Tag Archives: Klaras, Ivy

1996-2003 TSI: AdDept Client: Younkers

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Saks Inc. division based in Des Moines merged into Carson’s. Continue reading →

I am pretty sure that Younkers contacted TSI about AdDept before the company was absorbed into Proffitt’s Inc. I have a rather vivid memory—not to mention a photograph—of a presentation that I did for them at the IBM office in Des Moines. Since Proffitt’s purchased the company in December of 1996, the starting date in the title is probably accurate. It might have been in late 1995.

The downtown Younkers store was connected by skyways to other downtown buildings in two directions.

Doug Pease accompanied me on the first trip to Des Moines for the demo. We stayed at a Holiday Inn that was just north of the downtown area near Mercy Hospital.

I remember that we went to a basketball game at the Knapp Center on the evening of January 27, 1996. The Drake Bulldogs came into the game with a 6-2 record in the Missouri Valley Conference. However, they were defeated by the Tulsa Golden Hurricane1 79-73. Drake seemed to be a little better overall, but they had only one guy who could dribble through a press, and in the second half when the starter had to be benched because of foul trouble. The freshman (Cory Petzenhauser) whom they inserted at point guard was just humiliated. It was painful to watch.

That defeat started a tailspin for Drake, which ended up with a 12-15 record. The coach resigned in March

The only photo that I have of the people from Younkers was taken at the IBM office. The only person whom I recognize is Roger. He is the guy in glasses in the back row near one of the enormous members of his staff.

Des Moines is legendary as a sleepy town, but I remember that Doug and I actually discovered a bit of night life in an assortment of restaurants and bars that were in a redeveloped area between the river and Younkers’ downtown store at 713 Walnut Street.

The system was not actually installed at Younkers until April of 1998.

The primary players in the AdDept installation at Younkers were the Advertising Director, whose name I think was Joe, and Roger Wolf, who was in charge of the advertising business office.

The Tea Room at Younkers.

My recollections of the details of the installation are few. The headquarters was on an upper floor of the flagship store. The Senior VP of Advertising treated us to lunch in the store’s famous tea room. It was quite elegant.

I think that Younkers bought the AS/400 directly from IBM. I don’t remember where it was kept, and I don’t think that I was required to install it. TSI wasn’t involved in connecting the various devices either.

Roger and Joe came to Enfield for training. I remember that practically everyone in the department except for Roger’s group used Macs. We had to research the availability of terminal emulation software for them. Joe had some very specific ideas about tracking the progress of production jobs. TSI was asked to do quite a bit of customizing of the trafficking programs to realize them.

Long after I posted this entry I discovered this photo of a meeting at PMG in Birmingham. Roger is the second from the left in the shirt with vertical stripes. Steve VeZain of PMG is waving on the right. Beside him is someone named Chris from Younkers. He must have been in charge of the Mac network.

I was not there for the flooding of the Raccoon River in 2003, but some of its effects were still visible years later.

Roger’s group of four or five accounting people was tucked away in a small area that was like a mezzanine up some stairs from the rest of the department. The ceiling was low. Everyone sat in a single row facing the wall. It was very cramped and felt rickety.

Roger was as almost as skinny as I was, but two enormous women also worked up there. I could not help wondering if the support beams for their floor were up to the task. For me it was a hellish place to work. Two people had radios on all day long. One played heavy metal rock; the other was tuned to the rantings of Rush Limbaugh.

My notes from 1999 indicated a peculiarity in the way that Younkers did its accounting:

They have implemented a great many things that have the result of increasing the budget for storewide ads. Some of this is at the expense of merchants, some at the expense of vendors. Roger understands this, but he is not good at articulating it.

Some of these “great many things” were quite difficult to program. Several years after the beginning of the installation Roger’s group was still not using the system to the satisfaction of the corporate people at Saks Inc.2

The rest of Saks Inc. thinks that Roger is a fuddy-duddy and an obstructionist. The PMG3 approach to solving problems is to put pressure on people to solve their own problems. I think this is why Joe quit. They have put a lot of pressure on Roger to give up his overly intricate accounting procedures and get with the program.

