Work Horse. Amy wanted to know if we could create a .csv file to feed it. She said that she would have to find out what would be in the file.

This was the last trip to Macy’s South. Since it occurred in the last month of the fiscal year, I suspect that the department’s budget for the next year included no provision for paying for my presence.

My life in Buckhead: I never rented a car in Atlanta. I always took MARTA from the airport to Bulkhead. On the first trip the hotel was within walking distance from the train station. On subsequent trips I took taxis from the train station to the Hampton Inn. I usually walked to Macy’s headquarters. One time when it was raining I asked the hotel to call a cab for me. They got me a ride, but it was not in a licensed cab. I did not complain.

I remember a lot about working at Macy’s, but little about anything else. The MARTA rides to Buckhead were usually late at night. The airport is south of the city, and Buckhead is far to the north. Sometimes it was a little creepy. The route went through downtown Atlanta. Often groups of young people who had been clubbing boarded there. At one point my car was occupied by myself, a group of young black women, and a group of young white men. The women were talking, and the guys overheard them. A discussion about the wisdom of the invasion of Iraq ensued. I was happy when that trip ended.

I cannot remember ever socializing with anyone from Macy’s. I ate lunch by myself in the cafeteria. I sometimes ate supper in the food court at a neighboring mall. Most of the time, however, I stopped at Arby’s on the walk back to the hotel and picked up a Reuben or a roast beef sandwich and ate in my hotel room.

I have quite a few memories of the Atlanta airport. My flights usually departed from Terminal F, but after I cleared security I usually took the tram to Terminal E. The elevator ended in a food court that contained a pretty large Chili’s restaurant. I would usually eat supper there, and, if I did, I would order the Baby Back Ribs with broccoli instead of French fries.

That restaurant was the only part of the airport that I liked. It always seemed very loud to me, even though I almost always spent the waiting time listening to operas or Italian tapes on my Bose headphones.

Epilogue: TSI maintained a good productive relationship with Macy’s Central until 2009, when the headquarters in Buckhead was closed, and all advertising was scheduled, produced, and ordered from New York.

1. FedAd and Assets were software systems written by a group that had been organized by Gilbert Lorenzo of the Burdines division. The system was supposed to be one integrated system that covered all aspects of advertising. It was used by Burdines and Bon Marché. After the integration of all of the divisions into New York some version of it was used in the advertising department there. The attempts to entice me to involve TSI in this multi-milllion dollar undertaking are described here and here.

2. Like almost everyone in the department, Aurore worked at Macy’s until 2009, when the advertising operations were consolidated in Manhattan. Her LinkedIn page is here.

3. Cliff looked like Santa Claus. I spent quite a bit of time with him over the course of the years. He revealed to me that he had a fairly substantial business on the side selling things on eBay. On one of my trips he told me about his plan to sell programs from some sort of Martin Luther King event being held in Atlanta. He also told me that some of his goods came from dumpsters. His LinkedIn page is posted here.

4. Beth Lane was a CPA who worked part-time in the Business Office. I remember very little about her. Her LinkedIn page is here.

5. Steve Weinbaum was astounded that I was willing to try to replicate the MSO planning process. I explained that I had done a lot of AdDept installations. No one had anything like this process, but several of them had other aspects that were equally challenging. His attitude impressed me. I wished that I had been able to work with him more. His LinkedIn page can be found here.

6. Miriam Pechar’s LinkedIn page is here.

7. Laurie Stenwall’s LinkedIn page is here.

8. Karla Schottle’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

9. Jeanna Corley’s LinkedIn page is here.

10. Andrea Harrison later moved to newspaper scheduling. Her LinkedIn page is here.

11. Karen Martin’s LinkedIn page is posted here.

12. Annemarie Poterba’s LinkedIn page is located here.

13. Bill McFadden’s LinkedIn page can be seen here.

14. Gretchen Watkins’s LinkedIn page is here.

15. Steve Tesch’s LinkedIn page is here. I could not find a page for any of the other IBM people or James Jordan.

16. Bernice Bailey’s LinkedIn page is posted here.

17. Jackie Fould’s LinkedIn page is posted here.

18 Don Detelj (silent j) was always sort of a mysterious figure lurking on the outskirts of the installation. His LinkedIn page is here.

19. Kristal Brown’s LinkedIn page can be seen here.

20. Linda Ashe’s LinkedIn page is here.

21. The LinkedIn page for Randy Reeves can be found here.

22. Most department stores have at least one department that is operated by another company that leases the space. Those companies must pay for the advertising that is run for them.

23. Brigitte Billingslea’s LinkedIn page is located here.

24. Kristyn Page’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

25. Mary Wiseman’s LinkedIn page is here.

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