In one sense my mother’s death in 1998 came as a shock to my dad. In the previous few years her health had deteriorated rapidly. However, for the vast majority of their relationship, she had been the one with the longer life expectancy. She was younger and female, she had never smoked so much as one cigarette, she had very regular habits, she made sure to get plenty of exercise, she ate healthy diet, and she drank very little.
My dad, on the other hand, smoked pretty regularly for nearly fifty years. He was not a drunkard by any measure, but he spent a lot of time with salesmen and advertising people for whom liquor was considered a lubricant. He ate whatever he felt like having (including raw hamburger!), and his only exercise was golf. Furthermore, he had had some kind of incident on a vacation in Arizona that had something to do with his heart.
Throughout their marriage mom was the head of the household. She cooked, cleaned, and did the laundry. She also paid all the bills and managed the cash. If something needed to be fixed or purchased, she took care it. My dad considered it his responsibility to provide enough income for her in the present and the future, and he definitely did that. However, he had never—at least since 1947—given much thought to the little details of daily life until my mom became incapacitated and then died. He confided to me that he always thought that he would die first, and with the insurance, pension, and investments, mom would be all right.
Shortly after mom’s death dad moved into a somewhat smaller apartment that was on the ground floor. Although I can clearly picture both it and its location, I have forgotten the address. My dad had a lot of good friends. I am quite sure that they helped him through the transition. They knew that he had depended on mom, and they gave him good advice about dealing with quotidian matters. They also kept him involved in social activities. At least once a week they had regular breakfasts together, and they invited him to other get-togethers. He also kept up his golf game, such as it was. Needless to say, he kept attending church.
Near the end of this period my dad had one of his hips replaced. I was not involved in the planning or execution, but he told me that the doctor said that the other hip was nearly as bad. His friends must have helped him deal with this as well. I remember that he seemed to be able to walk fairly well after the operation.
One problem that they could not address was his vision. Somehow the retina in his right (I think) eye became detached. He had no vision in it at all. He therefore, had no depth perception. To make matters worse, a cataract was developing in his left eye, which was more than 75 years old.
My dad’s driving ability was definitely suspect. At some point he decided to stop driving on major thoroughfares. This was a good idea. Drivers on heavily used road need good peripheral vision, and his one eye was not enough. Parking was also problematic because of the need to make precise judgments of distance.
He had planned out relatively safe routes to the places that he frequented. If we were going to one of those places—such as the house of one of his friends or a nearby eatery—he drove and I sat nervously in the passenger’s seat. More than once we went to a fairly upscale Italian restaurant in a nearby shopping center. The waiters did not know how to pronounce many items on the menu.
Although I was extremely busy during these years, I stopped in to see him whenever I could. Whenever I was scheduled for a trip to the Midwest or the West Coast I tried to add an extra day or two for a stop in Kansas City. I usually took the shuttle to and from KCI airport. We used his Ford Taurus to get around when I was there.
I made one special trip to be with him when he had the procedure to fix his cataract. Since his other eye was worthless, I had been very worried that in the unlikely event that something went wrong, he would be blind. However, when he came out his vision was much improved. He told me that he had always thought that the blue street signs in the area that he lived were green. Also, he could now see the letters clearly.
Pilgrimages: During my visits we almost always went to at least one favored restaurant that could not be reached easily on side streets or had problematic parking arrangements. I drove on those occasions The establishments that I remember very clearly were the Village Inn for huge breakfasts, Dixon’s for chili, and RC’s for fried chicken. These trips were more like pilgrimages that just dining out. Each deserves its own paragraph.
The Village1 Inn was located in Mission, KS. The only reasonable way to get there was to take Metcalf, which was a very busy four-lane road. The restaurant was similar to an IHOP, but they also offered something called a “skillet”. The menu explained, “Each skillet meat is prepared with country potatoes, two eggs, any style and served with a side of made from scratch buttermilk pancakes. Egg whites or low cholesterol egg substitute available.” That may sound like to much to eat, but the “Ultimate Skillet” added all of the following: “Two hickory smoked bacon strips, two sausage links, ham, mushrooms, green peppers, onions, tomatoes and melted cheese”. My dad usually ordered a slightly less ambitious skillet, but I generally settled for an omelette. Coffee cups at the Village Inn did not stay empty long.
Dixon’s2 chili was nothing like any you have tasted. It was Harry Truman’s favorite restaurant both before and after he was president. Their chili had no beans, but you could ask for some. However, if you demand catsup, you might be thrown out. Actually, you would only be “fined” ten cents. The chili is served on a plate. It is not very hot, but hot sauce and ground peppers are on the tables, and most diners make ample use of them. The restaurant that we patronized was on 75th St., a very busy artery. So, I always drove. Dad always ordered his with tamales. I preferred mine dry. The recommended beverage was RC Cola.
My mother made good fried chicken, but when I was growing up there were still several places in the Kansas City area that made exceptionally good fried chicken. When I was growing up our go-to restaurant for this delight was Boots and Coates. Later my dad found another good one in Martin City on 135th St., RC’s3. If I was in KC for more than one day, we drove there for supper.
The computer: My dad wrote a satirical book, Yup the Organization4, that was published in 1986. I am pretty sure that my mom typed the manuscript for him. No one else could read his handwriting, which to me always looked like rain.
He had other ideas for books. He somehow came into possession of a semi-computer made by Brother that could do word processing but nothing else. After mom died, he wanted to buy a computer so that he could send and receive emails, mostly from me. Someone else helped him buy it. It was left to me to describe how to use America Online.
It was hard for him to see the cursor. I adjusted it so that it was larger. Then I set up his account. I created an icon on the desktop for AOL.com. I showed him how he could move the cursor around by making similar movements of the mouse. I did not explain precisely how the mouse was able to cause this. Instead I had him practice double-clicking5 on the AOL icon. He finally got it to work, and the login screen appeared. He entered the user ID and the password that I had previously established. Almost as soon as he pressed Enter, the computer’s speakers greeted him with, “You’ve got mail!”
My dad was excited and justifiably proud of his accomplishments. Although I advised him strongly just to delete the items that appeared in his Inbox, he insisted on opening the first one. When he double-clicked on it the contents appeared on his screen. It was explicit pornography6 in vivid colors.
In shock he lifted the mouse off of its pad and waved it at the screen as one might use a crucifix to ward off a vampire. I despaired at the prospect of talking him through deleting the email. Instead, I wrested the mouse from him and did it myself.
Dad was eventually fairly competent in the use of text-based email. I never attempted to teach him about images or attachments.
I also tried to help my dad with word processing. He could enter and edit the text, and he knew how to save it. I tried to teach him how to copy and paste. He just could not seem to understand the concept at all, and, despite the fact that I had trained hundreds of people to do tasks much more complicated than copying and pasting, I eventually gave up.
So, he used the word processing on the computer in essentially the same manner as he used his old word processor—hunting, pecking, editing, saving, and printing.
He wrote two more books. I read them, but I did not like them. One was an insider’s look at how dad’s insurance company had gotten Senator Bob Dole to rescue them from a tax mess. The other was a fictional story about three brothers.7 Dad tried to get the Dole book published, but it never happened.
Other adventures: My dad loved to play golf. His vision limited his ability to do it. For a while a friend of his walked with him and spotted his ball for him. I don’t know how dad could have gauged the distance on putts. In all the time that I played with him, I never saw him measure a distance in number of strides, and doing such a calculation would have been foreign to the nature of someone who could not balance his checkbook.
I did not play any rounds of golf with him during this period, but we did go to a driving range together a few times. I had to describe to him how much slice he had imparted to each shot. He always said something like, “I’m not coming through the ball enough.” I had no idea what this meant.
I attended two or three of the all-male breakfast gatherings of my dad’s friends. At one of them someone asked me about my business. I explained how we installed AdDept systems to administer the advertising departments of large retailers such as Macy’s and Saks and how TSI was in the process of developing and marketing a service called AxN to process insertion orders from the retailers to their newspapers. Some of the guys were quite interested in the latter project.
I often ran a few miles in the morning. Once, on a fairly warm day, I did ten miles, and it wore me out. When I got to the apartment I lay motionless on the carpet. Dad nearly freaked out. I had overdone it a bit, but within ten minutes I was functional again. That’s what it is like to be a runner. You recover much faster than people think.
On September 18, 2004, dad and I watched the football game between Michigan and San Diego State, then coached by Brady Hoke. It was a terrible game. SDSU was ahead 21-17 at the half. As the teams left at halftime, the field announcer asked Lloyd Carr what he expected in the second half. He tersely said, “I expect a comeback.” U-M scored a touchdown early in third quarter. After that it was an excruciating duel between the two punters.
The big move: In 2005 my dad was diagnosed with macular degeneration in his left eye. He was given treatments to arrest it. They seemed to work, but he was still legally blind. He could not drive.
The area of KC that he lived in had no public transportation to speak of. I proposed that he sell his car and move closer to me and Sue.8 He wanted to give me his car, but I did not want it. I liked my car, and when I stopped liking it, I wanted to pick out my own model and color.
