Tag Archives: Pease, Doug

1993-2012 TSI: AdDept Air Travel Adventures

Posted on by
1

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.

They weren’t abandoned that night.

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.

Takeoff or bounce?

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.

1996-2006 TSI: AdDept Clients: May Company

Posted on by
3

As soon as the AdDept system at Macy’s in New York (described here) was running reasonably well, the May Department Stores Company became the most attractive marketing target for the system. The largest advertiser (at least in newspapers) in central … Continue reading →

The G. Fox & Co. store in downtown Hartford.

As soon as the AdDept system at Macy’s in New York (described here) was running reasonably well, the May Department Stores Company became the most attractive marketing target for the system. The largest advertiser (at least in newspapers) in central Connecticut was—by far—G. Fox, a traditional department store similar to Macy’s that was based in Hartford. They even had a store that was within walking distance of our new house in Enfield.1 I was well aware that G.Fox was part of the May Company and that the May Company was largely responsible for the development of the mall.

I had purchased a book from somewhere that contained marketing information on large retailers. In it I learned that the May Company, which had been in business since 1877, operated the following divisions in 1989:

  • G. Fox & Co. based in Hartford.
  • The Hecht Company with headquarters in Arlington, VA.
  • Filene’s, a former Federated division based in Boston.
  • Foley’s, a former Federated division based in Houston.
  • Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh.
  • Famous-Barr in St. Louis
  • J. W. Robinson Co. in Los Angeles.
  • May California in Los Angeles.
  • May D&F in Denver.
  • May Ohio in Cleveland.
  • Lord & Taylor in New York.
  • Meier & Frank in Portland, OR.
  • Venture, a chain of discount stores based in O’Fallon, MO.
  • Payless, a chain of shoe stores based in Miami.

That’s fourteen independently run divisions that were, except for maybe the last one or two, good prospects for the AdDept system. I figured that if we could persuade the parent company to commit to using AdDept in all of its divisions, TSI would be set for life. Maybe they would even buy us! That was the way that small software companies thought (and dreamed) in the late eighties.

In fact, the May Company during that period was busy acquiring other department stores, and that attitude put a lot of stress on the advertising departments of the divisions that acquired the new stores. There is no doubt that the May Company’s acquisition of thirteen Thalhimer’s stores in 1992 was the impetus for Hecht’s to purchase the AdDept system that year.2 Hecht’s advertising department had been using a PC-based system for producing corporate reports. It was completely incapable of handling the extra load. Similarly, when May D&F was folded into Foley’s in 1993, the Houston division suddenly was facing a greatly increased workload. That caused them to call TSI for help, and we installed an AdDept system for them.3 Capacity was never an issue for AdDept; we always proposed hardware near the lowest end of the available AS/400 models. If a client outgrew its hardware, it could migrate to a more powerful model.

Filene’s store in Boston.

In 1993 G. Fox was absorbed by the Filene’s division. Having a pretty good idea of the problems that this would cause for the advertising department of Filene’s, we tried to interest them in using AdDept. However, for reasons that I have never completely understood, we were unable to get our foot in that door for many years. Filene’s advertising department never took advantage of a significant portion of the system productively enough that we were able to use them as a reference.4

Instead, our third May Company installation was at Lord & Taylor5, where I learned that L&T did not play by the same rules as the other divisions. In some ways that caused headaches; in other ways it was delightful.

Doug Pease: In 1993 Sue and I hired Doug Pease to handle our marketing. One of the primary reasons that we selected him was because he had formerly worked in G. Fox’s advertising department in Hartford. He was looking for a job because the G. Fox stores had been converted to the Filene’s logo, and the advertising for those stores was planned and purchased from the office in Boston. Doug was quite familiar with the work flow of an advertising department that was similar to the ones that TSI was targeting, and he also had some contacts in the industry. Our hope was that he could grab the brass ring of the May Company for us while I was busy trying to get the systems for the three divisions—and a few other retailers—that we had sold up and running.

This was a very important time for TSI. My image of those days resembles a hockey stick. Until that time TSI had experienced rather flat earnings. We were basically just getting by. By contrast, in the last seven years of the twentieth century we had as much work as we could handle, and our financial statements were much better.

Unfortunately, I have almost no notes for that entire period. I talked with Doug on a regular basis, but my focus was on the current installations. I depended on him to establish a relationship with prospective customers. As soon as we hired him we did a mailing to prospective customers, and Doug took to the phones. He talked with several people at the May Company.

The main liaison person between the May Company and the advertising departments of its divisions was named Fred Christen. I never heard anyone say a bad word about him. He had, of course, heard about our work at our three installations, and he seemed to be impressed.

I am pretty sure that we had another “guardian angel” at the corporate headquarters. I often seemed to be at an advertising department at a division at the same time as a corporate auditor whose first name was Linus. His job was to assess the way that divisions were reporting their advertising expenses and income from co-op programs for their vendors. He seemed to be impressed with the way that AdDept handled these things.

May D&F store in Denver.

Fred Christen left the May Company shortly after Doug arrived at TSI. I heard that Fred left to manage his family’s business. Doug established a relationship with Fred’s successor, Dennis Wallace. I am pretty sure that Doug made at least one trip to St. Louis, but I don’t remember the details. At any rate, at some point the May Company decided that AdDept should be installed in all of the department store divisions. At that point Robinsons and May California had merged, May D&F had been folded into Foley’s, Kaufmann’s had taken over the May Ohio stores6, and the May Company had divested the Venture stores. So, we learned about five new clients in one swell foop: Famous-Barr7, Filene’s, Meier & Frank, Robinsons-May, and Kaufmann’s.

In retrospect I find it rather incredible that I have so little recollection of the details of how or when this decision came about. It was definitely a momentous occasion for TSI, but I remember no fanfare or celebration at all. I don’t think that the deal was finalized until 1996 or 1997. In the interim I installed quite a few AdDept systems at other retailers.

Employees at the May Company treated us fairly from day one right up until the time that the company was purchased by Federated in 2006. Most of TSI’s dealings with the May Company were at the division level. The following is a summary of my notes of our dealings with the corporate entity after all of the systems had been installed.