At first I too thought Roger was an obstructionist. The last two trips he has made a strong effort to use AdDept. However, he won’t give up his calendar until he is confident that every single number in AdDept’s calendar can be defended. They now have the worst of both worlds. Roger does the calendar in AdDept. He checks every number by hand. Then he gets frustrated and goes back to his manual calendar.

Steve’s4 idea was to send Ivy5 to show Roger how McRae’s does thing. Roger, who is at least as intelligent as Ivy, understands how McRae’s does things. Ivy has no clue how Younkers does things. Another problem is that Ivy is even less articulate than Roger.

I don’t know what the solution is, but it has to come from someone above Roger. Most people think that they are going to fire him. This won’t solve the problem.

They did not fire Roger, but they did try to make him quit. Liz Ewing6 replaced him as manager of the business office, and Roger was demoted to accounting clerk.

On most of my visits I stayed at a hotel that was within walking distance of the Younkers building. My recollection is that it was a Radisson.7 It was very nice, and Younkers had a discount rate. The thing that I liked best about it was that it had a Jacuzzi that was seldom used by the other guests. I found a good park in which to run, and afterwards twenty minutes in the Jacuzzi felt fantastic.

I had several adventures traveling to and from Des Moines. On one afternoon I was flying from Chicago to Des Moines on United. A tornado that was passing through the area forced us to land in Cedar Rapids. The entire story is recounted here.

I made it to the scheduled meetings on time and worked with the users according to the original schedule. Just another day at the office.

The other adventure involved a stop in Kansas City to play golf with my dad. The details have been posted here.

I have two startling memories from Des Moines. The first came when I was working up in the advertising business office. One of the overweight ladies was regaling the rest of us with a tale of an acquaintance of hers who had a foot fetish. He offered to pay her to allow him to suck her toes.

The other one came from Joe, the original Advertising Director who resigned and then was replaced in 2000 by Kristen Gray8. A group of us was having lunch at a restaurant. The topic of conversation was the difficulty of handling teen-aged offspring. I, of course, offered nothing. Joe mentioned that he had once received a telephone call from the police when his daughter had driven a car into a mall. Evidently no one was hurt.

In 2003 Saks Inc. made Younkers part of its Northern division. The offices in Des Moines were closed, and all administrative functions were transferred to Milwaukee. The stores continued to operate with the Younkers name. In March of 2006 the entire division was sold to the Bon Ton.

The downtown Des Moines store was closed in 2005. In 2014 a huge fire consumed the empty building that I knew as the downtown Younkers store.

Any remaining Younkers stores were closed as part of the Bon Ton’s liquidation in 2018.

1. Evidently the coach in 1922 wanted to name the team the Golden Tornadoes, but he discovered that it was already taken by Georgia Tech. So, he changed it to Hurricanes. At lest that’s what it says here. Of course, hurricanes seldom, if ever, bother Tulsa. I don’t know why or when it was made singular.

2. As is explained here, after Proffitt’s Inc. purchased Saks Fifth Avenue, it changed its name to Saks Inc.

3. PMG stands for Proffitt’s Marketing Group, the people at the corporate headquarters in Birmingham who oversaw the advertising departments.

4. Steve VeZain was the person at PMG charged with monitoring the progress of the installations in the various advertising departments.

5. Ivy Klaras worked at McRae’s in the business office. The AdDept installation at McRae’s is described here.

6. Liz Ewing’s puzzling LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

7. There are no Radissons in downtown Des Moines in 2023, The hotel that I stayed in was either sold or destroyed.

8. Kristen Gray’s LinkedIn page is posted here.

1996-2000 TSI: AdDept Client: McRae’s

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Saks Inc. division merged into Proffitt’s. Continue reading →

McRae’s was a chain of department stores based in Jackson, MS. In 1994 the stores were acquired as a division of Proffitt’s,but the stores retained the original logo and were administrative from the headquarters in Jackson. Either the Senior VP, whose name was Oscar, or Marianne Jonas, the Advertising Director, got in touch with Doug Pease1, TSI’s Marketing Director. They were interested in TSI’s AdDept software system. Doug made the arrangements for a two-day visit.