I expected that after he came to the area he would live in an apartment for a little while. Meanwhile Sue and I would erect an addition to the north side of our house tin Enfield to provide him with a place to stay. We did eventually add on to the house, but by then I had come to realize that the idea of him moving in with us would not work for a large number of reasons. It hurt me that I did not keep my promise, but I don’t know how I could have.
So, he lived by himself in apartments in Enfield for six years. That story is related here.
1. In 2023 The Village Inn in Mission appeared to be thriving. Sue and I also frequented the one in Clearwater, FL.
2. Dixon’s was renamed Fritz’s Chili at some point. However, no changes were made when the restaurant in Overland Park was purchased in 1967. It closed in 2018, one day before my dad’s 96th birthday, which he celebrated in another realm.
3. In 2023 RC’s was sold to a couple who announced their plan to leave fried chicken on the menu but also serve Thai food!
4. In 2023 dad’s book was still available on the Internet. He let me read the manuscript that he had submitted. It was pretty good. There was one vignette about a meeting that I particularly enjoyed. Unfortunately, the editor made him remove that item because he (or maybe she) found something potentially offensive. The end result was a work that could not decide whether it was satirical of a self-help book. The nonsensical title was also the editor’s idea; the book made no mention of Yuppies.
5. This took some time. My dad was extremely left-handed, but he used his right hand for the mouse. So, his right forefinger was challenged to perform an activity that his left hand had not yet mastered. Furthermore, to my knowledge he had never performed any kind of fine movement with his right hand. He had never learned the basics of any musical instrument. His typing was strictly hunt-and-peck, and he generally did more hunting than pecking.
6. This might have been the only pornography that my dad ever witnessed. Although he was a contemporary of Roger Sterling, he had a very different set of values. Foul language and off-color jokes or stories were not tolerated in our house. There was no mention of sex at all in my family.
7. Yes, my dad had two brothers and no sisters. He read almost fiction. The only fictional book that he read while I knew him was The Godfather by Mario Puzo, which he read on someone else’s recommendation. He could not get past the language. His own novel had no setting. He left every aspect of the background story vague. I found it almost impossible to read. In fact, I could not get through it.
8. Jamie moved to Birmingham AL in 1999, as is explained here.
Dick’s Sporting Goods is as old as I am. It started as small store in Binghamton, NY, that sold fishing equipment. In 1994 it was moved to the Pittsburgh area. In 2022 it had over 850 stores with over 50,000 employees.
TSI and Dick’s had a very long courtship. I am sure that I made several trips to Dick’s before we signed the contract. The first time that I visited the company it was still in its previous building, which was much smaller than the complex that it constructed in Coraopolis, PA.
We never gave up on selling them a system even though many of AdDept’s features would never be of much use to them. I knew that Dick’s IT department was committed to the AS/400 architecture. Therefore, the cost to them would not include the cost of additional hardware, which was often a deal-breaker.
I remember one sales trip in which I was asked to talk about the way that our system handled co-op—ads that feature a single vendor who has agreed to pay a portion of the expenses. I was pretty sure that no one would buy the AdDept system just to handle co-op, but I always tried to do what they asked. I have read through pages and pages of notes about the project of installing AdDept at Dick’s, but I found no subsequent mention of co-op
TSI and Dick’s formally tied the knot in a contract dated March 4, 2003. It was signed by Eileen Gabriel1, who was Dick’s CIO at the time and me. I still have a pdf file of the document. Most of our contracts were far simpler than this one. Their lawyers obviously added quite a bit of language to the one that we submitted. Neither side ever had any difficulty about it during the more than eleven years that it was in force.
At the time that we negotiated the contract I did not understand (or, for that matter have much interest in) why Dick’s, which up until 2003 had always been in the “kicking the tires” column of prospective AdDept users, suddenly was rarin’ to go. I subsequently discovered two factors that probably contributed to the change in attitude: 1) The company went public in 2002. That probably provided a good deal of cash. 2) By then the advertising department had hired several employees who were familiar with what TSI and AdDept could accomplish2. There probably were other favorable conditions that were not evident to me.
Planning for the AdDept system: Dick’s already had several large AS/400’s that were used for other aspects of its business. On one of them were PeopleSoft3 applications designed for the accounting and human resources departments. One of TSI’s major challenges would be to implement an interface between AdDept and PeopleSoft’s A/P and G/L systems. When employees in the advertising department entered expense invoices into the AdDept system they would automatically be sent to the PeopleSoft system for payment and posting to the General Ledger.
Paul Marshalek
Krista Gianantonio
Adam Sembrat
I found a document created by Paul Marshalek4, the first project manager for the AdDept installation. It provided the agenda for a one-day “discovery session” that was held in the Final Four room on April 16, 2004, almost exactly one year after the contract was signed. The scheduled attendees were Krista Fullen5 and Adam Sembrat6 from advertising, Don Steward7 from IT, Joe Oliver8 and Jeff Jones9 from finance, Paul, and myself.
Don Steward
Joe Oliver
Jeff Jones
The agenda includes a dozen items. During my preparation for this entry one caught my attention. I remember spending a lot of time at Dick’s on various aspects of print media from insertion orders (sent via AxN10 from the beginning) to payment of bills to allocation of costs to stores. I did not remember much about broadcast. At the time they used an advertising agency called Empower MediaMarketing11 based in Cincinnati. I could not find any evidence that we ever implemented an interface by which the buys from the agency were uploaded to AdDept. TSI provided this for most AdDept users, but it usually required custom programming or at least some fine-tuning.
Getting the AdDept system operational: It was made very clear to me that TSI’s client was the IT department, and the people in advertising and accounting were the IT department’s clients. So, the IT department made all the calls in this installation. In some ways this made things more difficult for me. I was never sure whether the advertising department was satisfied with our progress. On the other hand, we heard very few complaints, probably because everything that the advertising department really wanted was installed in phase 1, as described below.
Aeolus, god of testing.
Dick’s insisted on having two separate AdDept environments, one for testing of new code and one for production. Both of them were named after Greek gods of wind. Aeolus, the developmental system, was named after the keeper of the winds. Boreas, the production system was named after the personification of the north wind. TSI employees had no credentials for signing on to Boreas and no way to reach it from our office in East Windsor.
Aeolus and Boreas actually resided on the same AS/400, but they were in different partitions designed to make accidental intermixing of the two environments impossible. If separate boxes had been purchased, separate licensing agreements would be required for the operating system and IBM system-level programs. This would have made the installation of upgrades a much more difficult and time-consuming process for the IT department.
This installation involved a large number of interfaces and a great deal of custom programming. When we delivered a new batch of program changes—both routine updates and code specifically for Dick’s—we had to install the new code in Aeolus, implement the required changes to the database, and test them there. Advertising employees would then be required to sign on to Aeolus and make sure that both the new and previously installed AdDept programs worked. If the changes were not ones that they requested, it was difficult to get them to take this seriously.
During the testing and approval period a process that “refreshed” the AdDept system in Aeolus with the programs and data from Boreas needed to be suspended. If the timing of the suspension was not perfect, then all of the changes that we had installed during that period could be wiped out. A few times this happened to us, and it was quite upsetting.
Boreas.
When all of the advertising department asserted that the changes were good to go, the Aeolus system was refreshed, and TSI needed to install the changes again. The people in advertising would spot check what we had done. During this second period the AdDept system on Boreas was frozen. When the advertising people validated the changes, the Boreas system was refreshed with the new code and the transformed data on Aeolus. Only at that point could work resume. The primary purpose of all this was, I suspect, to eliminate the possibility that IT people might be blamed for deleterious outcomes.
This approach was much less efficient than our usual method of delivering code. I routinely installed new code to four or five other AdDept installations every weekend. Most of the time the users did not even know that I had done anything. There were occasional problems, but never anything that we could not address in an hour or so.
I don’t blame Dick’s for insisting that we follow their protocols, but we had had great success at over thirty installations with the approach that we had developed, and we would never have been able accomplish so much if we had been tied to Dick’s approach in all of them.
Inevitably, despite all of the precautions, some bugs slipped through the testing process—both TSI’s and the advertising department’s. Dick’s had a method that allowed us to make emergency changes to address them, but I don’t remember the details of how it worked. We only needed it once or twice.
If there was a problem or a request for new code, the users had to go through the IT department. The people who served as TSI’s primary point of contact—the liaisons—were people who worked in the IT department as project managers.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the enforced separation of the users from the developers was that Dick’s insisted that I do all the training after the initial installation in one of their training rooms. I did not like this at all. Often the people who showed up at these training classes were not the people who would be using the programs that we were installing. Sometimes I did not know what roles were played by some of the people. I did the best that I could under the circumstances.
At other installations—even the ones with AS/400s owned and operated by the IT department—I was allowed direct access to the users. I had a thorough understanding of the administration of retail advertising, a claim that could be made by none of our liaisons. Many times I could address their issues on the spot and direct them to programs or techniques that they were previously unfamiliar with.