Notes: The first note that I have is dated October 18, 1999. It makes reference to a “sales tax fiasco”. I think that this must be about whether it was necessary to charge sales tax on our software and services. Because all of our AdDept clients were in other states, we were generally able to avoid doing so. However, there is an Excel file with a similar date that lists three invoices for Robinsons-May, which was in California, and three for Filene’s, which was in Massachusetts. Massachusetts and Connecticut had an agreement by which each collected taxes for the other. So, we definitely needed to charge Filene’s tax.

We also had a problem with California. TSI’s second accountant, whose name I do not remember, was hired in the early days of the AdDept system. She advised us to register with every state in which we had clients. This was poor advice, and we changed accountants shortly after that. However, there is no way to take back a company’s registration.

I vaguely remember an issue from several years earlier that involved an arrangement that my partner (and later wife) Sue Comparetto had made with Gottschalks, another store in California. In this case, the invoices were probably sent to St. Louis and paid by the May Company. We had never registered in Missouri, and we never paid sales tax there.

On January 2 of 2000 I wrote the following email to my other partner, Denise Bessette:

I think that we need to get something established as soon as possible with the May Co. to get compensated for your time and mine. Do you have any suggestions? I also think that it might be time for one or both of us of us to go to St. Louis and talk turkey with them. I am serious about this. I really am tired of not knowing where we stand.

I found a six-page document dated February 7, 2001. It concerned the specs for a Planning System Interface. Evidently they had an application called WD that they wanted to feed. They provided me with a document describing the system that had at least sixty-seven pages. Evidently we had been talking about this for at least two years. The document lists my questions and their incredibly vague responses. No one could conceivably quote an interface based on the responses that we received. I only vaguely remember this whole process. “WD” sounds familiar, but I am pretty certain that we never quoted it, much less coded it.

Denise and I went to visit the May Company together, but I think that it was in 2002. I went to St. Louis in 2001 to install AdDept for use by Filene’s on an AS/400 in the Midwest Data Center. I stayed in the Adam’s Mark Hotel. I did not like where they told me to stay. This is what I wrote to Denise.

My hotel room in St. Louis is absurd. It is a huge suite. I located a microwave and refrigerator inside what looked like a chest of some kind. For some reason it is much easier to find these two features in places where it is impossible to buy food (because I am downtown). The bathroom is right by the door, about a quarter mile from the bed. There are two TV sets, but no Jacuzzi, at least not in the room. The thermostat is out of whack. You have to set it to nearly 80 to keep the room from being frigid. I fear that they may not offer free breakfast here. They did not mention anything when I checked in.

It is supposed to rain all day here. There may even be thunderstorms. I was too lazy to run on Sunday. I will probably regret it today.

I hope that the May Co. has a comfortable nap room. I have become quite accustomed to the two-hour post-breakfast naps.

I think that the guy on the phone is Dennis Wallace. I don’t recognize the other two.

I remember that room and the rain much better than I remember what I did at the May Company. On subsequent visits I stayed at a nearby Hampton Inn. Incidentally, more than two decades later I still take lots of naps.

I found an agenda for a meeting with the May Company dated August of 2002. This must be the trip that Denise and I took together. Here it is:

  1. 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.
  2. 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
  3. May future plans
    1. Filene’s
    2. Uniformity
    3. Best practices
  4. 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.
  5. Other things
    1. AxN.
    2. Peggy Southworth labels.
  6. What else?

Some of this has fled my memory. I do remember that CFINT was a program that regulated performance. Prior to version 5 of the operating system the users could allocate priorities for jobs between “interactive” jobs (5250 sessions on terminals or PCs) and “batch” jobs (everything else, including jobs that relied on something between themselves and the operating system, such as a Java server). IBM wanted to show that the Java jobs had good performance. To do so it slowed down all jobs that were running as interactive. Nothing that IBM had previously done was as hated as this tactic.

I also remember the Peggy Southworth labels. Every division was required to create these labels for each print media job in a precisely specified format. We wrote a program for one of the divisions to do this for them.

The notes indicate that Denise and I met with Rob Cole and Mike Henry. I only vaguely remember them. I have a more vivid memory of Lew Allder, who was a Vice President in the IT department. He showed us around the machine room and assured us that the small size of our organization was not an issue with him or anyone else at the May Company. Everyone with whom we talked was very supportive of what we had done and what we were planning for the future.

Don’t take the bridge across the river.

I also remember one incident that occurred when we were driving either from or to Lambert, the St. Louis airport. I made a wrong turn, and we found ourselves on the bridge that goes across the river to East St. Louis, IL. I had no interest in taking a tour of that town. When there was a break in the traffic I jerked the rental car’s steering wheel to the left, made a clean U-turn and headed back to St. Louis. I think that this maneuver shocked Denise, at least a little.

I tried to find information on what became of the May Company employees mentioned in this entry. However, I was not able to find any information on the Internet about most of them. After a good bit of digging I found Dennis Wallace’s LinkedIn page, which is here. In 2022 he appeared to be working for a company in Houston that provides technical assistance to the hospitality industry.

1. All right, I never actually walked to G. Fox’s store in Enfield Square mall, but I could have.

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 by
3

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.

Joanne’s LinkedIn photo.

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.

Toni and Floyd.

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’ll take a dachshund any day.

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.

Brenda on Facebook.

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.

Toni and Floyd.

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.

Somebody, Floyd, and Deidre.

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 AxN12 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 AxN 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.

Floyd’s LinkedIn photo.

6. Floyd’s LinkedIn page is here.

Hugo’s LinkedIn Photo.

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.

Toni’s LinkedIn Photo.

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. AxN 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.

1997-2005 AdDept Client: Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc.

Posted on by
6

Holding company in Birmingham, AL. Continue reading →

Proffitt’s (under the name of the Elliott-Proffitt Co.) began in 1919 as a department store in downtown Maryville (locally pronounced MARE vuhl) TN. Decades after it became a chain of department stores TSI’s AdDept system was installed in its advertising department. The account of that process is detailed here.

In 1984 the company and all of its stores were purchased by the RBM Acquisitions Co. It was led by R. Brad Martin, who had previously been a very young member of the Tennessee Legislature and a real estate mogul. Proffitt’s Inc. soon began an ambitious series of acquisitions and openings of new stores. In 1994 it purchased McRae’s, a chain of department stores based in Jackson, MS, that was actually larger than Proffitt’s by any measure except ambition.

