Tag Archives: Pease, Doug

2001-2006 TSI: Weekly Partners’ Meetings

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Agendas for meetings. Continue reading →

Between January of 2001 and November of 2006 I met pretty often with Denise Bessette (introduced here), who was by then my partner and VP of Application Development. I found a folder of Microsoft Word files for the agendas that I wrote up for these strategy meetings. Starting in 2003 the meetings became more regular. They occurred on many if not most Wednesdays, the day that I was most likely not to be at a client’s.

We generally ate lunch together at an order-at-the-bar restaurant on the west side of the river. It had picnic tables near a small stream. I can’t remember the name of the place. I took a drive in the area that my memory associated with its location, but I could find no trace of it. I suspect that it closed, and the land was bought by a developer who put it to another use, perhaps condominiums.

The following summaries are mostly in chronological order. Almost every AdDept client is mentioned at some point. Separate blog entries with much more details have been posted for each of them. They can easily be found using the 1948 Project’s master index program, which is available here.

Many items on the agendas are repeated on subsequent agendas. A few of them persist over years. These were issues for which we never found solutions. The most obvious examples were the efforts to find additional uses for AxN that would benefit newspapers and/or advertisers.

By 2001 the nature of and name for AxN1 had been decided. Our focus was on how to roll it out to the AdDept clients and what we could do to make it more attractive both to the advertisers and the newspapers. We also discussed potential support issues and how the new model 170 that TSI had recently purchased could handle the load of handling the traffic from AdDept clients and newspapers. Occasionally we talked about personnel and other business-related matters.

By 2002 the business environment for large department stores had changed dramatically. Before listing the agenda for one of the meetings I wrote, “We need to change our attitude 180 degrees. Previously we had excess demand and were struggling to increase our capacity to meet it. Now we have excess capacity, and our customers are frugal.”

I had used Net.Data2 extensively for AxN. At the time it was the only thing available on the AS/400 that could interact with the database. By 2002, however, IBM was telling people not to use it. However, it was several years before IBM provided an equivalent tool. Java3, which I had studied extensively and had concluded was not suitable for what we wanted to do, was IBM’s solution to everything.

I was surprised to read how uncertain we were about the willingness o AdDept clients to use AxN. The meeting in March mentioned the need for a second installation. Before reading this I was pretty sure that Belk4 was the first, but maybe someone else had used it on a limited basis.

In 2003 Denise and talked a lot about what kind of programming was marketable to our clients. We investigated quite a few products that claimed to make it easier to make native AS/400 programs web-based . We also talked about what features could be added to AxN so that it would be more valuable to advertisers or newspapers. Usually one of the last items on the list was whether we should spend time converting our code from BASIC to RPG or something else.

In May Sue and I took our first vacation in Italy. I wrote a journal about that adventure and posted it here.

The meeting of November 5 was the first mention of Bob Wroblewski, who has been introduced here. The next few agendas mostly consisted of the same items.

In January of 2004 Bob and I flew to California to visit Robinsons-May and Gottschalks. Bob then started enrolling Rob-May’s papers. After that the process of getting newspapers to subscribe to AxN snowballed for several years. At about the same time our long courtship of Dick’s Sporting Goods finally paid off with a contract for AdDept. So, in only two years the outlook for TSI had improved greatly.

In February it occurred to me that there might be one dominant software company for the newspaper business. If we could create an interface with their system, it could advance the AxN project tremendously. However, I later discovered that each paper, if it had anything at all, had developed its own software or paid someone to do it. There was no uniformity. Fortunately I discovered that this was a blind alley before I wasted a lot of time, money, and energy on it.

The agenda for the February 18 meeting made it clear that the AxN project was about to take off. Most of the long-time AdDept users had at least been contacted. Stage Stores was enthusiastic, and they had just acquired another chain named Peebles. Finally, Dick’s Sporting Goods had finally signed the contract to purchase AdDept. To deal with the expected increase in use of the Internet by the newly subscribing newspapers Denise was arranging for installation of a T-1 line from AT&T with the Cox Cable connection as backup.

The March 3 agenda closed with a mention of the NAA, which was the abbreviation for the Newspaper Association of America (changed to News/Media Alliance in 2016). I eventually talked with someone at its headquarters, but I foresaw that it would take a lot of time and effort to build a productive relationship with the organization. It might have been a good project for Doug Pease (introduced here) or Jim Lowe (introduced here), but at that point they were in the rear-view mirror. I never thought that this would have been a good fit for Bob. Besides, he was busy talking to newspapers, or at least soon would be.

It took me a few minutes to decode this entry on the entry for March 24: “Robinsons: Lower price for LANG?” LANG was the Los Angeles Newspaper Group,.5 a company that printed and distributed tabloids in Los Angeles and its suburbs. Advertising for all those papers was managed from one central location. TSI agreed to send them one bill. We treated them like one large paper with several editions.

In April we were waiting for Dick’s to begin the solicitation for AxN before we approached Macy’s West and RadioShack. The April 21 entry contained positive news about Filene’s use of AdDept for accounting, including the monthly closing process. The next week Denise and I discussed the proposed trip to talk with Hecht’s main paper, the Washington Post. I ended up visiting them on May 14. It gave me quite a thrill, but I don’t think that they ever agreed to use AxN. Apparently we also considered a press release about being in business for twenty-five years, but I am pretty sure that we never did it.

The agenda for May 26 poses this question about Filene’s: “Have they made a big mess?” Bon Ton agreed to send letters to its newspapers about AxN.