I am certain that the installation would have proceeded more rapidly and with fewer problems if the IT people had allowed us to use our time-tested methods, but the idea was absolutely anathema to them. The IT department owned the AS/400’s, and they insisted upon their right of ownership. Bypassing this interference from the IT department was the primary reason that we always preferred for the advertising departments to have their own smaller systems that could eventually communicate with the systems running the other aspects of the business.
Our main contact at Dick’s during the installation and for some time afterwards was John Nelko12, an IT employee whose specialty was the workings of the AS/400’s operating system, OS/400. Under his supervision I installed AdDept on Aeolus and built all the files that they would need to use. I also installed IBM’s BASIC compiler and interpreter. That product was no longer supported by IBM, but TSI was authorized to sell and install it. Most of the other IBM software—SQL, query, FTP, faxing, etc.—that would be needed was already on the box.
On that very first day John and I got the faxing to work. I also was able to send an insertion order through AxN to TSI’s server. That required that FTP over the Internet was working. It also required that Dick’s be set up on TSI’s system as a valid sender.
TSI was assigned a user ID on Aeolus called TSIDICKS. I was told that the password was set to expire every sixty days. John worked with Denise Bessette in our office to get the SDLC communication working over the telephone lines. In the beginning that was how we accessed the system from TSI’s office.
There was a little time left over in that first visit for extensive training. My notes reported:
We got through the season table, expense classes, ad types, markets, pubs, rates, and print rates in the first training session. Everyone seemed comfortable with everything. In the second training class we went through the more difficult tables pretty thoroughly and entered a couple of ads.
The pub-store master table for inserts was not set up correctly by the program which13 I wrote to create the table. I fixed it. I used the Saks programs as the basis for DM220RDX and DM230RDX. Adam wants to show the costs on insertion orders. Most of the programs do not do this. I added a column for the Skid Color to the insertion order. I did this all during a long meeting which everyone in advertising attended on Wednesday afternoon.
I remember that the names of the insertion order programs for ROP and inserts began with DM220 and DM230 respectively. The “Skid Color” refers to the color of the tag that was attached to a “skid” (a pallet with no bottom deckboards) on which the inserts were stacked and packaged for delivery. Each version of an insert was assigned a different color.
These were my last few comments on that momentous trip:
Amanda Sembrat, then known as Amanda Greener.
We had a good luncheon meeting about the rest of the project. Steve Manning, the Budgeting Director, attended. They are considering whether to use AdDept to create real purchase orders for all advertising expenses.
I almost made the mistake of going to a Mexican restaurant on Cinco di Mayo.
I showed Krista how to respond to errors. At this point both Adam and Amanda were involved in other things.
I think that Adam overstepped his authority last time when he decreed that we did not need the broadcast interface. Helen said that we may need to revisit this. We had better be careful with Adam. He sounds like he has more authority than he really does.
Request #1 was approved.
They certainly want me to return for the first insertion order run. They may want me sooner than that.
The fact that Dick’s ran so many inserts in so many markets caused some unique challenges that were also mentioned in the notes:
Adam says that about 15 papers have separate rates for flexis, which are also called minis. We need to come up with some way of handling this.
Most of their events start on Sunday. If the paper does not publish on Sunday, they want it to default to Saturday, Monday, Friday (before), Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday (after) in that order. I set things up to work this way, I think, but I was not able to test every possibility. For Thursday drops, they want it to default to Wednesday, Friday, Saturday.
They want to use the holiday quantities for Thanksgiving. Is there a good way to do this?
They have some “events” which involve sponsorships with sports teams. The costs are spread over several months. I am thinking that we might use Stage’s amortizing programs for this.
The second trip June 14, 2004: Dick’s was one of the few clients for which a one-day trip was at least somewhat reasonable. USAir had many direct flights between Bradley and Pittsburgh. Because Dick’s was so close to the airport, I could easily get to the office at the same time as the employees.
I did encounter one major problem: I discovered that it was not trivially easy to meet with people in the advertising department.
I got there about 9 a.m., but I had to wait about 30 minutes as they tried to figure out what to do with me. Advertising is in the new building, but the reception desk is in the old building. Eventually they managed to contact Adam, and he showed me into the building.
Here is what happened once I got to the advertising area:
I spent most of the morning making sure that all papers were correctly designated as F for faxing or T for AxN. I called Lucia15 to make sure that we were in agreement concerning every paper.
I met with Adam, Helen, Paul, and Steve about where we stand and what is on the agenda. Steve said that they need to keep track of actuals versus budgets. It took me a while to figure out that he means by category on each book. Right before he left he gave me a list of the categories which they currently use. They also decided that advertising should meet with Jane Walker and the accounting people to make sure that everyone is on the same page.
I helped Adam set up a pub group for all of his insert papers. He also needs one of his main papers. I think that he now knows how to do this.
We put on an ad and printed insertion orders. Adam noticed that only the first 12 characters of the fax number appeared. I fixed this.
The sequence number for the NJS market was incorrect. Adam fixed it.
We discovered that there were no rates for 6-page tabs. They sometimes run 12-page minis (same as flexis) which ordinarily use these rates. I wrote a little program to help Adam key these rates in fast.
I was able to establish an FTP session on TSI270.
Amanda16, who is engaged to Adam, said that she had looked over the quote for the run list. It looked good to her. They would like to have it by 6/28, although, of course, they have not approved it yet.
They were unable to print. The printer which they formerly used is no longer near them. I called John Nelko. He eventually identified the printer. I need to send him a memo telling him which user profiles need to be changed to use the new printer, which is called Ad_Dept.
I think that DM022 should use the text description from the book size file rather than the dimensions for the size on screen #M22A.
We could not fax because the modem was not available. I will send an e-mail to John to try to reserve the modem one day this week. Adam wanted to wait until Friday, but I told him that I would be out of town on Friday.
The rest of the story: An AdDept Progress Report dated October 15, 2004, and prepared by (I think) Paul Marshalek identified phase 1 of the installation as “print media”, which for Dick’s was primarily in the form of newspaper inserts. Phase 2 was much more detailed. It had the following sections:
Pub-store allocations, which included implementation of an interface with the system that Dick’s used for sales analysis.
Other media: broadcast, magazines, and billboards (which everyone in advertising called “outdoor” even if the signs were in a building).
Another interface to “refresh” AdDept’s vendor table so that its data was consistent with PeopleSoft’s.
Expense invoices, which in AdDept were divided into media (which were entered against the schedule) and non-media (which were entered by job categories or sub-accounts). This project included the expense payables interface.
Media accruals that created the journal entry for the G/L in PeopleSoft. The document notes that the file containing the journal entry for August 2004 was delivered to Jane Walker14 in the IT department.
Cost accounting, which in their case meant advertising costs (including overhead) in all media per store.
Non-media closing, which included accruals from purchase orders and prepaids.
This list, which resulted from the four-day trip that I made in October of 2004, included some really big programming jobs, but I am pretty sure that they were all eventually implemented.
I met several new people on that trip:
Carol Mazza was a media manager who worked for Helen Burkholder. Krista and Erika Crawford worked for her.
Linda Weiss was tasked with entering broadcast invoices. She reported to Steve Manning.
Dave Derry was an internal auditor.
Todd Schultz worked in Expense Payables.
Jeff March, who worked at Galyans, a company that Dick’s had recently acquired, was scheduled to start work the next Monday as broadcast manager.
Rick Kohout provided me with files that I used to implement the sales interface.17
Krista at her desk.
Most of my time on the October 2004 visit was spent with Krista. I checked over what she had done for ROP and inserts and helped her set up other types of ads. At the time Dick’s was rapidly expanding. New stores were provided with pre-opening and grand opening advertising support. These ads had their own separate G/L accounts, and we had to devise a way of handling them.
My next trip was in April of 2005. I gave a talk to eleven people to explain how AdDept does accounting. The tone of my notes indicates my frustration. Accounting for advertising is complicated. I could not explain it very well in a few minutes in a classroom setting.
I learned that Jeff Jones accrued to plan. Here is what I reported about the reconciliation process:
Jeff explained that he made his “accrual entry.” He actually closes to plan. He takes the planned expenses, subtracts out the invoices paid, and spreads the difference to markets in a spreadsheet.
We got the February accrual to match. This is not really much of an accomplishment. We just matched one AdDept report to another after eliminating all possible sources of error. We got the March accrual to match within .5%. We ran the report by ad so that Jeff could compare it with the list which he used for his accrual.
Accrual to plan is a bogus concept. The whole idea of accruing is to make the expenses and income occur in the appropriate month so that one can isolate problem areas as soon as they develop. Accruing to plan disguises difficulties because the actuals are forced to match budgets. However, it was not my job to explain this.
I came up with a list of eleven things that needed to be changed in the production system. At other installations I would have just fixed them myself, but I was not allowed to touch anything. Denise and I had to come up with ways to circumvent this restriction in each case.
I also listed six or seven small changes that they requested.
I returned to Dick’s on May 31 for one day to look at their pub-store allocation records. I discovered that because someone skipped the step of creating these records, the allocations of costs to stores for 2005 have all been wrong.