Previous new stores that had been purchased by RBM were run under the Proffitt’s logo and administered from the company’s headquarters in Alcoa, TN. McRae’s was allowed to run as a separate division, as were subsequent acquisitions of the Parisian, Younkers, Herberger’s, and Carson Pirie Scott.

The lobby in Birmingham was rather impressive.

After the Parisian division was acquired, the corporate headquarters was moved to a beautiful office located at 750 Lakeshore Parkway2 on the north side of Birmingham, AL. However, all advertising was still administered by each local division in its home location. The data center and the IT department were at McRae’s headquarters in Jackson, MS.

TSI had repeatedly sent promotional materials to advertising directors at each of the divisions. Doug Pease, TSI’s marketing director, followed up on the mailings and eventually encountered Fran Jose2, who was a top executive of Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG), the organization that supervised the advertising departments in the divisions. He was impressed enough with the AdDept system that PMG made the decision to implement it in each of the advertising departments. By the time that I got involved in this endeavor Fran had moved on. This was fine. Doug referred to him as “a little Napoleon”.

In 1998 Proffitt’s Inc. bought Saks Fifth Avenue and immediately changed the name of the company to Saks Inc. AdDept had been installed in all of the divisions, including Saks, although Carson’s was no longer using the system (as explained here). In 2000 Martin divided the company into two divisions. One was Saks, the other was everyone else. Martin then moved to New York and ran Saks with little success for a few years before he had to sell it and all of the other pieces of his crumbling empire.

Steve’s LinkedIn photo.

The people: I dealt mostly with Steve VeZain3, who hailed from Louisiana and LSU. He joined PMG in September of 1997. Steve had rather grandiose plans about managing the advertising departments of the various divisions. He made a couple of trips to visit TSI to discuss some of them. Only a few of those were ever put into play. I have rather extensive notes dating from 1999 about our interactions.

Steve’s wife worked in the same building in Birmingham as he did, but I think that she was a buyer or maybe the boss of buyers for the Parisian.

Steve took me to supper several times when I was in Birmingham. His favorite restaurant was Joe’s Crab Shack. I think that his wife accompanied us on one occasion.

I fond the above photo after I had posted this entry. I think that it must have been taken in 1996 or 1997 after the installation at Younkers but before the installation at Proffitt’s. I have no memory of this meeting, but attached post-its identified the participants. From left to right they were Tom Henry from Proffitt’s, Roger Wolf from Younkers, Tom Waltz and Cindy Karnoupakis from Proffitt’s, a guy named Chris from Younkers, and Steve VeZain.

Josh.

One of Steve’s first moves was to hire Josh Hill, a native of Minnesota who was a recent graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In fact, Despite his accent, Josh was designated as Mr. UAB in 1997.

I spent a fair amount of time with Josh at various divisions. Steve sent him to oversee some of the AdDept installations, and he accompanied Steve on at least one of his visits to TSI.

Josh liked to lift weights and to ride his motorcycle at high speeds. I don’t know why he (or anyone else who grew up north of the Mason-Dixon line) decided to come to Birmingham for his education.

In late 1999 my sister, Jamie Lisella, quit working at TSI and moved to Birmingham to work for Steve VeZain at PMG. The circumstances have been detailed here.

In January of 2000 Jamie told me that Josh’s car had been involved in a serious accident, but he was OK. She also informed me that the employees at Saks Inc. were allowed to sign on to the Internet, and many of them wasted a lot of time there.

Kathy in her cubicle.

I have only sketchy memories of others who worked at PMG (or whatever it was later called). Kathy D’Andrea kept the corporate books for marketing. I don’t remember her, but I found a photo of her. One of the documents that I found mentions that she would be at Herberger’s at the same time that I was scheduled, but I do not remember seeing her there.

Dave Weeast was in charge of the AS/400’s for all of the divisions. We dealt with him fairly often, but I don’t think that I ever met him. I think that he worked in Jackson, MS, for Windell Manuel5.

Corky’s LinkedIn photo.

I have no recollection of Corky Wicks6, who worked as a business analyst for the company from 1997-2006, but his name is in my notes.

By March of 2001 Jamie had left Saks Inc. I found an email from her to Dave Weeast and Windell Manuel, about the five AS/400’s that had been running AdDept.

What was the purpose of PMG? I had the impression that it did not have a specific agenda. Perhaps the idea was to impose standards upon the advertising departments of the divisions that had, in most cases, been operating independently for decades. What standards? I think that was a big part of the problem. TSI probably did not help. One of our selling points was that the system was easily adaptable to different philosophies of the administration of marketing. Some of the procedures used by the divisions were real outliers.

I think that Steve, Josh, and Jamie had all left Saks by early 2001. Perhaps the marketing group itself had been disbanded. The other organizations that we had worked with had nothing that was similar to PMG.

SPM: All five divisions (and even Saks Fifth Avenue) had been using an ad agency named SPM to place their newspaper ads. Saks dropped them some time in 1997 or 1998. All of the divisions hated working with SPM. Steve decided to drop them in the Spring of 1999. This was a break for TSI. All the divisions suddenly needed to produce insertion orders. We were rapidly able to implement insertion orders and faxing without too much difficulty.

Three interesting visits: This event was not mentioned in my notes, and so it probably happened before July of 1999. When I arrived in Birmingham on the first day of that visit Steve told me that he wanted me to attend a demonstration of a system that was being used for some aspect of either creation or production of ads at Carson’s.

The demo was conducted by two people from a software company that I had never heard of. These two guys were accompanied by Ed Carroll, who was still the Senior VP there. I knew him fairly well. He was the SVP at P.A. Bergner when the company declared bankruptcy in the middle of the AdDept installation. When Ed Carroll saw me he greeted me with a sarcastic “What are YOU doing here?”

I wasn’t quite sure myself. Steve had said that they were interested in implementing an interface with AdDept. After the demo—which I did not think was very good—I went to wherever I was supposed to be on this trip, probably upstairs in the Parisian advertising department. I later asked Steve if he wanted me to pursue this and quote an interface. He quickly dismissed that idea.

On another trip the SVP of advertising for Herberger’s—I don’t remember his name—was there for a meeting. At the time Herberger’s was about open two new stores in the Minneapolis area. They had scheduled an open house to hire people to work in the stores, but they had forgotten to run ads in the local newspapers. He spent several hours on the phone with local radio stations dictating copy to them and begging them to run ads for his company. I found it amazing that he did not trust anyone back in St. Cloud to handle this for him.