In June we discussed various methods of emailing claims. I don’t recall that we ever took any action on this. There was ominous news from Federated that they put all quotes on hold. The total number of orders in AxN exceeded 100,000. The June 30 agenda announced that Dick’s was moving into its new building over the subsequent weekend.

The first item on the July 21 agenda was “Denise’s three issues”. I wonder what they were. Item #10C talks about a follow-up meeting with the Washington Post that never happened. The next week’s agenda explained that they did not respond to my email. A second e-mail was sent on August 4. On August 25 (my dad’s eightieth birthday) I called the Director of Advertising Services.

Something distressing was evidently going on at Parisian, but I don’t remember what it was. That disclosure was somewhat offset by the following good news: “RadioShack: 34 active; 39 testing; 22 Macy’s West; 15 L&T; 4 Parisian; 56 other.” RadioShack did one of its four geographic divisions at a time. The last two entries brought up new subjects: “How can we make better use of my time and Lucia’s6?” and “5-year plan”.

The August 4 agenda was the first to mention SQL7. I used SQL for all of the AxN programs, but the AdDept programs mostly created temporary indexed output files that were populated by one program and read by another using IBM’s recommended approach, ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method).

Marshall Field’s (introduced here), the last big installation of the May Co. version of the AdDept system, was first mentioned in the agenda for September 8. We were very excited about the meeting scheduled for September 16 at Hecht’s advertising department in Arlington VA. By this time the work for the Peebles installation at Stage Stores was operational enough that we were ready to solicit their newspapers for AxN.

I was serious enough about contacting companies that sold software for ad agencies that I spent $35 to buy the booklet from the AAAA. I questioned whether we should write to each of them to propose an interface with their system and AxN. I don’t remember ever doing so.

The agenda for November 1 mentioned that Field’s used an ad agency for both broadcast and newspaper. My recollection was that they started using AxN almost immediately and dropped Haworth, the agency that bought newspaper space. However, later entries seem to contradict this. The same agenda mentions that TSI was carrying $55,000 in questionable receivables in the last month of its fiscal year.

I never had to make an onsite visit to our AxN client in Guam.

The November 10 agenda mentioned that—after months of foot-dragging—Federated Systems Group was finally going to “cut over” to their new AS/400 system. During this period we were worried about providing support for AxN for Macy’s West’s newspapers in Hawaii and Guam. This was needless. The papers subscribed for years without any problems. This was also the last agenda that included a mention of a press release about TSI’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

A major issue early in the year was how to handle the process for installing changes that Dick’s had forced upon us. There were other issues, too. The first agenda of the year ends with the question: “How can we get this installation on the right track?”

Two minor enhancements to AxN for the advertisers had been completed: custom emails and downloading of email addresses. However, I had apparently given up on the possibility of interfacing with computer systems used by the newspapers. There was also a process for reconciling the orders on AxN with the schedule on AdDept.

By March 10 we had a big programming backlog because of the large number of difficult jobs for Marshall Field’s. Denise controlled this process. I simply asked, “How can I help?” In the same meeting we discussed for the first time what, if any thing, we should do to forestall Macy’s from replacing AdDept with the system known then known as FedAd that had been developed by Burdines. Our contact at Macy’s West stated that “it did not exist”.

At the March 25 meeting we talked about Macy’s East for the first time in many months. For the April 28 and May 4 meetings there is separate agenda for AxN. For some reason I seemed worried about using it at Foley’s and Stage Stores.

The first item on the regular May 4 agenda was one word: “Lucia”. Lucia was able to handle much more challenging projects than our other administrative employees. The problem was trying to come up with things for her to do. Another issue on the same agenda posed some interesting questions:

We never mastered the trick of Cloud Computing.
  1. How could we set ourselves up to manage systems for our small clients? Bon Ton, Gottschalks, Neiman Marcus
    1. IBM (like Federated)?
    2. TSI
      1. Dedicated high-speed line for each user?
      2. On the net?
        1. Telnet? How would they print? Pdf?
        2. VPN: AS/400 to AS/400?
        3. VPN: PC to AS/400?
      3. High availability?
      4. Disaster recovery?
    3. A third party?

We did not spend a great deal of effort on trying to provide “cloud” computing for our customers. It would have involved a great deal of expense and risk. Just seeing that term “disaster recovery?” item gives me the chills.

Later in May Sue and I took our second Italian vacation with our friends Tom and Patti Corcoran. I wrote a journal again, but this time I had a camera. The results are posted here.

The agenda for June 2 began with the surprising news that Chuck Hansen at Marshall Field’s had asked me to back off on AxN. It also mentioned the agenda for a meeting with Macy’s Marketing on 5/17. It probably intended to say “6/17”. The next agenda, dated July 8, only stated, “Follow up with …” I must have forgotten the name (Robin Creen) of the lady with whom I met at Macy’s Corporate Marketing. There is also a reference to Bloomingdale’s. I suspect that this was in response to information from Tom Caputo, who worked with AdDept at both Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue, that Bloomies had never taken the FedAd software out of the box.

The July 11 agenda has some detailed information about a proposed newsletter publicizing how AdDept handled inserts. Some of these enhancements were done for Dick’s.

The August 26 agenda has a new and somewhat mysterious major topic called “AdDept ideas”. The two subtopics are “SpooliT8 ($9K) or other Excel” and “Service Bureau”. I think that SpooliT made .csv files out of spooled output files. It may have had a few other features.