I also helped them address the issue of paying bills for ads that ran in 2004. I came up with a Mickey Mouse method that at least got the accounting right at the G/L level.
The notes from my only visit in 2006 are very sketchy. There were a couple of new people whom I do not remember, and someone in advertising asked us to quote a massive database of zip codes to help with ordering insert distributions. Some—but by no means all—newspapers allow specifications of zip codes for insert distribution. Both AdDept and AxN handled this by special instructions.
I remember quoting creating this database, but I don’t think that we ever did it. The notes make no mention of any other media or any accounting issues.
Bob Pecina.
I made one four-day visit in 2007. I met a lot of new people. Included in that group were Carl Abel and Bob Pecina,18 who would be our primary contact for the rest of our relationship.
Among other things I learned that the advertising department had begun using AdDept for billboards and magazines.
They expressed considerable interest in copying all ads from one year to another for planning purposes. This was an important but very complicated task for any retailer. TSI had software to do this. If everything was set up perfectly, or at least nearly so, it could save a lot of time and make for more accurate planning. If anything important about the process was ignored, it could make a gigantic mess.
I knew that it would be a nightmare at Dick’s for more reasons than I could name. I am pretty sure that nothing ever came of this.
I learned that their change reports were essentially useless because they included ads that were created in order to estimate costs under a specific scenario and then deleted. There were a lot of these ads. I think that we put in a Y/N field on the selection screens for change reports to allow them to be excluded.
The last major project that we did for Dicks was to create a separate installation for Golf Galaxy, a retail chain that Dick’s had acquired in 2006. The administrative functions were not moved to Coraopolis until 2008. I decided to create a separate blog entry for the Golf Galaxy project. It can be viewed here.
Mike Krall.
When reading my notes for the two trips that I took in 2008 I discovered that I also spent time with Mike Krall19, a young guy who had been assigned the daunting task of managing the “cost accounting” programs that showed in summary and in detail how expenses were attributable to stores using rules that Dick’s created. The reports depended upon all aspects of the data—media and production costs, sales, store allocations, etc.—being accurate.
Here are some of the notes from the time that I spent with him:
I spent most of the day on Wednesday with Mike Krall. He runs the month end programs in AdDept, but he did not really know what he was doing. He had a detailed set of instructions to follow.
I made some queries in ADVMOQRY for Mike Krall to provide him with net indirect expense (INDNETEXP) and net production expenses for ads in prior months (PRIORMOEXP). I explained that these would only get the data from Dicks. If he wants Golf Galaxy, he should make copies and change the libraries from TSIDATA to TSIDATAG.
Does DX112 expense the indirects? Mike Krall said that he does not create a journal entry for indirects.
The white areas are buildings. The main entrance was in the middle of the top set. The bottom building and most of the parking (grey) areas did not exist when I visited last.
The atmosphere at Dick’s headquarters: Working at Dick’s was unlike anything that I experienced at any other retailer. For the most part the administrative departments of the department store chains that dominated the list of AdDept clients were located on the highest floors of large downtown stores. The ambience in the lower floors was designed to generate excitement. The upper floors were at best boring and sometimes even dingy. Even the offices of retailers that housed their administrative functions elsewhere were mundane.
The gigantic lobby at Dick’s headquarters.
Arrival at Dick’s was not an overwhelmingly pleasant experience. Despite the massive size of the complex—and it is much larger in 2022 than it was in my last visit of 2008—the offices in Coraopolis were not trivially easy to find within the industrial park. The parking was not a bit convenient. In those days there was only one lot, and by the time that I arrived with my rental car only spots that were a long way from the main entrance were available.
I don’t think that I was ever in this room.
From the front door one entered a huge waiting area. No one without an employee badge could get past it without being escorted. My memory may be faulty, but I don’t recall that they ever gave me a temporary badge.
Incidentally, it would not have been a good idea to arrive early to try to claim a better parking space. I would not have been allowed past the lobby until the person or people with whom I was meeting were there.
The cafeteria.
Surrounding the lobby were eight or ten conference rooms. Each was named after famous sporting events—Super Bowl, the Masters, World Series, etc. They were extremely elegant. A few of our early meetings were held in one of them.
Dick’s also had a very nice cafeteria, which was called the Court Street Café. I am pretty sure that I ate there every day—except the time that lunch was delivered to our meeting—on every visit. It’s a good thing, too. There were no restaurant in or near the industrial park in which the headquarters resided.
I remember feeling quite short on one of my first visits there. I was at least six feet tall, but almost everyone I met was quite a bit taller. Later I heard about a volleyball tournament held somewhere inside the facility during the lunch break or maybe right after work. They already had an indoor basketball court when I visited. Now they have that (with a track around it), tennis courts, and a huge workout room.
The Dick’s store at State Line Plaza.
Epilogue: Alone among TSI’s clients, Dick’s still seemed to be thriving in 2022. They even have a store in Enfield next to Costco. A very large percentage of the people with whom I worked in the early twenty-first centuries are still employed there in Coraopolis.
A decision made by Dick’s in late 2013 was the cause of the decision to close down TSI. At the time the income from maintenance fees was not enough to keep the company running. The income from custom programming had also dwindled, and there were no real prospects for sales of new AdDept systems.
We therefore depended on the steady stream of checks from the newspapers that subscribed to the AxN service. Because several of our other largest AxN users had outsourced the buying of their newspaper space to third parties, Dick’s many newspapers accounted for a large percentage of the remaining income. I knew immediately that the decision by Dick’s management to let an advertising agency order its newspaper space was the death knell for TSI. The details are described here.
The people at Dick’s were quite surprised by TSI’s decision. Someone called us and told us that they still wanted to use AdDept. They evidently thought that we had misinterpreted their communication about the agency. We had to explain that the AxN contracts generated a considerable amount of income for us.
Denise Bessette may have made a private arrangement to provide some support for the AdDept system at Dick’s. I was 65 years old when we made the decision to close, and I was not interested in such a venture.
1. I am not sure that I ever met Eileen. If I did, I don’t remember the occasion. Her LinkedIn page is here.
Helen Burkholder.
2. Two people who may have played significant roles behind the scene were Helen Burkholder, an executive in Dick’s advertising department, and Bill Dandy, her boss. I did not spend a lot of time with either of them in this installation, but they were both certainly influential.
I had worked closely with Helen when she was a media manager at Kaufmann’s. The blog entry about the Kaufmann’s installation is posted here. I am not sure what Bill Dandy’s title was. I met him when he took over that job at Michael’s in Irving, TX. That very profitable installation has been chronicled here. Helen’s LinkedIn page is here. Bill’s can be viewed here.
3. In December 2014 PeopleSoft was acquired by Oracle. I am not sure what effect this had on Dick’s. It did not seem to affect the design of the interface.
4. Paul worked in the IT department, not advertising. His LinkedIn page can be viewed here.
5. Krista Gianantonio (née Fullen) was our day-to-day contact in advertising. Her LinkedIn page is here. She was familiar with AdDept and TSI from her previous jobs at Hecht’s (described here) and Kaufmann’s (described here).
6. Adam Sembrat’s LinkedIn page can be found here.
7. I don’t remember Don Steward at all. I don’t think that we had any subsequent dealings with him. He might have been Paul’s boss. His LinkedIn page is here.
8. I don’t remember Joe Oliver. His LinkedIn page is here.
9. Jeff Jones actually worked with the financial side of AdDept. His LinkedIn page is here.
10. Dick’s had stores all over the country, and they advertised in hundreds of newspapers. The fact that the advertising department was excited about electronic delivery of insertion orders gave a big boost to TSI’s efforts to expand the use of the AxN product.
11. In 2022 the company is just called Empower. Its Wikipedia page can be found here.
13. When researching the notes I definitely realized that I had not yet learned when to use “that” and when to use “which”. This “which” should be a “that”. So should the “which” in the last sentence.
14. Like many of the other people listed in this entry Jane Walker is still employed at Dick’s in 2022. Her LinkedIn page is here.
15. Lucia Hagan was the administrative person at TSI during this period. Her history at TSI is described here.
16. My notes say that Amanda Greener was not actually employed by Dick’s; she actually worked for Dick’s printer. She evidently married Adam. Her LinkedIn page is here.
17. I have only the vaguest recollections of any of these people, but I found LinkedIn pages for several of them: Carol Mazza’s is here. Todd Schultz’s is here. Jeff March’s is here. Rick Kohout’s is here.
Designing our flag and running it up the pole to see if anyone salutes. Continue reading →
By the spring of 2000 Denise Bessette and I had pretty well outlined the steps required to implement TSI’s new Internet product and agreed on the name AxN (pronounced “A cross N”). It was a clearinghouse for insertion orders (reservations for advertising space) sent from advertisers (A) to newspapers (N). It also managed communications from both sides and allowed the newspapers to confirm the orders online. The process that Denise and I employed, including the division of labor, was described here. Details of the system design are posted here.