I also encountered the advertising director from Saks Fifth Avenue, the company that had just been acquired. I don’t remember her name, but at the time I knew her fairly well. I always wondered why she was in Birmingham that day. Maybe they were just telling her not to worry about any interference in the way that SFA did business.

The big project: At the end of July in 1999 Steve and Josh came to TSI’s office and described how they wanted a system for the corporate marketing group that was fed by the other five systems. Apparently they were able to sign on to the systems and get some of the information that they wanted. However, they wanted all of this to happen automatically when the departments closed their books at the end of the month.

I could see many problems. The divisions did not all play by the same rules. The May Company and Macy’s had methods of standardizing the reporting of their many and diverse divisions. I knew that some of the Saks Inc. divisions were keeping their records in ways that were anything but standard. I am not sure that some of them were even legal. This sounded to Denise Bessette and me like a huge amount of work with no evident benefit.

Problems at the divisions: My notes from 2000 foreshadow some big problems that were beginning to appear:

The infrastructure at the divisions needs attention. Each division has only one printer, and it fails often. They should get the most recent version of Client Access and set up sessions for the printers (at least some of which were put on the Mac networks for some reason). Some divisions use a version of 5PM Mac software that has bugs. Dave Weeast is in charge of all of the AS/400’s in Saks Inc., and he is hard to get in touch with.

The divisions cannot approve requests unless they take it out of their own budgets, which they will do under practically no circumstances. The current process for approving requests is difficult. The divisions request something. Denise and I write a description of it and send it to Jamie. She runs it by Steve when she gets a chance. There are dozens of issues from the divisions from the pre-Jamie period that have never been addressed. If Steve thinks there is some merit in the request (which usually means that one of the Senior VP’s has been yelling at him), he tells me to quote it. I quote it and send the quote to Jamie. She tries to get Steve to look at it and approve it.

I can’t look at hobbles, and I can’t stand fences. Don’t fence me in.

The email: By 2000 AdDept systems had been installed on separate AS/400 systems in Des Moines IA (Younkers), Alcoa TN (Proffitt’s), Jackson MI (McRae’s), St. Cloud MN (Herberger’s), and Birmingham (Parisian). When the responsibility for advertising for McRae’s was transferred to the Proffitt’s division, and the ad scheduling for Herberger’s was moved to the Carson’s division, Jamie arranged for the McRae’s and the Herberger’s AS/400 systems to be shipped to the computer room in Birmingham. I know this because I was a cc on an email that she sent to Dave Weeast and Windell Manuel on March 29 of 2001.

Dave, Windell,

I understand there is some confusion regarding the location and status of the five AS/400’s that I administered. I will be happy to work with the two of you to facilitate any restructuring of these systems. I would prefer to communicate only with you, as I have not had much, if any, cooperation from the personnel in Birmingham and I am tired of doing charity work. I reviewed this information repeatedly with management and IT staff at Saks Inc. prior to my departure. I would like to reiterate that sending one of these AS/400’s to Jackson for their big ticket system was being done as a favor.

There are three systems on hand in Birmingham; PARADV, HERBADV and MCRAEADV. All three boxes are located in the computer room on the second floor. The PARADV system is active and used by the advertising department of Parisian. Operating system level is V4R2, but the upgrade package V4R4 is on hand in Birmingham.

HERBADV and MCRAEADV are the surplus AS/400 systems due to fusion. I had these boxes transported to Birmingham last fall and upgraded the operating systems on both to V4R4. The IP addresses for network connection for these systems has been issued through Jackson and changed on both of the AS/400’s. However, the connection failed. I had been working with Jerry Aultman in Birmingham’s IT Department to get this resolved. My hunch is that the problem lies with the DNS entry, or lack thereof. Additionally, the advertising personnel also utilize the IBM FAX/400 product which requires installation of an inbound and outbound fax line via 7852 modem.

I ordered these lines through Jeff Bass. Although I provided him with account numbers to pay for installation and usage on these lines, as of my departure on 3/14, I had not been advised that they were installed and functional.

The fourth system, YNKADV, is physically located in Des Moines. This machine is an older model 40e. This is the system I had planned to ship to Jackson for the Big Ticket application. Before it can be shipped, the network connection on the HERBADV AS/400 must be resolved and the MAC connectivity issues addressed. Two phone lines must be active. The base AdDept software application is intact on this box. The data libraries for TSI’s AdDept application need to be copied and installed. TSI will need to consult on this process, as well as the installation of any subsequent custom software programming and the fax configuration. I have cleared out the user profiles on the HERBADV box and added the current Younkers’ users.

I had also planned to move the existing PROFADV system (located in Alcoa, TN – V4R2- also an older model) to the MCRAEADV box. The MCRAEADV system holds the base software previously used by McRae’s advertising personnel. This will be an advantage on the software side. Once again, the network, phone, fax and software issues described above apply to PROFADV, also.

All of these AS/400’s are covered by a software subscription valid through December, 2001. PARADV, HERBADV, MCRAEADV and PROFADV are all covered by a one-year, 24 x 7, focal point contract for IBM hardware and software. The YNKADV system is set up on monthly maintenance, so that the monthly payment could be assumed by Jackson after it is transported there. However, I did purchase a software subscription for YNKADV, so the Jackson personnel could order the OS upgrade at no cost. Mike Wavada at TSI should be able to assist with any questions regarding the IBM maintenance, as they were purchased through his company as a business partner with first right of refusal.

If there are any additional issues, please let me know.

I found this email remarkable. I don’t remember what model of AS/400 Younkers had, but there was never a model e40. However, the most remarkable thing was that Jamie had, at least according to this email, arranged for the two boxes to be shipped from St. Cloud and Jackson. I doubt that anyone cared much about the box in Herberger’s advertising department, but the one in Jackson was in the corporate data center. I cannot imagine how she had managed to get it out of there. It took a lot of chutzpah and, I imagine, some maneuvering.

After Steve, Jamie, and (presumably) Josh left Saks Inc. in 2001, we still had rather good relationships with the advertising people at Younkers, Proffitt’s, Parisian, and, especially, Saks Fifth Avenue. We were never able to convince Carson’s to use the AdDept system even after the division was purchased by the Bon Ton, which had been using it for years.