Throughout this period there were references to The Oregonian, the major paper in the Portland area that stopped paying invoices for AxN without canceling and never responded to attempts to find out why.

The agenda for September 14 mentions the long letter that I sent to Robin Creen. Its contents are posted here.

The agenda for October 12 had several tantalizing references. It began by stating that IBM’s VPN9 product, which TSI used for communicating through the Internet, with clients’ AS/400s would be activated on the following Saturday. It also reported that a newsletter had been sent out.

Robin Creen topped the October 24 agenda, but there were no details. The second item referred to renewal of iSeries News, a magazine.that catered to the AS/400 community. It had undergone many name changes, and the content had also evolved. We kept all of the back copies in the shelves that in 2023 are in my office. When we closed down the company (details here), I threw all of them away.

The third item was “SBC Contract”. I don’t remember SBC, but I suspect that it was an IBM Business Partner that had sold more systems than we had or had somehow managed to deal directly with IBM. During this period TSI was not allowed to quote or sell any IBM products. We had to go through a Super-VAR.

The fourth item was “Lucia” with no details. The fifth was “AT&T Global: do we need it?”. I am pretty sure that this product allowed me to get my email when I was on the road. In the days before Wi-Fi I had an AT&T product installed on my laptop that allowed me to use a phone line in my hotel room to sign on to AT&T and look at my email.

We must have received an inquiry from Sport Chalet10 a chain of stores in California that was similar to Dick’s. Until I saw this entry again I had completely forgotten about them. Evidently I wrote them a letter and sent them a newsletter, but nothing came of it.

The last agenda for 2005 was dated December 6. The #1 item was the blitz to get an AdDept system for Macy’s South up and running in time for the season that started at the beginning of February. The second item was an inquiry from Circuit City11. This was another dead end.

The “My disk recovery” entry brought back some really bad memories. I think that I recovered everything on my computer’s hard drive, but it was costly and painful. The best part was that I got an external hard drive12 that made it very easy to back everything up.

There are no entries for 2006 until June. I remember being under extreme pressure to bring the two huge AdDept installations at Macy’s South and Marshal Field’s up to speed. Meanwhile we received the crushing news that Macy’s and the May Co. had merged, and Macy’s would be the dominant player.

The agenda for June 13 began with the word Corum. I am pretty sure that it referred to broadcast buying software. Based on the date it was probably associated with Macy’s South.

That agenda also contained a major item that simply stated “Modernizing and marketing AdDept”. We never did find a feasible way to transform the AdDept screens into something that looked modern. We made more marketing attempts after this, but they did not amount to much. This was the peak period for AxN. More than four hundred papers had subscribed. TSI’s administrative person spent a good deal of time printing and mailing invoices and depositing checks from newspapers.

The agenda for October 11 was startlingly different. It mentioned two AS/400 models, a 170 and a 270. My recollection is that we did development and ran the business on the 170, and the 270 was devoted to AxN. It also mentions recruitment. I am not sure whether that referred to the administrative position or programming. The agendas have gotten shorter and shorter.

This agenda also mentioned the C compiler for the 270. Denise was upset at me for even investigating the possibility of converting TSI’s code to C, which was widely used in the Unix world.

In the agenda for October 18 the scary term “Macy’s North” appeared several times. It referred to the company that was formerly called Marshall Field’s. Evidently the marketing (never called “advertising”) department there had never bought into using AxN for insertion orders. They may have still been using Haworth.

“Maintenance” was often mentioned in the agenda for November 1. We probably never charged as much as we could have for the kind of service that we provided our clients. I was evidently still spending quite a bit of time at Belk.

I was surprised to see Circuit City mentioned again on the agenda for November 8. We must have received another phone call. The term “Foley’s project” also appeared. I am pretty sure that that was the code name for the long and frustrating effort that Denise and I undertook to sell the company.

The last agenda that I have was dated July 10, 2007. It contained only four items:

  1. Trip to Macy’s West
  2. 515
  3. Dick’s quotes
  4. Foley’s
Never even a nibble.

Denise and I continued to meet, but not on a formal basis. By then I had almost given up on selling more AdDept systems. There had been so much consolidation in retail that the number of good prospects for the system had shrunk to almost nothing. Nordstrom and Dillard’s would have looked nice on our client list, but it was hard to think of anyone else that was worth pursuing.

We still did quite a bit of custom programming during the next five or six years, but managing the list of open jobs did not require the juggling act that had characterized the previous decade.

The AxN business decreased for a few reasons. The big stores no longer trusted newspaper ads to bring in customers as they once did. Newspaper readership was way down. Some of the AdDept clients outsourced their buying to agencies or media services. That always meant a drop in the number of papers.

I enjoyed those meetings immensely, and I miss them.

1. The history of the development of AxN is posted here. The system design is outlined here. The description of the process by which it was brought to market begins here.

2. Net.Data was a scripting language written by IBM for the AS/400. It was quite popular, but IBM for some reason decided to drop it in favor of the open source scripting language php, which required implementation of the Zend php engine.

3. Java is an object-oriented language that was developed by people at Sun Microsystems. The company released an open-source version. Java was almost the only thing that IBM talked about at the PartnerWorld convention that Denise and I attended in 2000. It is described here. On the AS/400 applications written in Java required a lot more resources than programs written in the native languages. If run on the same box the Java programs were slower, a lot slower.

4. The history of the AdDept installation at Belk is posted here.

5. In 2016 LANG merged with the Orange County Register and a few other papers. The new organization was called the Southern California Newspaper Group. The third item under the Federated topic was “AxN letter to four divisions”. Since “Bloomingdale’s” was the second item it mus refer to Macy’s East, West, South, and Florida (Burdines).