I should note that neither Denise nor I have a background in marketing. Most of our discussions about this project took place during the period shortly after Doug Pease, or marketing person left TSI. We had not yet replaced him.
The first non-technical question that we faced was how to fund the project. We never really thought about setting aside a pot of money, borrowing from a financial institution, or seeking investors. Instead, all of the coding made use of tools that we already had or were available at minimal cost. We knew that the company would eventually need to spend some money on marketing, but we had no idea how to budget for it in advance.
A critically important aspect was deciding how we would bill for the service. The insertion orders always originated with AdDept programs on the AS/400s used by TSI’s clients. However, for various reasons no more than twenty of them regularly produced insertion orders inside AdDept. We were already charging those companies a monthly fee for TSI’s support of the AS/400’s faxing software. How much more could we charge them? Most of them knew the limitations of faxing, but removing them was not a high priorities for any of them.
In 2022 the Tribune Company owns the Courant. The building that I visited has been abandoned.
On the other hand, the companies that used AdDept ran ads in hundreds of newspapers, and for most of those papers the department stores were by far the biggest purchasers of advertising. It was not unheard of tor some of these companies to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per month for ads in a single newspaper. In order to assess the situation better I scheduled appointments with executives at the two major papers that were within easy driving distance, the Hartford Courant and the Springfield Union News & Sunday Republican1.
I explained our proposed approach to an executive at each publication.The lady at the Courant was not very enthusiastic about the idea, but she did say that the paper would consider whatever the customers wanted. She emphasized that the newspapers were already paying third-party services in order to receive the ads electronically.
The guy at the Republican was more engaging. He showed me the process of how his employees laid out an issue of the paper. They did not start by placing the stories in a way that would make the paper more attractive at the newsstand. They began by figuring out where the ads from Filene’s2, the May Company’s department store chain that dominated New England, would run. He said that sometimes they did not receive the ads until minutes before press time—or even later. However, they always held the space for every ad that Filene’s had scheduled.
So, both Denise and I concluded that TSI should bill the newspapers for the service and to offer it to the advertisers as an alternative to faxing at the same price, thereby bringing their net costs to zero. The big questions were how much to bill the newspapers and how to frame it. It did not seem right to bill the large newspapers the same amount as the smaller ones. The pricing had to seem both moderate and equitable.
Denise came up with the idea of five or so tiered billing amounts, where the tiers were determined not by a paper’s circulation but by its published column-inch rate. These rates were available in a publication called Standard Rates and Data to which most advertising agencies in those days subscribed. I had seen the huge books lying around at our agency customers. I asked employees at Keiler Advertising if I could have an obsolete copy. They gladly located a fairly recent one and gave it to me. I discovered that the rates3 for newspaper advertising varied wildly. As I remember it, we decided to set the floor value for the top tier of AxN rates at $150. So, any paper that with a standard rate of $150 or more per column inch would be charged $150 per month. Other papers would be charged proportionately less
This proved to be a rather easy concept to explain to the newspaper. Because the advertiser and the newspaper both benefited, the costs would be split between them. The newspaper rates were proportional to the publicly recognized value of the ads in their paper. Our fee was roughly equal to the price of one column inch of advertising space. The size of a full-page ad in a broadsheet newspaper was over 120 column inches. TSI’s fee would be a pittance to newspapers, most of which were still thriving financially in the early twenty-first century. If we could present the system as reducing the number of misunderstandings, the cost for the newspaper could easily be justified if even one free make-good were eliminated every few years.
In 2001 I made two trips to locations of AdDept clients to assess the feasibility of AxN for both the advertisers and the newspapers. The first trip was in January of 2001 to Houston, a city with two large AdDept installations, Stage Stores4 and Foley’s5. I gave fairly detailed demonstrations to the buyers of newspaper space at both locations. I showed the system to Stage Stores first. Here are some of my notes from that trip.
The AxN presentation went pretty well. Becky (Newman), the production manager, made a point to tell me that she was very interested in it. They also gave me a lot of suggestions as to what they needed, especially in the inserts area.
After the demo Becky showed me the AdDirect6 website. It is in many ways similar to ours. They list all of their clients. The only retailers are M&F8, L&T9 (who doesn’t use them), Stage, and Office Depot. The coolest thing about the site is that you can determine which fields are displayed as columns (but not the order of the columns). You can also specify up to three sorting fields. Finally, you can specify a filter to limit the list. Stage would like all of these. They would be less useful to others.
Stage pays AdDirect $10,000 per month. They plan to negotiate the charge down.
… Fort Worth(less) Star Telegram invoice for $500K. Foley’s never indicated that they thought that the papers would be reluctant to pay a little for the IO service. They seemed to think that they would do whatever they told them to do.
Foley’s was under the mistaken impression that all of the other divisions were using AdDirect.
The second trip was to Pittsburgh. I demonstrated the system to the advertising department of Kaufmann’s9, the May Company’s division that was based there. I was able to show the newspaper buyers on their own PCs that very little would be different when they began to use the AxN code that had been added to the AdDept system with which they were familiar. It was really just a matter of flipping a switch for each paper. The system did the rest.
I then signed on to TSI’s AS/400 from one of their PC’s and showed them what orders would look like from their perspective. I showed them in the AxN Handbook for Newspaper Users (posted here) what the orders looked like when the rep signed on with the newspaper’s credentials. They were very impressed.
After explaining how we planned to bill the newspapers, I asked Mary Ann Brown how difficult she thought that it would be to get the newspapers to cooperate. She said, “They’ll do whatever we tell them to do.”
I had appointments the next day with Pittsburgh’s two newspapers, the Post-Gazette and the Tribune Review. At the Trib I met with an IT guy. He found what we were doing very interesting. He verified that all the reps had access to the Internet, and he was quite pleased that our approach did not require him to purchase equipment or reconfigure what he had. The lady who was Kaufmann’s rep at the Post was more stand-offish, but she verified Mary Ann Brown’s assessment of their willingness to cooperate.
My third appointment was at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I rented a car and drove to Cleveland for an afternoon meeting with Kaufmann’s rep. I soon discovered that we had a common acquaintance. He had just returned from a trip to Albany. He had met there with Fran Lipari, the owner of Communication & Design10, the agency that handled the Key Bank account. The rep was polite, but he was not a bit enthusiastic about the prospect of paying TSI for handling insertion orders.
I rated my success level at the three newspapers as a win, a loss, and a tie. That was not a great result, but we were still in the ball game. We were just at the stage in which we were ready to roll the product out to the first advertiser when something remarkable happened.
In 2001 TSI received a telephone call from someone at Belk11, a department store chain that was (and still is) based in Charlotte, NC. In the next few months I made many trips to Charlotte to discuss with them the use of the AdDept system. Since Belk already owned several AS/400s, the time between their approval of the AdDept contract with the accompanying design document for proposed enhancements and the beginning of the installation period was much shorter than usual. I remember that at one of those early meetings I was explaining how the AS/400 could automatically fax the insertion orders to the newspapers. Someone asked if it was possible to use the Internet to send the orders.
Guinea pigs love to whistle. Be careful; if you pick one up by its tail, its eyes will fall out.
I swear that I did not plant this question, but if I had thought of it ahead of time, I probably would have. I informed them that TSI had indeed developed just such a product, and we were about to roll it out to our existing customers. After I explained how it worked, Belk eagerly agreed to act as TSI’s guinea pig (sorry; I meant to type “Beta Site”) for AxN. This was such an ideal situation that I could scarcely believe it.
How TSI persuaded nearly all of the users of AdDept and hundreds of newspapers to sign up for AxN is explained in Part 2, which is posted here.
1. The name of the paper was changed to Springfield Republican in 2001.
2. Filene’s used AdDept for accounting functions, but only because the May Company insisted. I was never able to persuade the newspaper manager to abandon the elaborate set of spreadsheets that he had developed even though it did not produce insertion orders. The painful story of my attempts to get them to use more of the system have been chronicled here.
3. Most department stores negotiated much lower rates than the published ones. They often had complicated agreements about volume discounts.
4. The “standard rate” was the “open” rate for a black & white ROP ad in a daily edition. It did not include any discounts or premiums. I located a web page that actually included a page in one of the 2005 editions of Standard Rates and Data. It showed the complete rate card for the St. Petersburg Times, which happened to subscribe to AxN. It is on p.3 of the pdf posted here. SRDS, the company that published the physical book, now allows subscribing advertisers and agencies to view the rates on the Internet.
Becky Newman’s LinkedIn photo.
5. TSI’s long relationship with Stage Stores is recounted here. I do not have vivid memories of Becky Newman. Her LinkedIn page is here.
6. Foley’s was one of the earliest users of AdDept. The details have been posted here.
7. I have only a vague recollection of AdDirect. Apparently it was a way of entering ads for insertion orders online one at a time. The orders could be sent to the newspapers. This might be a reasonable approach for an ad agency, but retailers ran the same ad in many markets. Entering these one at a time would be unduly burdensome. If the $10,000 figure is correct, then the AdDept-AxN combination saved Stage a heck of a lot of money over the years.