1. Incredibly, Brad Martin has no Wikipedia page. A biography is posted here.

2. Beautiful photos of this building were posted here. It is apparently occupied in 2022 by Evonik Industries.

3. I don’t think that I ever got to meet Fran Jose. He does not appear to have a LinkedIn page.

4. Steve VeZain left Saks Inc. in 2001. His LinkedIn page is here.

5. 6. Windell Manuel’s LinkedIn page is here.

6. Corky Wicks LinkedIn page is here.

7. SPM was affiliated with an agency that handled newspaper advertising for Sears and a few other retailers. The two agencies were across the street from each other. I met with them when I visited Sears. That adventure is recounted here. In 2023 SPM was still in business. Its website could be found here.

1991-2012 TSI: AdDept: The Whiffs

Posted on by
6

A few notable failures. Continue reading →

We had a very good record of closing AdDept sales. Most of the whiffs fell into one of two categories:

  1. Divisions of Federated Department Stores. Our relationships with various Federated divisions are described in detail here. They are not included in this entry.
  2. Companies that did not advertise enough to justify a high-quality multi-user centralized database. We actually sold the AdDept system to a couple of these anyway.

TSI’s first efforts to market AdDept were concentrated around New York and New England. I figured that there were not very many retailers who could afford the system to keep track of advertising, but, then again, I did not really expect to justify the cost of the system at Macy’s in the very first module that we activated—ad measurement.

The strip mall in which the Enfield store was located was named after Caldor.

Our first attempt was a quintessential whiff. Kate Behart (much more about her here) had been in contact with someone in the advertising department at Caldor, a discount department store based in Norwalk, CT. Kate arranged for me to give a presentation to them at the IBM office in Norwalk. Of course, we had to make sure that the office had the BASIC program, and I had to install both the AdDept programs and some data that I had dummied up from Macy’s real data.

My presentation was flawless. The only problem that I encountered that day was the lack of an audience. No one from Caldor showed up. We never did find out why not. Kate called them repeatedly, but no one returned her calls. It may have had something to do with the fact that in 1989, the year that we installed the first AdDept system at Macy’s, the May Company sold Caldor to a group of investment houses.

Caldor went out of business in 1999.

I also paid a visit to another local retailer, Davidson and Leventhal, commonly known as D&L. Theirs were not exactly department stores, but they had fairly large stores that sold both men’s and women’s clothing. So, they had quite a few departments. The stores had a good reputation locally. The headquarters was in New Britain, CT.

This D&L ad was on the back cover of the issue of Northeast that featured my story (described here).

The advertising department only employed three or four employees. They wanted to know if they could use the computer for both D&L ads and ads for Weathervane, another store that they owned, as well. That seemed vaguely feasible to me, and so I said they could. In fact, we later did this for Stage Stores and for the Tandy Corporation, but both of those companies were much larger, and I had a much better understanding by then of what it entailed.

I didn’t even write up a proposal for D&L. The person with whom I spoke made it clear that what we were offering was way out of their price range.

D&L went out of business in 1994, only a few years after our meeting. Weathervane lasted until 2005.

I have only a vague recollection of doing a demonstration at IBM’s big facility in Waltham, MA, for a chain of auto parts retailers from Phoenix. The name of the chain at the time was Northern Automotive. My recollection is that I spoke with a man and a woman. If they told me how they heard about AdDept, I don’t remember it. After a very short time it was clear that AdDept was much more than the company needed. Although Northern Automotive had a lot of stores with four different logos, it only ran one ad per week. So there was really not much to keep track of. I had the distinct impression that the demo was just an excuse for the couple to take a vacation in New England on the company’s dime.

I don’t remember either of their names, but the experience list on LinkedIn for a guy named Paul Thompson (posted here) makes him a strong candidate. Northern Automotive changed its name to CSK Auto, Inc. not long after our meeting. In 2008 CSK was purchased by O’Reilly Auto Parts.

Won’t Paul be surprised to be busted thirty years later in an obscure blog?

Tom Moran (more details here) set up an appointment with employees of Genovese Drugs at its headquarters in Melville, NY. The two of us drove to Long Island to meet with them.

I probably should have talked to someone there over the phone before we left. The only impression that I remember getting from the meeting was that they were not at all serious about getting a system. We had a great deal of trouble getting them to describe what the advertising department did at the time and what they wanted to do. I was frustrated because I had considered this a relatively cheap opportunity to learn how chains of pharmacies handled their advertising. It was actually a waste of time and energy.

Tom tried to follow up, but he got nowhere. We did not submit a proposal.

J.C. Penney bought the company in 1998 and rebranded all the stores as Eckerd pharmacies.

Woodies’ flagship store in downtown Washington.

While I was working on the software installation at Hecht’s in 1991, Tom Moran coordinated our attempt to land the other big department store in the Washington, DC, area, Woodward & Lothrop, locally known as Woodies. I found a folder that contains references to correspondence with them. Tom worked with an IBM rep named Allison Volpert1. Our contacts at Woodies were Joel Nichols, the Divisional VP, and Ella Kaszubski, the Production Manager.

As I browsed through the file, I detected a few warning signs. The advertising department was reportedly in the process of asking for capital for digital photography, which was in its (very expensive) infancy in 1991. Tom was told that they hoped to “slip in” AdDept as part of the photography project. Furthermore, the fact that we were not dealing with anyone in the financial area did not bode well.

Someone wrote this book about Woodies.

Finally, we had no choice other than to let IBM propose the hardware. Their method of doing this always led to vastly higher hardware and system software costs than we considered necessary. I found a copy of IBM’s configuration. The bottom line was over $147,000 and another $48,600 for IBM software. This dwarfed what Hecht’s had spent. If the cost of AdDept was added in, they probably were facing a purchase price of over a quarter of a million dollars! That is an awful lot to “slip in”.

I don’t recall the details, but I remember having an elegant lunch during this period with someone from Woodies in the restaurant of the main store. It may have been Joel Nichols. It seemed like a very positive experience to me. He seemed eager to automate the department.

We lost contact with Woodies after early 1992. I seriously doubt that the advertising department even purchased the photography equipment that they had coveted. The early nineties were very bad for retailers. By 1994 the owner of Woodies and the John Wanamaker chain based in Philadelphia declared bankruptcy and then sold the stores to JC Penney and the May Company. Many of the stores were rebranded as Hecht’s or Lord and Taylor.