6. Lucia Hagan was TSI’s administrative person during this period. She was introduced here.

7. SQL stands for Structured Query Language. It was invented by IBM, but the company did not endorse its use on the AS/400 until 2004.

8. SpooliT is still on the market in 2023! Its website is here.

9. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. The Wikipedia entry is here.

10. Sport Chalet was sold to Vestis Retail Group in 2014 and was liquidated in 2016.

11. The sad story of Circuit City ended with its liquidation in 2009.

12. I still have that hard drive in 2023. However, I recently discovered that I no longer can find the cable that was used to attach it to a computer, and the company that made it was no longer in business.

1995-2000 TSI: AdDept Client: Cato Corporation

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Cato: the low-end AdDept client. Continue reading →

Virginia Meyer1, the VP of Advertising at Cato Corporation2, called me one day in early 1995 to ask about the AdDept system. I flew to Charlotte, NC, and made a presentation. Somehow she persuaded the company’s IT department to buy AdDept for her on an AS/400 that they were using for some other purpose. I installed the system in July of 1995. Over two decades later I still do not understand why they bought the AdDept system and used it for five years.

Cato was definitely unlike any other AdDept client. During the first visit Virginia explained that the company had about six hundred stores. They generally ran only one sale per month, and they timed it to start just after welfare checks were likely to be received. This way of thinking was not prevalent at Saks or Neiman Marcus. For a while Cato had left purchasing of broadcast ads to the individual store managers. However, several of them spent their budgets on Christian stations with extremely poor ratings. The advertising department eventually brought the buying in-house.

No Cato stores in Maine or Montana.

Virginia’s motivation for wanting the system was primarily because I said that we could provide her with sales data about the stores. Most of the work that TSI did was to construct an interface with the corporate sales recording system and to produce a report called Volume by Market. Many new fields had to be added to the store table in order to produce it. The one that I remember most vividly was one that designated whether the store was near a military base.

What, you may ask, did this have to do with advertising? Not much, but Virginia had been trying for years to get the IT department to provide her with sales information so that she could tell whether the company was spending its money wisely. The IT people had never addressed the request.

The people: I got to know a few people in the IT department. I remember that we went somewhere for lunch at least a couple of times. Aside from them and Virginia, the only person with whom I worked was Lisa Nutter3, who managed the advertising business office. She was our liaison during her short career at Cato.

Memories of Charlotte: I remember going to Charlotte with Doug Pease, who was introduced here. So, we must have done a demo for them either on their equipment or at IBM. I remember that I was very impressed by the airport in Charlotte (now called Charlotte Douglas International Airport in 2023). It had a very nice selection of restaurants in its central court and a large collection of rocking chairs positioned along the windows. It was a hub for US Air at the time. I could fly there directly from Hartford.

Near the exit from the terminal was a large statue of Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III, the monarch whose behavior so upset the American colonists. She gave birth to fifteen children. Mecklenburg County was also named after her duchy. I have not researched why she was so popular in this remote corner of North Carolina.

Traveling from the airport to Cato—or anywhere else in Charlotte—required driving on Billy Graham Parkway. I guess that I should not have been surprised that the people and politicians in Charlotte were proud of his legacy as Richard Nixon’s moral compass.

I recall little about the demo or the first meeting. The thing that I do remember is that Doug and I spent most of a day at Carowinds, an amusement park that was on the south side of Charlotte. Actually part of it was in South Carolina. A brick sidewalk marked the boundary. I was not sure at the time whether I had ever been in South Carolina, and so I made certain that I crossed the border at least once.

50 mph.

Doug and I challenged each other to ride on the stand-up roller coaster called Vortex. I won’t say that I really enjoyed the experience, and I would not do it again. However, I am glad that I tried it once. Important note: neither Doug nor I got sick. If you are interested in what it was like, you can watch this video.

We stayed at a Holiday Inn that was at the far end of the parking lot for a strip mall on Woodlawn Road just west of I-77. The primary attraction of the strip mall was The Gentlemen’s Club of Charlotte. I learned that “gentlemen’s club” is a euphemism commonly employed in the South for what northerners would call strip clubs or girlie bars.

I am pretty sure that I stayed in this hotel, which at some point before 2023 was converted into a Holiday Inn Express, for all of my trips to Cato. I did not patronize the GC of C, but I did manage to run a few miles on several evenings in the residential area behind the hotel. The nearby KFC was my primary source of nourishment on most of those evenings. I also liked a Mexican restaurant named Azteca4 near there.

On one of my visits I came across a Cato store in a strip mall. I took a short circuit around the store. I saw enough to know that it was not for me.

Lost but not gone forever.

I ate lunch with the IT guys on a different visit. Somehow I lost my American Express card, the only credit card that I had at the time. I had to cancel it and get a new one. It was a bother, but no one tried to use it.

For some reason I was invited to a meeting at Cato that was attended by the president of the company. His name was, not surprisingly, also Cato. He was not impressive. The other executives at the meeting seemed to need to explain everything to him.

There are still plenty of these.

Epilogue: Early in 2000 I received a phone call from Virginia. She told me that they were canceling the AdDept maintenance contract and the open programming projects. Denise Bessette (introduced here), who by then was TSI’s VP of Product Development, took this news very hard because one of the issues that Virginia mentioned was that some of the open projects had been open for several months. Shortly thereafter Lisa resigned.