8. M&F is Meier & Frank, the smallest department store division of the May Company. It was based in Portland, OR. Details of the AdDept installation at M&F have been posted here.
9. L&T refers to Lord & Taylor, the May Company division based in New York. The relationship between L&T and TSI is described here.
10. Much more has been posted about the AdDept installation at Kaufmann’s here.
11. Communication & Design (always “&”, never “and”) was one of the first ad agencies to purchase the GrandAd system. My adventures in installing and supporting that system are described here.
12. The details of TSI’s long and productive relationship with Belk are posted here.
In large measure this entry is based on and inspired by a set of recently discovered messages that I sent to my partner, Denise Bessette, about new projects that we were researching or working on. The first email was dated in late 1999. The last was in early 2001. The messages portrayed an exciting but scary time for both of us.
By the middle of the nineties it was evident to us that the way that TSI had been programming in the past fifteen years was becoming obsolete or was at least losing popularity. In 1992 Microsoft left IBM at the starting gate when it released Windows 3.1, the first version of its operating system that featured a graphical user interface (GUI) and was also stable enough that large corporations took it seriously. One could still make the argument that text-based software systems like the ones that we had developed were appropriate for many business tasks—in fact, most of the most important ones. However, if you did, you were probably dooming yourself to the fate of typewriter salesmen.
Great if you have just 2 fingers.
In fact, systems like AdDept and TSI’s other systems were branded by many of the magazines of the day as “legacy systems”. The emphasis of the new approach centered around the appearance of the screens, which now featured colors, images, text boxes, radio buttons, and varied fonts. They were certainly more interesting to look at than anything that we had produced. The mouse was the thing! The keyboard was only used when absolutely necessary. Whether they were as efficient or as easy to use was debatable, but, as I already noted, we were well aware of what had happened to the typewriter salesmen.
Another thing that happened during the middle of the nineties was the explosive growth of the Internet. All software developers wanted to be a part of it, but few were exactly sure how to approach it. I knew that we needed to figure out what aspect we should concentrate on, but it was not an easy decision to make. A few early participants made a lot of money, but an awful lot of ideas were catastrophic failures.
The Search for a GUI: I spent countless hours researching ways that we could provide a GUI for the AdDept system that did not involve a complete rewriting of the hundreds (and growing daily) of screens that we had already implemented. Every developer who worked on IBM midrange or mainframe systems must have been faced with the same problem. We all wanted a way to provide a system that looked modern but also took advantage of the thousands of lines of functioning code that had already been written.
I don’t know why, but IBM was not much help in this endeavor. Instead, in the late nineties IBM became a strong proponent of an object-oriented programming language developed by Sun Microsystems called Java. This was a startlingly new language. The first version was released in 1996.
I bought and read ten separate books that purported to teach Java programming. The structure of the language was consistent with the first principle of its design: “It must be simple, object-oriented, and familiar.” Well at least it was simple and object-oriented. The structure of the code was nothing like what I was accustomed to. Its main orientation was to a computer display, which it considered a set of objects, each with a set of properties and methods. That approached worked well enough for a screen, but how would it work for other things? After downloading the software development kit to my laptop and spending hundreds of hours mulling the contents of those books, I could do all of the exercises in every book, but I had not the slightest clue how to begin to code a system to manage any aspect of retail advertising. In fact I could not replicate even one screen of the AdDept system.
I did not completely discard the notion of using Java somehow, but if we did, we would definitely need some help. As I look back on this, maybe this is the reason why IBM was so crazy for Java.
The Spreadout Project: Users of TSI’s systems seldom complained about the look or feel of our data entry screens. Those screens would never have won any design awards, but the formats were completely consistent throughout the application, and everyone knew that they got the job done efficiently. Furthermore, they knew that TSI could implement requested changes rapidly and at moderate costs.
What they did not like much was the look of the reports, which was limited to one non-proportional font—Courier—with no images or even styles like italics or bolding. Many, if not most, of the people who used AdDept were quite good at making and manipulating spreadsheets. They were used to controlling the format of the output, and they liked the flexibility. For example, if they wanted someone to concentrate on one column or row, they could easily change the font, color, or style for just those cells.
Several clients asked us if it would be possible for us to produce an Excel spreadsheet as the output from designated programs in AdDept instead of or in addition to printed reports. I did not know if it would be possible, but I said that I would look into it. I dubbed this project “Spreadout”.
It was rather easy to produce an output file that contained the same rows and columns as the report, and we implemented that option in a large number of AdDept reports. The user could then download that file to their PC. That file could then be loaded into Excel with the rows and columns intact. However, the fields (or cells) in the file contained only text or numbers. It was not possible to download formulas for totaling or designate any kind of formatting. Furthermore, the process of downloading the file was not exactly speedy.
I tried to figure out what it would take to produce code that could provide files that could be opened in Excel with predetermined formulas and formatting. I found some documentation from Microsoft of the Excel files, but I never could concoct a way to provide what our customers asked for. Furthermore I never heard of anyone else who had accomplished this, and —believe me—I searched..
I did, however, managed to provide an alternative that proved popular to some clients. Almost all the AdDept customers used Hewlett-Packard printers that were accessible by the AS/400. HP sold books that documented the format for files in HP’s printer command languages, PCL 4, PCL 5, and PCL 6. I could then write code to produce spooled files that contained the output in exactly the format that the client specified. The downside was the considerable amount of coding required for each report, many times as much as it took to produce it in the Courier-only. It also required an extra step to send the output directly to the printer without being reformatted.
However, a few clients were so insistent about the need for a precise format that they were willing to pay the price. These reports were almost always the ones that they distributed to other departments or to higher-ups.
If anyone else ever did a project like this for the AS/400, I never heard of it. Unfortunately, I never figured out how it could be marketed as a stand-alone product usable with other AS/400 software.
As the new millennium approached, we—that is, Denise Bessette and I—felt that we needed to expand TSI’s horizons. In January of 2000 we flew to San Diego for IBM’s PartnerWorld conference in the hope of making contact with people who could advise us how to adapt to the need for modernization and the Internet. That enjoyable but frustrating experience has been described here.
On February 25, 2000, I took the time to write up in a fairly detailed manner how, given the inherent limitations of a small business like ours, TSI should to proceed in trying to develop a second line of business. Here is a portion of that memo:
General principles:
1. We should get the best people available to help us.
2. We should maintain AdDept as a dependable source of income. Whether we should invest a lot of time and/or money in enhancing and marketing AdDept is still to be determined.
3. We should try to leverage our assets better. Our income is too heavily dependent upon the number of hours put in by Mike and Denise.
4. We should assume that the economy will remain strong for another two years. On the other hand, we should avoid debt or at least large amounts of debt in case this assumption turns out to be false.
5. We should add new skills that are more marketable. That means learning some subset of Windows, object-oriented programming, and the internet. We should be thinking past the next project to the one after that if we can.
6. We should look for partners with skills and assets that complement ours.
7. We should not be deterred by the fact that some of these principles seem incompatible.
8. We need to act fast. Pursuing René2 cost us seven months. On the other hand we might have gone down some less profitable paths if she had been on board.
I think we should take the following steps as soon as possible.
1. Find out what it takes to get our existing clients to use AdDept for insertion orders. The following clients are not using AdDept for IO’s: Macy’s East, Neiman Marcus, Filene’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Hecht’s. I checked Herberger’s. They have ads through March 29, 2000, at least. Macy’s West is apparently starting. Gottschalks ran insertion orders yesterday. I don’t know about Meier & Frank, but I can take care of that on my trip.
2. Find out which advertising departments have access to the internet and would be willing to use it to check on insertion orders. I don’t think that this would be a problem with most of them. Unfortunately, we don’t really have anyone in the office who can do this for us.
3. Make an appointment with Ken Owen3 to run the idea of a clearinghouse for insertion orders by him. He may be very interested in working with us on it. I have quite a bit of respect for him. At the very least, he is smart and completely honest.
4. Run the clearinghouse idea by at least one of our clients. Why not schedule our trip to New York and run it by Tom, Chris, and whoever their ROP person is?4
5. Run the clearinghouse idea by at least one newspaper or someone who knows how newspapers think about these things today.
6. Start trying to package and market AdDept and/or AS/400 products and services. We need to maintain or enhance our cash position over the next six months.
7. We should find out what, if anything, the National Newspaper Association (NNA)5, the AAAA6, and AP AdSEND have done in this regard. The AP is a potential partner in this venture. I once had a copy of the NNA’s EDI spec7, but I seem to have thrown it out when we moved. I will see what I can find on the Internet.
Requirements for hiring a marketing/client services person:
1. He/she must be able to get along with Mike and Denise. This includes having a good work ethic. I think Doug barely met these qualifications.
2. Must be able to get along with the clients.
3. Must be willing to spend a lot of time on the phone.
4. Must be able to talk to decision-makers and occasionally presidents of corporations without looking foolish. Doug could do this, but his ability to identify the real decision-maker was just so-so. He was also almost always overly optimistic, but this might be necessary to offset my tendency to see the negative side of everything.