In some ways Fred Meyer, a chain of department stores based in Portland, OR, seemed like a perfect match for TSI. At the time they were almost unique, and we usually excelled at programming unusual ideas. Their approach to retail included what are now called “hypermarket” (department store plus groceries) stores, although they definitely had some much smaller stores as well. The one in downtown Portland was very small. I really thought that we had a good shot at getting this account, largely due to the fact that the IT department already had one or two AS/400’s. So, the hardware cost would probably be minimal.

She would be lucky to make it in nine hours; there were no direct flights.

I was asked to work with a consultant who, believe it or not, commuted from Buffalo, NY, to Portland, OR. I can’t remember her name. She knew computer systems but virtually nothing about what the advertising department did. She wanted me to tell her what AdDept could do, and she would determine whether the system would work for them. I have always hated it when a “gatekeeper” was placed between me and the users. I understand that they do not trust the users to make a good decision, but advertising is very complicated, and almost no IT consultants know much about it. I would not have minded if the consultant sat in on interviews that I conducted with people in advertising.

If I was allowed to meet with anyone from the scheduling or financial areas of the department, I do not remember it at all. I do remember spending an afternoon with the head of the company’s photography studio. AdDept had a module (that no one used) for managing shoots and another (used by Macy’s East) for managing the merchandise that is loaned to the studio for a shoot.

I remember the photo studio guy mentioning that they also did billable work for outside clients. He mentioned Eddie Bauer by name. He could not believe that I had never heard of it/him.

I probably botched this opportunity. Before agreeing to come out the second time, I should have insisted on meeting with whoever placed their newspaper ads and the person in charge of advertising finance. I did not want to step on the toes of the lady from Buffalo, but I probably should have been more aggressive.

Kate accompanied me on one of these trips. We probably flew on Saturday to save on air fare. On Sunday we drove out to Mt. Hood, where we saw the lodge and the glacier, and visited Multnomah Falls on the way back.

Freddie’s was acquired by Kroger in 1998, but the logos on the stores were maintained. There still is a headquarters in Portland, but I don’t know if ads are still created and/or placed there.

Aside from our dealings with Federated divisions2 TSI had very few whiffs during the period that Doug Pease (described here) worked for us. After one of our mailings Doug received a call from Debra Edwards3, the advertising director at May Ohio, a May Company division that had its headquarters in Cleveland. Doug and I flew Continental non-stop to Cleveland and took the train into downtown. My recollection was that we were able to enter the store from the underground train terminal.

The presentation and the demo went very well. I am quite certain that we would have gotten this account were it not for the fact that in early 1993 the May Company merged the Ohio division with Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh. Management of the stores was transferred to Pittsburgh. Debra was hired as advertising director at Elder-Beerman Stores.

We stayed overnight in Cleveland and had time to visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which was right down the street from the huge May Co. building. I cannot say that I was greatly impressed with the exhibits.

A few years later Doug and I undertook a second trip to Cleveland to visit the headquarters of Sherwin Williams. Doug had talked extensively with the lady who was the advertising director there. He was very enthusiastic about the prospect of making this sale. By that time Doug had already closed a few big deals for us, and so I trusted his judgment. However, I could not understand how a company that really only sold one product could possibly need AdDept. Yes, they have thousands of stores, but how many ads do they run?

I don’t honestly remember anything about our discussion with them. Needless to say, Doug did not close this one, although he never stopped trying to revive it.

I don’t really count it as a whiff, but Doug was unable to close the deal with Liberty House in Honolulu after our epic trip to Hawaii in December of 1995. The details are recounted here.

I drove past two of the stores in Texas, but I never went inside.

Just as Marvin Elbaum had backed out of his contract with TSI for a GrandAd system in 1986 (as described here), so also one company signed an agreement for TSI’s AdDept system and, before we had installed the system, changed its mind. There was one big difference in the two situations. The second company was the Tandy Corporation, which had actually ordered installations of AdDept for all three of its retail divisions. At the last minute the company decided to close down Incredible Universe, one of the three divisions. The other two companies became TSI clients in 1997, as is described here.

It was not a big loss for TSI. IU was one of a kind. Its stores were gigantic multi-story combinations of electronics and theater. There were only seventeen stores, and only six were ever profitable. Those six were sold to Fry’s Electronics. The other eleven were sold to real estate developers at pennies on the dollar.

I did a demo for Mervyn’s California, a department store based in Hayward, CA. I think that I must have done the demo after finishing a training/consulting trip at Macy’s West in San Francisco. I cannot imagine that I would have flown out to the west coast to do a demo without spending a day or two gathering specs.

The IBM office nearest to Hayward was in Oakland. I took BART in the late afternoon from San Francisco to Oakland. There was quite a bit of excitement at the Holiday Inn at which I was staying. Someone had been murdered on the street in front of the hotel the previous night. There was one other very peculiar thing about this stay. I checked into a Holiday Inn with no difficulty, but I checked out of a different hotel (maybe a Ramada?). The hotel had been sold, and its ownership had changed while I was asleep.

The demo went fine. The guy who had contacted me—his name was Thiery or something like that—liked what he saw. However, the sale never advanced any further. This was almost always what happened whenever I got talked into doing a demo without taking at least a day to interview the potential users. At the time that I did the demo Mervyn’s was, unbeknownst to me, owned by Target. This might have explained the lack of progress. Target may have been restricting or rejecting any capital purchases at the time.

Mervyn’s was sold to some vulture capitalists in 2004. A much smaller version of the chain went out of business in 2009.

For some reason Doug and I once had a very short meeting with the president of Gottschalks, a chain of department stores based in Fresno, CA. He told Doug and me that he would get all of the other members of the Frederick Atkins Group to install AdDept. This organization (absolutely never abbreviated by its initials) somehow enabled its members to shop for foreign and domestic merchandise as a group. Nearly every department store that was not owned by the May Company or Federated belonged to it.

A few years after he made this promise he (or someone else at Gottschalks) arranged for me to speak before the members at one of their conventions in Naples, FL. I flew to Fort Meyers and rented a car from there. Naples was beautiful and reeked of new money. I gave my little spiel, but I did not have an opportunity to interact with any of the members of the audience. So, I did not get any direct feedback.