I suspected that the company must have instituted austerity procedures. Almost never did a client cancel its maintenance contract and continue to use the AdDept system. In fact, when I started this project, I expected to learn the Cato was no longer in business. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to Wikipedia in 2023 it had 1,372 stores with five logos.

1. Virginia Meyer worked at Cato until 2002, but her influence seemed to vanish in 1999. Her LinkedIn page is here.

2. Despite the fact that Cato has always been a family-run business that was named after its founder, it’s logo is in capital letters, which gave me the impression that it was an acronym.

3. Lisa Nutter’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. A restaurant called Plaza Azteca opened in Enfield, CT, in a location that had already been the home of several failed restaurants. Parking was difficult, and many other restaurants with established clientele were nearby. Sue and I went there once and were not impressed.

It closed after only a few months.I don’t know if it was affiliated with the one in Charlotte.

1995-1996 TSI: AdDept Client: Color Tile

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Short but sweet. Continue reading →

The Color Tile stores had the crooked TILE letters. Tandy Corp. once owned Color Tile as well as the other store pictured here, RadioShack.

Color Tile1 was a chain of small retail stores that was based in Fort Worth TX. In 1995 it had over six hundred stores. The IT Department, which already owned AS/400’s, contacted Doug Pease2 about using AdDept for its advertising department, which was quite small compared to the ones for department stores. Doug and I flew to DFW, rented a car, and drove to Fort Worth to demonstrate the AdDept system and to talk with the employees in the advertising department.

The presentation went very well. I sent them a proposal and a contract. They signed and sent TSI a deposit. Shortly thereafter I flew back to Texas and installed the system on an AS/400 in the company’s data center.

These are the two people from Color Tile in a conference room in Ft. Worth. Doug, whom I cut out of the photo, and I were sitting across from them.

I could find no notes from the time that I spent at Color Tile. I only found the photo at the left when I was looking through my Tandy photos.

Throughout the installation I only worked with a couple of people in Color Tile’s advertising department, and I don’t remember their names. The guy insisted on taking me to lunch at a real Mexican restaurant. He said that he wanted to prove that eating Mexican food need not require spending excess time in the men’s room an hour later. Mexican food never affected me that way, but I definitely enjoyed the meal with him.

The woman was very excited about the progress that had been made in just a few months. However, the company declared bankruptcy in January of 1996 and was liquidated a little more than a year later. Later she was hired by RadioShack (described here) and worked with the AdDept system for several years.

Fortunately, Color Tile owed TSI very little when they entered bankruptcy. In the end the company left all of its vendors high and dry.

1. The retailer Color Tile, Inc. should not be confused with Colortile, a brand of floor covering that was still in existence in 2023. The confusion is enhanced by the fact that Colortile’s signage often splits its name into two words.

2. Much more can be read about Doug here and in most of the entries for AdDept clients.

1995-2009 TSI: AdDept Client: Macy’s West

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Department store chain based in San Francisco. Continue reading →

I have been putting off the writing of this page for the last few months. Macy’s West was a big and important client, but my memories of most of the people and the projects that we did for them are hazy. To make matters worse, I have found very few notes about the installation and no photos whatsoever.

Macy’s flagship store and Union Square.

Macy’s was acquired by Federated in 1994 shortly after both companies emerged from bankruptcy. TSI had been pitching Macy’s West, the division that was administered in San Francisco, about purchasing an installation of the AdDept system for some time.

I am pretty sure that the original inquiry from Macy’s West came from Gary Beberman, who had been our liaison for the very first AdDept systems at Macy’s East in New York City (described here) and who had also consulted on the installation at Neiman Marcus (described here). He and his wife, who also worked at Macy’s, had moved to the Bay Area, and Gary had taken a job at Macy’s West. The advertising department was looking for a system, and Gary recommended that AdDept be considered. He told them what we had accomplished in Manhattan and probably also mentioned things that could have been done but weren’t.

I vaguely remember doing a demo in San Francisco, and I think that Doug Pease might have come with me. I have a vague recollection that someone from the I. Magnin stores, by then managed by Macy’s West, was in attendance. It may very well be that the Macy’s West advertising department was able to use an AS/400 that had formerly been used (probably for accounting) by I. Magnin.

In the first few years most of our dealings were with Gary. I did quite a bit of consulting on my trips to San Francisco, but he did most of the training of the users in San Francisco. Since they used hardware they already owned, we were not involved in quite a few aspects of the installation that we often were.

That arrangement was positive in that it allowed me and the rest of the people at TSI to spend more time on more productive activities. The down side, however, was that none of us at TSI had a good feel for how well the installation was going. Macy’s West seldom called for support and used AdDept for fifteen years. Our association stopped only when the corporate bigwigs brought all of the administrative functions to the Big Apple.

My visits to Macy’s: I made a half dozen or so trips to Macy’s West over the years. I flew to San Francisco on whatever airline had the best rates at the time. It might have been United, Delta, or American. The flight back was always on a red-eye.

The advertising department at Macy’s was located in a building that was a few blocks from the huge store in Union Square. It might have been on Fremont St. I stayed at a Holiday Inn that was on either Mission St. or Market St. I don’t think that the hotel is still there. It may have been sold to another chain.

I did not rent a car; I took BART from and to the airport, and I walked from the hotel to Macy’s headquarters. I may have taken a taxi once or twice. I only remember one meal that I ate in San Francisco. Gary Beberman and I walked to one of his favorite restaurants that was, I think, in Chinatown. I remember no further details. My meals on other occasions were probably grabbed in passing from fast food places.