5. Must be able to refrain from overselling.
Pluses:
1. Intelligence. Determination can go a long way to overcome deficiencies in this categories, but I don’t think I want to try to explain things to someone any duller than Doug.
2. Retail experience.
3. Newspaper experience.
4. Other advertising experience.
5. Good business sense.
6. Sales experience.
7. Computer experience.
How to proceed.
1. We can run an ad in the Courant. There are almost as many classified ads for sales and marketing people there as for programmers. The only major retailer in the immediate area now is Ames, and they run no ROP. Therefore the chances of finding someone in Hartford who understands retail advertising are slim.
2. We can contact a headhunter. We don’t have to pay unless we find someone, but we will have to pay plenty if we do. It might be worth it if it speeds up the process.
3. We can advertise on the Internet. Does that cost money? If so, how much?
4. In interviews I think that we should consider dangling a carrot of a spinoff of a .com company for the insertion order clearinghouse. I am not exactly sure how to present this idea to someone. Maybe we could offer them a percentage of the new company with the understanding that we would try to sell it once it has become established.
In retrospective I find it impressive that I was able to earmark in advance so many important issues that TSI would face over the next few years. We made some mistakes, but we made a lot of good decisions.
A month later, on March 25, 2000, I mailed a letter to our contacts at all of the companies that used AdDept. I solicited their opinions on what TSI’s priorities should be in the new millennium. Here is a copy:
TSI is in the process of evaluating how best to allocate its resources over the course of the next year or so. Our highest priorities will remain providing excellent support for existing installations and responding to requests for custom programming from existing clients. However, there are a few additional projects that we are considering. We are very interested in learning what our existing clients think about them.
1. Menu maker: This is a fairly simple idea both in concept and in implementation. You would be provided with either a PC/Mac program or an AS/400 program that would allow you to create your own menus. The menus would reside in a separate library so that they would never get mixed up with the standard AdDept menus. You would provide the name for the menu and the heading text. For each option you that want to add, you would be allowed to select from a list of AdDept programs and menus. You could also enter your own command or an IBM command (e.g., WRKQRY). If you selected an AdDept menu or program, the description and the online help would be filled in for you, but you could override the text to make it say what you wanted.
2. GUI front end: Most software companies that market systems of a size comparable to AdDept have budgeted more than $1 million to “modernizing” their data entry screens to use a “graphical user interface” that is consistent with the methods used by Windows and Mac programs. It is now technically feasible to create a fairly nice GUI front end for AdDept for much less than that using products available from third party vendors. However, there is still a considerable capital outlay involved. We also estimate that it would take at least half of a man-year of labor. Furthermore, the PC or Mac would have to meet certain minimum requirements. Terminals would still use the green screens. TSI’s support regimen would be more difficult. The interactive programs would probably run slower on older AS/400’s. They may actually run faster on newer boxes.
3. Output to Excel: We believe that it is technically feasible (albeit difficult) to create a file from the AS/400 that is usable by Microsoft Excel with no intervening steps. It is a relatively straightforward task to download data files (or even spooled files) to spreadsheets today, but many intervening steps are required to get something presentable. TSI’s proposed method would allow you for each report that is eligible for this kind of treatment to designate (and permanently store) the formatting of the worksheet—report titles, column headings, “fit to page”, and most of the other values in “File, Page Setup.” You would also be allowed to designate fonts and sizes for the report title, the column headings, the body text, and each level of subtotals. The subtotal values would be formulas, not simple values. The same program could be used for data files that are produced by queries. The resulting worksheet could then be edited as needed. You can even edit, add, or delete lines in the worksheet. The subtotals will automatically be updated. Most simple reports could be reformatted to use the proposed program. It might be difficult or even impossible to generate some complex AdDept output using this approach.
4. Insertion order clearinghouse: We have long thought that the methods used for reserving newspaper space leave too much room for error and are overly labor-intensive, both for the advertiser and for the newspaper. The purpose of this project is to make the ordering process easier and to minimize the potential for miscommunication.
Instead of faxing the orders, the AS/400 would send them electronically to TSI. We would post them on a website. When the newspaper reps sign on, they would see all orders for them from all advertisers who are using this service. They would be able to add comments or questions and confirm them electronically with or without reservation numbers. They could also print the orders and, eventually, download them directly into their reservation systems. When you sign on, you would see all of your orders. It will be immediately obvious which ones have been confirmed, which have been read but not confirmed, and which have not been read yet.
What do you think of these ideas? Do you have any ideas of your own? We would greatly appreciate it if you would communicate your feedback to us at your earliest convenience. The last thing that we want to do is invest a lot of time and money in something that is of little or no perceived value to our clients.
I don’t recall receiving any substantive responses to this, but around this time Steve VeZain sent me a rather lengthy email that explained some of the priorities for Saks Inc. Our dealings with him and his company are detailed here.
Net.Data: At some point I became acquainted with an online forum called IGNITe/4007. This was a website where AS/400 developers could pose questions about using the AS/400 for applications for the web. Although some IBM experts participated, the forum was not run by IBM, but by a former IBMer named Bob Cancilla8, who worked for a company in Rochester, MN, the home of the AS/400.
Bob also wrote the book shown at left that explained how to use the AS/400 as an Internet server. IBM disdained the approach of its customers using a book written by someone who had actually gotten the AS/400 to function as an Internet server. Big Blue preferred that its customers spend hundreds of dollars on classes or thousands of dollars on consultants rather than $15 or $20 for a book. They also championed something called WebSphere to manage applications written in Java. During February and March of 2000 I had puzzled over the Redbook that documented this product. I was nearly ready to give up on the idea of using the AS/400 for anything related to the Internet until I found Bob’s book and website in April of 2000.
I purchased this excellent tome and followed most of Bob’s advice. I successfully configured TSI’s model 150 as an HTTP server to serve web pages to browsers and as an FTP server for exchanging data files. It was possible to use the AS/400 as an email server, but Bob advised against it. We elected to use AT&T for sending and receiving emails for our employees. We later configured our AS/400 to send outgoing emails through the SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol) server. Eventually IBM decided that it was a bad idea to have its own proprietary HTTP server and supported a version of the Apache server used by almost everyone else.
At that time the most popular scripting language for web-based applications was PERL. IBM never supported it on the AS/4009. Instead it provided its own language, which was called Net.Data (pronounced “Net Dot Data”). This was the only web language that could be used on the AS/400, and no other system in the history of the world ever used it. We obtained a copy of IBM’s handbook on Net.Data (posted online here), and I determined that we could probably use the language for what we wanted to do. Here is what I wrote about it at the time.
I signed on to the IGNITe400 website and registered as a member. It’s free. You can ask questions there. I looked at a few of them. Bob Cancilla himself answered some of the questions! I also looked at IBM’s Net.Data website. It is full of information.
I printed out a lot of documentation. I am now convinced that we can do what we want to do with HTTP server and Net.Data. This is exciting. Buying that book was a great idea. The links alone are worth the price. The biggest difficulty that I see will be working out the process of getting the orders from our customers and then from others.
… I have more than doubled my knowledge about the AS/400 and the internet in the last two days. Moreover, I think I could do it! I think that we should try it some time this coming week.
Net.Data was an interpreted language, just as BASIC was on the Datamaster and the System/36. The programs (which in web parlance were called scripts or macros) were not compiled into executable machine code. Changes to the scrips took effect as soon as the programmer made them. So, a developmental environment was a necessity. The time it took the processor to interpret the code and generate the HTML code that the browser could understand made all of the programs considerably slower than the compiled BASIC programs on the same machine. However, they were lightning fast compared to Java, the approach blessed by IBM.
So, I taught myself how to use Net.Data to deliver interactive scripts for a browser (at the time the main choices were Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer, and whatever Apple called its browser before Safari). The language itself was relatively easy to understand, but programming for numerous constantly changing browsers was much different from programming for a very stable AS/400 and its 5250 user interface.
I also had to learn the Common Gateway Interface (CGI), which was the method of reading from and writing to files on the AS/400. This was totally different from what we were accustomed to. Our programs had always read the files a record at a time even after we switched to the AS/400’s relational database. With Net.Data it was necessary to execute an SQL statement that returned a set of data—rows (records) and columns (fields)—that was stored in an array (called a table in Net.Data). It was then necessary to loop through the rows of the array. I was already somewhat familiar with SQL, but I needed to learn how to use “joins” to do complicated selections.
These two volumes got a workout. The binding on the HTML book split in two years ago.
I also needed to buy books on HTML and JavaScript. If I had realized before I started that I needed to learn all of this, I might have deemed that the project would require more time and effort than I could afford. However, by the time that I realized what I was up against, I had invested so much time that I was not about to abandon the project.
There was no syntax-checking of Net.Data macros, and, at first, there was no editor to help by color-coding the statements. So, when I ran into a problem, which happened quite frequently, I had to search elsewhere for help.
Life got a lot easier when IBM put its Redbooks on CDs.