We eventually did sign up a few members of the group—notably the Bon-Ton (described here) and Elder-Beerman (described here). I don’t know whether my speech had any effect.

I think that the Frederick Atkins Group is defunct in 2021. The references to it that I could find on the Internet were all from decades past.

In (I think) 1999 Doug Pease and I made an unproductive trip to Columbus, OH, to talk with the IT director of of Value City about the possibility of installing the AdDept system for use by the advertising department. That adventure is described here.

First stop: Norfolk.

TSI got a phone call from a chain of furniture stores in coastal Virginia, Norfolk4, as I recall. As part of my crazy automotive support trip, I stopped by to talk with the advertising director at this company on my journey from Home Quarters Warehouse in Virginia Beach to Hecht’s in Arlington. I spent a couple of hours with him. When I discovered that the company had only three stores, I knew that this was a mistake. I told him that our software could address his problems, but the cost and effort would not be worth it for either of us. I advised him to hire someone who was a wiz with spreadsheets.

I think that I got a free cup of coffee out of it.

I can’t tell you what happened to the company thereafter because I don’t even remember its name.

We had two reasonably hot leads in 2000. I had to handle both of them myself. The first was at Bealls department store, which has its headquarters in Bradenton, FL. This was another situation is which I had to deal with the IT department rather than the advertising department. I am pretty sure that the company already had at least one AS/400. I have a few notes from this trip, but it is not clear whether I intended to do the demo on their system or on one at a nearby IBM office.

In any case I think that there was a technical problem that prevented a successful installation of the software needed for the demo. So, I had to improvise, and I did not get to spend much time with the people who would have benefited from the system. The whole thing made me very depressed.

I had some free time, and so I went to the beach. I stopped at a Jacobson’s store to buy a tee shirt to wear at the beach. The cheapest tee shirts in the store cost $100!

The beach was lovely, and it was unbelievably empty. The weather was pretty nice. A beach in Connecticut would have been packed in this type of weather.

All of these stores are gone.

We did not get the account, but the tale has an interesting coda. Bealls is still in business today. For years Bealls could not expand outside of the state of Florida because a different store with exactly the same name was already using it in other states. These Bealls stores were run by Stage Stores, a long-time AdDept client that was based in Houston. Stage Stores was still using AdDept when TSI went out of business in 2014.

In 2019 Stage announced that it was changing all of its stores into Gordmans, its off-price logo (which did not exist while I was working with them). When the company declared bankruptcy Bealls purchased, among other things, the right to use the Bealls name nationwide.

I remember going to Barneys New York in late 2000 to talk with someone in advertising. I also have discovered three emails that I sent to Christine Carter, who was, I think, either in charge of the advertising department or in charge of the financial side. Barneys only had twenty-two stores, and that included some off-price outlets. I don’t know how much they actually advertised.

Flagship store on 60th Street.

We never heard from them after my last email, which emphasized how easily AdDept could be adapted to differing needs even for companies the size of Barneys. By this time the very affordable AS/400 model 150 had been introduced. It would have been perfect for them.

I think that Barneys is dead or nearly so in 2021. All of the stores in the U.S have been closed, and even the “Barneys New York” brand was sold to Saks Fifth Avenue. However, the company also had a Japan division, which is evidently still operational.

I received a very unexpected phone some time in 2001 or 2002. It came from a man who had formerly worked at Saks Fifth Avenue and had taken a job as a Vice President at Sears. He knew that the advertising department at Saks had been doing things with its AdDept system that Sears’ advertising department seemed utterly incapable of. He invited me to the Sears headquarters in Hoffman Estates, IL, to investigate the possibility of installing AdDept at Sears.

At about the same time I had been in contact with the agency in a nearby town that Sears used for buying newspaper space and negotiating newspaper contracts. They wanted to talk with me about the possibility of working together. The agency’s name was three initials. I think that one was an N, but I am not sure.5

I arranged to spend consecutive days at the two places. It was cold on the day that I visited the agency. I learned that it recruited new clients by claiming that they could negotiate better rates for them because they also represented Sears. I suspected that this was baloney. Sears was a bid dog nationwide, but the amount of newspaper ads that they bought in any individual market was not that impressive. They were just in a lot of markets.

After the people explained the services that they offered to clients, I remarked that about 10 percent of what they did overlapped with about 10 percent of what we did. Privately I could not imagine that any of our clients who would benefit from their services.

I told them about AxN, our Internet product. They informed me that the papers did not want to sign on to their website for insertion orders. Of course, they wouldn’t, and they had nothing to hold over the papers.

We ended the meeting with the usual agreement to stay in touch and look for synergies, but privately I considered them the enemy.

I did not see a parking structure. Maybe I entered on the wrong side of the pond.

The next day was bitterly cold, and there was a strong wind. I located the sprawling Sears complex and parked my rented car in a lot that was already nearly full. I had to walk a long way to the main building, and I have never felt as cold as I did on that walk.

I could hardly believe it when I walked into the building. The ground floor was billed with retail establishments—a drug store, a coffee shop, a barber shop, and many more. I had to take the escalator up to get to Sears. I was met there by the woman with whom I had been in contact. She was from the IT department.

OK, now I get it. Our problem was that we did not have enough architects.

She took me up to meet the “advertising team”. Six or eight people were assembled in the room, and they all had assigned roles. I remember that one was the “system architect”, and one was the “database manager”. I almost could not suppress my amusement. What did all these people do? There was no system, and there certainly was no database. At TSI I handled essentially all the roles that everyone at the table described.

They asked me some questions about the AdDept system. When I told them that it ran on the AS/400, the system architect asked me if that system was not considered obsolete. I scoffed at this notion and explained that IBM had introduced in the AS/400 64-bit RISC processors that were state-of-the-art. I also said that, as far as I knew, the AS/400 was the only system that was build on top of a relational database. That made it perfect for what AdDept did.

I wonder how many “OS/2 shops” there were in the world.

They informed me that Sears was an OS/26 shop. I did not know that there was such a thing. In the real world Windows had already left OS/2 in its dust by that time. In all my time dealing with retailers I never heard anyone else even mention OS/2. It might have been a great idea, but IBM never did a good job of positioning it against Windows.

Besides, just because the corporation endorsed OS/2 should not eliminate consideration of multi-user relational databases where appropriate. The devices with OS/2 could serve as clients.