Doug and I flew to Jackson, rented a car, and met with Oscar, Marianne, and a few other people in McRae’s advertising department. It was located not on a high floor of one of their stores but in a very large single-story structure immediately off of Highway (NOT “Route”) 80 on the southeast side of Jackson. It had a very large elegant lobby and a curious lack of open space anywhere else. There were a large number of walled-in areas. The corridors between them all ran north-south or east-west. It reminded me of a maze created for rodents.

Oscar advised us to drive west to I-220 and to approach IBM from the north.

At the end of the day spent gathering information about how they did business I asked Oscar for advice on how we should drive to the IBM office on the following morning. We were staying at a Holiday Inn or Hampton Inn in Pearl, which is just south of the airport. He outlined a route that, by my offhand calculation, would take us at least ten miles out of our way on a journey that was scarcely more than that in total. I asked him why we could not just go up I-55. He depicted that route as being “too congested”.

I was doing the driving. I informed Doug that we were going to ignore Oscar’s advice. I used the map that Avis provided to plan a simple route that took us north on I-55 until we came to the exit. To our surprise IBM’s office building was actually right on the exit ramp. It would have been almost impossible for us to find it if we had been coming from the north as Oscar suggested. Yes, there was a modicum of “congestion”. I had to brake a couple of times, but, believe me, driving in Jackson was much easier than navigating Boston’s snake nest of roads.

On the first visit Doug and I somehow had a free day after the presentation. We drove down to Jefferson Davis’s home, which is in Biloxi (pronounced BLUX ee locally) and is called Beauvoir. The drive down to Biloxi was stunning. I could not believe all of the rundown trailers and shacks that were visible from the highway.

The mansion itself was nothing special. There was an incredibly large tree in the yard that impressed me much more than anything inside,

So, the takeaway from this little journey was that the leader of the rebellion was allowed to spend the rest of his days living in luxury while the people whom he and his fellow plantation owners had enslaved and their descendants were still living in deplorable conditions. This was our welcome to Mississippi.

Oscar and Marianne liked our proposal and signed the contract. When I returned to Jackson to install AdDept I was escorted to the Data Center (in the same building as the Advertising Department) by a guy whose name was Bill Giardina. He pronounced it Gar DEE nah, with a hard G—as if the i was not even there. I really only needed for him to show me where the box and the system console were, but he stayed nearby and distracted me with homespun chatter all day long.

One evening Doug and I attended a minor league baseball game, probably on the installation trip. The Jackson Generals2 played a seven-inning game at their nice little stadium. I don’t remember the score or the opponents or even who won, but I do remember that we had a very nice relaxing time.

I remember only a little of what TSI needed to code for McRae’s. Oscar had an advertising schedule that he had devised on his PC. We had to produce the same data in roughly the same format. I don’t recall it being exceptionally difficult. We also needed to create an interface between AdDept’s expense and co-op programs and the corporate accounting system that was called Walker.

At Marianne’s insistence I trained two people from the IT department on how to check the backup to make sure that all the important libraries made it to tape every night. I don’t remember whether I tried to talk her out of entrusting people outside of her department with the responsibility for assuring the integrity of the backup. This became an important issue at Proffitt’s, as described here.

The people:I took photos of three people at McRae’s: Marianne, Melba Willis, her right-hand person, and Ivy Klaras3, who managed the accounting area. I don’t remember too much about Melba or Ivy.

  • Melba (nearest to camera) & Marianne
  • Melba at her desk.
  • Ivy.