I am pretty sure that on one occasion I took the cable car from the turnaround on Powell Street up to the top of the hill. I did not visit the Cable Car Museum. It was in my price range. So, either I did not know about it, or I might have been pressed for time.

The people: I only have notes and memories of two people whom I worked with in the first twelve or thirteen years. Emily White was the Senior VP of the advertising department from May 1996 to October 1998. Doug knew her from their time together at G. Fox in Hartford. I later worked more closely with her at Meier & Frank in Portland.

Around the turn of the century there was a major upheaval in the department. This is what I wrote in 2000:

They have recently undergone wholesale personnel changes. We have done a lot of work for them designing interfaces. We have designed very few reports. They must use a number of queries to create reports. The original training was done by Gary Beberman, who lives in San Francisco, and was our first liaison at Macy’s East.

I do not have a good feel for what they are doing at Macy’s West. I imagine that they could benefit a great deal from a few days of our time.

Dan Stackhouse was our liaison in later years. He was in charge of the local network used in the department. He did not really know much about either the AS/400 or the AdDept system, but he was able to gather specs for new projects for us and address connectivity issues.

I remember that Dan was fired by Macy’s, and he sued them over this action. He asked me to submit an affidavit explaining our relationship. I did what he asked, but I doubt that it helped his cause much. I searched the Internet for references to his lawsuit. I did not find much.

AxN: Because of Gary’s close involvement with the project, almost all of the work that we did for Macy’s West was in the establishment of interfaces with their corporate accounting systems. We customized very few reports for them.

One very unusual project was the coding and installation a menu that could be used by people in the merchandise departments to look at information about their ads. They set up user IDs for each department or group that were restricted to the programs and queries available from this menu.

The only other project that I remember in much detail was involved with AxN, TSI’s system for sending and managing insertion orders for newspaper advertising space. Unlike Macy’s East1, the people in San Francisco were very enthusiastic about delivering insertion orders via the Internet.

TSI’s initial contact with the newspapers that would hopefully be subscribing to the service was a letter written by me and signed by someone at the advertising department. I remember vividly that the woman whom we asked to sign it had no additions or changes to the letter, and she definitely wanted us to send it. However, she did not want to take the time to sign the letters herself. She said, “You can just sign them.” So, for the first and only time in my career I added the role of forger to the long list of activities that I did for the company.

The AxN installation at Macy’s West provided TSI with a few far-flung clients. Macy’s purchased Liberty House, the chain of department stores and resort-wear stores based in Hawaii, in 2001. One of those stores was in Guam, and the Pacific Daily News subscribed for several years.

The last trip: My last trip to Macy’s West was for two days at the end of July 2007. I learned that Sheila Field was the Senior VP of marketing. She had in fact been there for several years and before that at Foley’s in Houston, where I spent a lot of time in the mid-nineties. I never had met her, and she was also not available on this occasion. I did meet with many other people. I did not do a great job of learning names. Here is the unedited list from my notes:

Sheila Field.

Sheila Field2 is the Senior VP. She is from Foley’s. I almost certainly know her, but I did not get to see her on this trip. Kedar Stanbury3 is in finance, which means planning at Macy’s West. So is Von Jones4. Their boss is Chuck Allen5. The business office manager is Gary Veran6. His assistant is Diane _______. Laurie Hamilton7 is the print media director. Jennifer Hung8, Kelly ____, and Terry _____ work for Laurie.

They reported quite a few anomalies that they had been living with. I made it clear that they should report these to TSI. We always fixed things promptly. They gave me a list of areas that they were interested in using AdDept for:

  1. Contracts.
  2. Work group limitations for purchase orders. Does this even work? They want to make sure that the direct mail people create nothing but direct mail purchase orders. Do we have a way to do this?
  3. Components.
  4. Foley’s effectiveness (advertising productivity) reports.
  5. Expense invoice upload.
  6. Co-op upload.
  7. Month end:
    1. Media accruals.
    2. Non-media accruals.
    3. Prepaid to expense.
    4. Prepaid reconciliation.
  8. Run lists.
  9. Stage’s Internet ads.

The plan was for me to return in “a few weeks”. I cannot overstate how psyched they were for using AdDept more productively. My notes stated that I thought that they would approve whatever programming was needed for every item on the list.

Alas, the plan never was carried out. In February of 2009 management of all advertising for all Macy’s divisions was consolidated in New York. Within a few years none of the people mentioned above were still working for Macy’s. I don’t think that any of them made the transition to New York.

This consolidation was a major blow to TSI. I knew that there was little or no chance of persuading the consolidated Macy’s to use AdDept. Macy’s West was a big client for both AdDept and AxN.

1. For some reason Macy’s East never used AdDept for insertion orders. They did not even use it to print copies. Instead they called each paper and described each ad that they wanted to run to the newspaper’s rep. It baffled me that they could not appreciate how much faster and easier it would be to use AdDept, which had all of the information on the order, to send orders to all papers at once. Everyone who used AxN—both newspapers and advertising departments—were very happy with it.