They explained to me that Sears’ advertising department had hundreds of employees, most of whom served as liaisons with the merchandise managers. Most of the ads were placed by agencies. I presume that the newspaper ads were produced in-house. No one whom I talked with seemed to know. The people on the committee did not seem to know anything about how the department did budgeting or planning.

The competition.

Someone talked about Sears’ competitors. The example cited was Home Depot. I don’t know why this surprised me. I must have been taken in by the “softer side of Sears” campaign a few years earlier.

After the meeting my escort took me to a remarkable room that was dedicated to the advertising project. It was a small theater that had ten or so posters on the wall with big Roman numerals at the top: I, II, III, IV, etc. There were no statues, but otherwise I was immediately struck by the resemblance to the Stations of the Cross that can be found in almost any Catholic church in the world. I asked what the posters represented. The answer was that they were the “phases of the project”. I was stunned by the assumption that the project required “a team” and that it was or indefinite duration. No one ever allowed us more than a month or two to have at least portions of the system up and running.

At some point I was allowed to give my presentation. The man who had worked at Saks attended along with a fairly large number of people. Maybe some were from advertising. I was never allowed to speak with them individually.

I never got to read the advertising department’s Wish Book.

My talk explained that AdDept was a relational database that was specifically designed for retail advertising departments. I described a few of the things for which it had been used by other retailers. I could not do much more than that. I had not been able to talk with any of the people in the department, and the IT people were clearly clueless.

When I returned to Connecticut I wrote to both my escort and the man from Saks. I told both of them that I did not know what the next step might be. I had not been given enough access to the advertising department to make a proposal. The whole experience was surreal. If someone had asked me to return, I would only have done it if I were granted unfettered access to potential users.

No one ever contacted us. I told Doug not to bother following up.

One puzzling whiff occurred during the very short period in which Jim Lowe worked for us. The strange case of Wherehouse Music is explored here.

Perhaps the strangest telephone call from a genuine prospect that I ever received was from Albertsons, a very large retailer with is its headquarters in Boise Idaho. The person who called was (or at least claimed to be) the advertising director there.

I had heard of Albertsons, but I did not know very much about the company. All I knew was that they were a chain of grocery stores in the west. Since advertising for grocery stores is basically limited to one insert/polybag7 per week, they had never seemed to be great prospects for AdDept. However, I never hung up on someone who expressed interest in the system.

The problem was that this lady insisted that I fly out to Boise to meet with her and her crew the next day. I tried to get her to explain what the situation was, but she said that she had no time to talk. She needed to know if I would make the trip. It was a little tempting for a peculiar reason. Idaho was one of the few states8 that I had never visited. Still, this sounded awfully fishy. I passed.

The incredibly bumpy road that Albertsons has traveled is documented on its Wikipedia page, which is available here. I don’t remember when the call from the advertising director came. I therefore have no way of knowing whether she was in charge of advertising for a region, a division, all of the grocery stores, or none of those. I might well have passed up an opportunity that might have extended the life of the company. Who knows? It looked like a goose, and it honked like a goose, but maybe going to Boise would not have been a wild goose chase.

Jeff Netzer, with whom I had worked in the nineties at Neiman Marcus (recounted here), called me one day in 2010. He asked me if I remembered him. I said that I did; he was the Aggie who worked at Neiman’s.

He informed me that he was now working at Sewell Automotive, the largest Cadillac dealership in the Dallas area. He said that they were looking for help in automating their marketing. I was not sure how well AdDept would work in that environment, but I agreed to visit them. His boss promised to buy me a steak dinner.

I flew Southwest to Dallas, and for the first time my plane landed at Love Field. It was much closer to Sewell than DFW would have been.

I found a great deal out about their operation. I doubted that we could do much for the agency for a reasonable amount of money. On my computer I recently found a three-page document dated September 23, 2010, in which I had listed all of the issues that I learned about at Sewell. A woman named Tucker Pressly entered all of their expense invoices into a SQL Server database. It was inefficient, and there were no programs to help them compare with budgets.

The main objective of the marketing department was to make sure that they were taking advantage of all available co-op dollars from Cadillac and other vendors. We could not help with this unless we wrote a new module. I described my reactions to their issues in a letter to Jeff.

I never heard back from Jeff, who left Sewell in 2012. Nobody ever bought me a steak dinner.

Sewell Automotive is still thriving in 2021.

In 2011 or 2012 I received a phone call from a lady from the advertising department at Shopko, a chain of department stores based in Green Bay, WI. I don’t recall her name. She said that she worked for Jack Mullen, whom I knew very well from both Elder-Beerman and Kaufmann’s. Before Doug Pease came to TSI, he had worked for Jack at G. Fox in Hartford.

I flew out to Packer Land to meet with her. They had a very small advertising department. They basically ran circulars in local newspapers on a weekly basis. As I remember, she and one other person ran the business office.

I worked up a proposal for the most minimal AdDept system that I could come up with and sent it to her. When I had not heard from her after a few weeks I called her. She said that the company was downsizing and, in fact, her position was being eliminated.

Jack also left the company in July of 2012. His LinkedIn page is here. Shopko went out of business in 2019.

1. Allison Volpert apparently still works for IBM in 2021. Her LinkedIn page is here.

2. As I write this I can easily visualize Doug stabbing a box with a pencil after a frustrating telephone conversation with someone from a Federated division.

3. I worked fairly closely with Debra Edwards when I installed the AdDept system at Elder-Beerman stores in Dayton, OH. That installation is described here. She was the Advertising Director there. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. The “l” in Norfolk is silent, and the “ol” sounds much more like a short u.

5. I later learned that there were actually two affiliated agencies across the street from one another. I encountered the other one, SPM, in my dealings with Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc., which are detailed here. The agency was still around in 2023. Its webpage is here.

6. In fact IBM stopped updating OS/2 in 2001 and stopped supporting the operating system in 2006. I cannot imagine how Sears dealt with this. I pity their employees with nothing OS/2 experience at Sears on their résumés.

7. Polybags are the plastic bags that hold a group of flyers from diverse retailers. they are ordinarily distributed to people willy-nilly.

8. The others are Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska. I am not certain of Arkansas. I might have gone there with my grandparents when I was a youngster. The only place that I have been in Utah is the Salt Lake City airport.