In researching for this blog, I found a pdf online for a Redbook (technical manual) that IBM published for people like me in 1997. It is posted here. Even a quick glance will make it clear that writing applications for the AS/400’s HTTP server would be a daunting task. For example, it contained this statement: “Net.Data Web macros combine things you already know such as HTML, SQL, and REXX with a simple macro language.” I did not know HTML at all, I knew only a little SQL, and to this day I have no idea what REXX was. Also, the Redbook neglected to mention that it was not really possible to write interactive programs without JavaScript.
I hung in there. Here is one of my last messages: “I feel a lot of pressure to work harder. I want this new project operational yesterday. It is going to be difficult at first. I want to get over the hump.”
I spent a lot of time in the IGNITe/400 forum. My best source of information was a guy from (I think) New Zealand, of all places. I never met him in person or even spoke with him on the phone. His name was Peter Connell, and he helped me through every difficult coding problem that I encountered. Not once was he stumped. By the time that I was well into the project, I was able to provide solutions to coding problems that others described.
TSI’s Internet Project: Even before Denise and I attended PartnerWorld, we had pretty much decided that our best shot at developing a successful Internet product would involve insertion orders, which is what newspapers and magazine call reservations that they receive from advertisers for ROP (display ads), inserts, polybags, or any other kind of advertising. TSI’s AdDept customers sent their reps at newspapers a schedule that listed all of the ads that they wanted to place for a specified period—usually a week. Most of them faxed this information to the papers. The rep at the paper examined the schedule. Sometimes questions required phone calls. Sometimes requests (such as designated positioning in the paper) could not be accommodated. Even after final approval the schedule was often changed by the advertiser before the ads ran, sometimes with very little advance notification.
Newspaper ads were expensive … and valuable.
Errors on both sides were not rare, and they could be quite costly. The newspaper often gave the retailer free ads to make up for the mistake. The advertiser’s loss might be much greater. In the nineties and early twenty-first century ads in newspapers were the primary vehicle for communicating with customers. Mistakes in the ads could cost the retailer thousands in sales, and they were embarrassing to the advertising department. Occasionally heads rolled.
In 2000 most retail advertisers faxed their schedules to the newspapers. If the line was not busy, the phones were rather reliable. However, what happened to the schedule after the fax machine received it? Was the printout legible? Did the rep ever get it, and, if so, what did he/she do with it. What assurance was there that the fax that the newspaper used to compose the paper was the final version?
We thought that the Internet might provide an opportunity to speed up this process and to improve its reliability. My first idea was to replace faxing with email. If the AS/400’s (free) SMTP server were installed, AdDept could compose and send to the newspaper an email that contained the schedule. Wouldn’t the newspaper rep immediately print the schedule? If so, how was this better than faxing? Doesn’t it just add another step? Besides, email is demonstrably less reliable than faxing. The worst that usually happens with faxing is that the output is blurry or even unreadable. Emails, in contrast, can be held up by any Internet Service Provider (ISP) that handles the message, and there could be dozens. So, the schedule might never make it to the rep’s inbox.
Eventually Denise and I settled on using FTP to send the schedule from the client’s AdDept system to TSI. Thereafter TSI’s AS/400 managed the whole process using a combination of BASIC programs and Net.Data macros. Details of the actual design are posted here.
After Denise and I agreed on the design, several details still needed to be settled:
Who will do the coding at TSI?
Who will pay for the service, the advertiser or the newspaper?
How much will we charge?
How will we market the product to our clients and their newspapers?
How can we entice advertisers that did not use AdDept to use this method for insertion orders?
Can we take advantage of the link established between TSI, the papers, and AdDept for other modules?
What will the product be named?
Will the project be part of TSI or a new financial entity?
The answer to #1 turned out to be Mike Wavada. I expected that I would eventually train Denise or one of the programmers so that they could at least support the existing code, but it never happened. It astounds me to report that this was a one-man coding job from day one, and no one else at TSI ever learned Net.Data. Hundreds of papers and most of the AdDept clients relied on it starting in 2002 and continuing through early 2014. Think about this: Between 2003 and 2012 I took six vacations in Europe and one cruise in the Caribbean. There were no serious incidents!
Questions 2-5 are addressed in the entry about marketing of AxN, which is posted here.
From the outset I was hoping that the nexus connecting newspapers and the retailers through TSI’s website could be used for other communications as well. The most obvious one was for the delivery of the files that contained the layouts of the ads. Nevertheless, I was reluctant to pursue this for several very good reasons. The first was that the Associated Press already had a huge head start with its very popular product called AdSEND10. There were also several other companies that offered similar services.
The other thing that gave me pause was the potential legal liability. It seemed to me that if we failed to deliver an ad correctly and/or promptly, we could easily be sued. A fundamental tenet of TSI’s operation had been to avoid any activity that might occasion a lawsuit. Throughout the first two decades of its operation, TSI had successfully avoided litigation. Also, we knew nothing about the process of sending ads electronically, and the AP already owned satellites that it used for this purpose. I also learned later that AdSEND had twelve dedicated T-1 lines, and one of TSI’s clients told me that that was not nearly enough. TSI eventually installed one T-1 line that easily handled the insertion order traffic generated by AxN.
An idea that I liked better was for the newspapers to transmit their invoices electronically through TSI’s servers to AdDept users. I even came up with a cool name for this: e-I-e-IO, which stood for electronic invoices and electronic insertion orders. My idea was to provide a program to feed the newspaper’s billing system with the information from the insertion order, and to feed the retailer’s AdDept system with the same information. I did a little research to see if one software system for billing or accounting was dominant in the newspaper industry and discovered that this was decidedly not the case. So, we would face the prospect of persuading one paper at a time, or, at best, one chain of papers at a time. Furthermore, someone else had already claimed the URL that I really wanted: eieio.com.
The name that I picked for the new product would still work if we came up with other ways for TSI to serve as a nexus between advertisers (A) and newspapers (N). It was AxN, which was pronounced “A cross N”. The A and the N were always portrayed in dark blue Times New Roman. The x was always in red Arial.
That leaves question #8. Denise was always in favor of making AxN a separate financial entity. However, we never found a way to extricate it from the rest of the business. We looked at the revenues separately, but we never even did a separate P&L for it.
1. René Conrad was TSI’s liaison with Kaufmann’s, the May Company’s division based in Pittsburgh. Both Denise and I had a very high opinion of her. When Doug Pease left TSI in 1999, we tried to hire René. Details of the AdDept installation at Kaufman’s are posted here. The unsuccessful pursuit of René is documented here.
2. Ken Owen is a friend and was a client. The latter role is explained here. By 1999 Ken’s business had drifted away from creating and placing ads for clients to software for the Internet. He gave us a little free advice, but the role for him that I envisioned did not materialize. I communicate via email with Ken every year on March 4, the holiday that we celebrate together—Exelauno Day.
3. Tom Caputo and Chris Pease were our key contacts at Lord & Taylor in Manhattan in those days. The history of the installation at L&T is recorded here.
4. I did contact the NNA, but nothing came of it. The person with whom I spoke was nice enough, but it became evident that trying to work with this organization would be extremely time-consuming and not the kind of thing that I was good at or enjoyed. Eventually I discovered that there were almost as many administrative systems for newspapers as there were newspapers. It appeared that there were no accepted standards.
5. The American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA—universally pronounced “four A’s”) published an annual list of software for ad agencies. For years TSI’s GrandAd system was on the list. I am not sure what I had in mind as an additional relationship. Perhaps I envisioned ad agencies that specialized in retailers might want to use AxN for insertion orders and would work with us to create an interface. Perhaps I thought that other software companies might add the interface to their products for ad agencies. Nothing like any of these things ever happened.
6. EDI is short for Electronic Data Interchange. It refers to an orderly setup that enables participant to exchange information electronically. When there are only two participants, it is usually just called an interface. “Specs”, which is short for specifications, refers to the documentation published and delivered to the participants and prospective participants.
7. I have no idea what the name of this group meant. At the time IBM was busy promoting the idea of e-business. IBM’s marketing director proclaimed at PartnerWorld that IBM “owned” the concept. So, that may explain why the e is not capitalized. I was surprised to find an article in Enterprise Systems Journal about IGNITe/400. It is posted here.
8. Bob Cancilla went back to IBM for a while and then became a consultant. His LinkedIn page is here. In 2018 he wrote about the thirtieth anniversary of the AS/400. It is posted here. The article explains some of the reasons why IBM treated the AS/400 division and its customers so shabbily almost from day one.
9. For some reason IBM repeatedly changed the name of the AS/400 to a bunch of things with the letter i appended. The operating system remained the same. Everyone at TSI, like most users, still called it the AS/400 even after the name changes.
10. In 2007 Vio Worldwide acquired “the assets” of AdSEND. The deal is described here. In 2010 Dubsat acquired Vio Worldwide. This transaction was reported here.
We had a very good record of closing AdDept sales. Most of the whiffs fell into one of two categories:
Divisions of Federated Department Stores. Our relationships with various Federated divisions are described in detail here. They are not included in this entry.
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.