2. Sheila Field’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

3. Kedar Stanbury’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Von Jones’s LinkedIn page is here.

  • Von Jones
  • Chuck Allen
  • Gary Veran

5. Chuck Allen’s page is here.

6. Gary Veran’s LinkedIn page is here.

  • Lauri Hamilton
  • Jennifer Hung

7. Laurie Hamilton’s LinkedIn page is here.

8. Jennifer Hung’s LinkedIn page is here.

1999-2000 TSI: Finding the Best Person

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Our attempt to hire René Conrad. Continue reading →

In the second half of 1999. after my sister Jamie Lisella had left TSI (explained here), the situation at the company was simultaneously the most exciting and the most perilous of its entire experience. On the one hand, business was very good; our services were much in demand, and the relationship problems of the previous few years were pretty much behind us. We had a good staff that could produce great code on a reasonable schedule. We also had plans to move into a new office in East Windsor that we were designing to fit our needs (described here).

However, the company did face some serious issues.

  • TSI had no marketing director, and we had done no marketing of any note for at least a year.
  • TSI no longer had an administrative assistant. I had take over these tasks, and I had better things to do.
  • The size of the potential market for new sales of our primary product, AdDept, an administrative system for retailers, was dwindling, mostly do to mergers and consolidations in the retail industry. Another factor was the fact that AdDept was already installed in a large number of locations.
  • The computer that we knew best, the AS/400, had limitations that made it difficult to sell to companies that were not familiar with it. Specifically, the screens and output were not considered “modern”.
  • The Internet posed a serious challenge. At the end of the century every business could see aspects of the opportunities that it offered, but few could see a clear pathway to using it profitably.

My partner, Denise Bessette, and I discussed these issues fairly often. We knew that we were understaffed in critical areas. Although a good case could be made for getting a new marketing director forthwith, the previous marketing person, Doug Pease, had left the company a few years earlier because I asked him to stop selling new AdDept systems for the simple reason that our existing clients were so demanding that we were struggling to keep up with their requests for new programming. It seemed to me that we should address our other problems before we hired someone to generate more sales.

I was aware that René Conrad was frustrated with her position as planning manager at Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh (introduced here). I had great respect for René and her work. In the wake of Jamie’s departure I discussed with Denise the possibility of asking René to work for TSI. Denise was receptive to the idea, but there certainly were a lot of detail that needed to be put in order.

After talking with René over the phone a few times in August of 1999 I sent the following letter to her:

I have been thinking a lot about this. I also met with Denise. As usual, she had some good ideas. It seems to me that there are three things we need to address: 1) a job description that we all can live with; 2) a solution to the relocation problem; 3) a suitable compensation scheme. You may have other issues, too. If you do, I would greatly appreciate it if you would tell me as soon as possible.

1) Job description

You asked me if this was Doug’s job. The answer is no. We hired Doug to sell AdDept systems. We hoped he would be able to do other things, but the only other one that he was accomplished at was setting up time and action plans and agendas. In the last five years we have taken an immature product with a small client base and made it into a comprehensive administrative system used by a large portion of the most powerful and successful retailers in America. What we really need now is someone with insider knowledge to help us shape our company for the next 10-15 years. This is the primary role we would like you to pay. We realize full well that this is much less structured than what you are used to. We hope you would look forward to the challenge and can adjust to this type of environment. The second most important objective would be to relieve some time pressure from Denise and me. I hope that you would be able to relieve me of some of the training time either by eliminating the need for it by improving our documentation or by taking some of the trips yourself. The other side of the coin is that neither Denise nor I can afford to take on new unbillable responsibilities. The case in point is supervision of the administrative assistant. Jamie did this work for such a long time that she required very little oversight. I don’t see how we could afford to hire you if you did not supervise this person. I don’t see how this job can be performed from anywhere except our office, certainly for the next few months. You will have an awful lot to learn about how our company works. You know all about Kaufmann’s and a little about the other May divisions, but we have 17 other clients. We work very closely together at TSI. I don’t see how this could be done by phone. We also do not have the infrastructure for remote use of our system. We have a dial-up connection through the network, but it uses phone lines.1 We would spend a fortune on long distance if someone had to dial in to our system, and, of course, that is the only way to dial in to our customers. Setting up an internet connection is expensive, and we would probably have to hire someone to do it. It also drags security issues in as well.

2) Relocation

I don’t exactly know how to sell you on Connecticut. Our new office promises to be very nice. You will have the biggest office with three windows. We will make sure that you have whatever you need to be productive. I have made a commitment to everyone to make the work environment so nice that people will love to come to work.

As I said, we have no death marches.

I think you will like working with our staff. If there was any negative feeling in our office, it left with Jamie. We are in the process of hiring an administrative assistant.2 If you don’t like the person we hire, you can get someone else.

The area is pretty nice. The weather is certainly no worse than Pittsburgh’s.

We are two hours from Boston, which is full of activity. We are only three hours from New York by train. Vermont is only 1.5 hours. The long island shore is an hour or so.

You will have to make new friends. That is never easy.

We would REALLY like you to come see what we have to offer. Denise is eager to show you Northampton, MA (about 20 minutes north), where she went to school.

3) Compensation

I am pretty confident that the compensation issue can be worked out without much difficulty. I told you about how much Doug had been making. I neglected to tell you that 2/3 of that was in commissions. I think that we need to revamp the compensation scheme somewhat. Doug concentrated on new AdDept sales. It took him a few years, but eventually his efforts outstripped our ability to support the new customers. I get the distinct impression that you aren’t interested in that kind of job. We want to sell AdDept systems, but we think we need to develop other sources of income as well.

We propose that you receive 35% of the profit on hardware sales; 10% of the revenue on AdDept sales (assuming I take all the sales trips by myself); 20% of AdDept module (e.g., CAPS interface) sales; and 50% of “project management” income. The last would be defined as any trips (at $900 a day) that you get customers to agree to let you take. If you can persuade them to pay you without taking a trip, all the better.

You will be part of the process of developing new products or services. We will negotiate with you what percentage you get.

The starting base salary would be $50,000. e will agree to pay you an additional $2,000 per month as salary in lieu of commissions for the first twelve months. If your commissions were $500, $4,000, $800, and $3,000 in the first four months, you would be paid $2,000, $2,500, $1,500, and $2,300.

We have done no marketing in more than two years. Nevertheless, in the next year I think that one AdDept sale is almost certain (Carson’s)3 and one is likely (Dick’s)4. It is possible that Dick’s will happen very soon, in which case I will have to pay Jamie commissions. There are two almost certain hardware sales (Carson’s and a box for Saks Inc.). At least three or four customers could definitely use faster boxes, and the new 170’s are very attractive.

Adapting to life in a small company will not be easy for you. On the other hand, I think that the profiles of TSI and René Conrad mesh well. We are stable, free of debt, and full of kindred spirits. We need a smart, aggressive, well-connected person. You’re it.

Have you seen the W.C. Fields movie, “The Bank Dick”5? Fields’ character Edgar Soucè (accent grave on the last syllable) has a prospective son-in-law named Og Oggleby who works in a bank. Fields is trying to talk him into embezzling money to invest in shares of stock in The Beefsteak Mine. The pitch is “You’ve got to take a chance when you’re young.” Soucè explains, “My uncle Huffnagle, a balloon ascentionist, took a chance. While he was aloft in his balloon one day, he espied a haystack 2,000 feet below him He took a chance. He jumped out of the balloon and aimed his flight at the haystack.”

“Gosh,” says Og. “Did he survive?”“Uh, no,” says Soucè. “But that’s the point. If he’d been a younger man, he might have. You’ve got to take a chance when you’re young.”

We contacted René, and arranged for her to fly to Connecticut and spend some time talking with us in our new office. We bought a round-trip plane ticket for her and arranged for her to stay at the nearby hotel, which was, I think, a Best Western at the time.

I picked up René at Bradley on, I think, a Saturday morning in December 1999 or January 2000. Denise drove in from her house in Stafford. We tried to explain that the situation at TSI was very positive, but we wanted to hire someone who could help us face the issues of the twentieth century. René’s biggest concerns were the fact that she was used to fixed goals and rewards for meeting them and whether her presence would be required in Connecticut. Unbeknownst to me she had strong ties to Pittsburgh and was not impressed by the social scene in the Hartford-Springfield area.

A few days before Denise and I left for our trip to PartnerWorld in San Diego I received a letter from René in which she declined our offer. It was disappointing but not surprising. When we got back from San Diego, I wrote up my thoughts for Denise’s consideration and then on February 7 I set this letter to René:

Denise and I were disappointed but not very surprised to receive your letter. I think that the three of us would have had an enjoyable and successful time working together, but there is more to life than work. At least, I think I read that somewhere.

We both gave careful consideration as to whether the job could be performed remotely. We also examined whether there was a feasible arrangement that involved two weeks here and two weeks there. The thing is that we want someone we can work closely with, and we just don’t see how that would be practical without the person being in the office. Denise and I often have impromptu conferences, and I think that the close sharing of ideas has helped the company immensely. Our primary objective is to find someone with slightly different experiences and a somewhat different outlook to join in the process.

We are still convinced that you would have been the best person for the job, but we accept that we now have to look elsewhere. We both look forward to working with you.

We did not get to work with her for long. In 2002 the May Company moved the administration of the Kaufmann’s stores to the headquarters of the Filene’s division. René began working with a local non-profit theatrical organization, about as different from TSI as imaginable.

TSI did not get to add Dick’s, which is also in Pittsburgh, to its client list until 2004. On a training trip I met up with René. She showed me where she worked, and we had supper together.

What if?: It is difficult to say how different things would have been if we had hired her. In the short term there might have been very positive results. I wrote on February 17, “It occurred to me in a fit of melancholy at 5 PM on Friday that René Conrad could probably have forestalled the Cato fiasco. She could also probably have taken the Meier & Frank trips, or at least one of them.”

On the other hand, she could not have helped us much with the May Co. It is almost impossible to imagine getting much more work from them. Perhaps she could have penetrated the barriers that Macy’s set up, and we could have continued our relationship with them after the grand consolidation. Even if she did, how would it have helped us.

I don’t think that she could have helped much with AxN. Denise came up with a great solution to the problem of marketing it to newspapers. I cannot imagine what René she could have figured out a way to use the connections we established between advertisers and newspapers for some other purpose that was valuable to one or the other.

While working on this project I contacted René through LinkedIn. Her page is here.

1. In 2023 it is strange to read about concern about telephone charges. At the time we used MCI for long distance. Every month our bill was in the thousands..A few years later our network and Internet connections made it feasible for employees to sign on to our AS/400 from home through a local carrier. In fact, one of our programmers, Michael Davis (introduced here), did this from Pittsburgh after changing from local employee to remote contractor. Denise worked from her home on Cape Cod during the last year of so of TSI’s existence.

2. The administrative assistant whom I hired was Nadine Holmes (Introduced here).

3. I can hardly believe that I was ever “almost certain” that TSI we would get Carson’s (introduced here as P.A.Bergner). Steve VeZain must have told me or Doug something that I later repressed.

4. The Dick’s Sporting Goods installation has been described here.

5. I planned to insert a link to this routine, which I consider the best comedy sketch ever, on the Internet, but I could not find it posted anywhere.