I worked closely with Marianne both in Jackson and later at Proffitt’s in Alcoa TN. She was intelligent and a hard worker, a combination that I did not often encounter in the business that I dealt with in the South. She was also a big fan of the University of Alabama’s football team.

I got along pretty well with all of the people at McRae’s. This is what I reported in November of 1999:

I don’t like Jackson, but I like the people at McRae’s. I am even warming up to Ivy. This is the only division that is putting in a real effort to take advantage of as many aspects of the system as possible. They are printing claims4 in all media except broadcast. I made a few adjustments to the broadcast claims today. Tomorrow we will print broadcast claims.

On at least one occasion I bought boneless sirloin, green beans, sour cream, and McCormick’s Beef Stroganoff seasonings and made myself enough for two delicious meals in this kitchenette.

Life in Jackson: I have a lot of memories of Jackson. Most of them make me chuckle when they pass through my consciousness, but I never enjoyed my time there. My strategy for dealing with this very strange place was to leave the word “why” at home.

The drive to the Jackson airport was ridiculous. It was quite close to the city center, but unless you were a bird or had a jet pack, you had to drive several miles south to I-20, exit after a few miles, and then drive back north to the airport. At the end of the exit was a stop sign. From there you were forced to cross two lanes of southbound traffic (with no stop sign) to reach a roadway large enough for only one car in the median. From there one had to attempt to merge in with the traffic in the passing lane of the northbound highway.

Between the exit and the airport was a rotary. In all of the times that I visited Jackson I never saw any cars enter the rotary from the east or west.

When I was in the South I often went to Cracker Barrel for supper. I always ordered the same thing: pot roast with green beans and unsweetened iced tea. In Jackson the waitress came up to my table and greeted me with “How are y’all doin’?” Her pencil was poised over her pad.

I responded., “Fine. I’d like the pot roast with green beans and a large unsweetened iced tea.”

Her pencil was motionless. Instead she ventured this evaluation. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

I drove to Kmart one evening. This was before the advent of self-checkout machines. I was in line for a cashier; behind me was a young black woman with her son who was perhaps eight or nine. He tugged on my jacket and said, “Mister, if you were my daddy, would you let me have a Mountain Dew?”

I immediately responded, “Absolutely not. It’s full of sugar and caffeine!” It later occurred to me that that would probably be the last time ever that someone his age might think of me as a potential daddy rather than a granddaddy.

One evening I was at the Jackson airport a bit late for my flight to Atlanta. I checked in and rushed to the gate. To my joy and relief there was absolutely no line at security! I put my briefcase on the treadmill without taking out my computer. The one person on duty let me through. I barely made the plane, but it was even more surprising that I saw them load my suitcase into the cargo hold as well.

In this 2022 photo the bottle is the New-Skin.

After security got so much tighter after 9/11, I often thought how easy it would have been for me to have hidden a gun beneath my laptop.

The worst moment that I had in Jackson came when I was eating lunch with Josh Hill from Proffitt’s Marketing Group. I think that I was eating a turkey sandwich when the thing on the left side of my lower lip started to bleed. I don’t remember if I had my bottle of New-Skin with me. I do recall that I spent the rest of the lunch break in the men’s room until Old Faithful finally blew itself out.

Epilogue: In 2000 the administration of the McRae’s and Proffitt’s stores was consolidated. The accounting and data processing functions remained in the building on Highway 80. Most other functions were transferred to the Proffitt’s headquarters in Alcoa, TN. Marianne Jonas moved to Proffitt’s, where she was the Advertising Director. I don’t think that anyone else with whom I worked in Jackson made the transition to Alcoa.

The story of the AdDept installation at Proffitt’s is posted here.

1. Much more about Doug can be read here and in many of the entries for other AdDept clients.

2. The team name was voted on by the citizens of Jackson. They picked “Generals” to honor the person after whom the town was named, Andrew Jackson. Why they chose Generals over Presidents is a stumper. Jackson’s greatest military victory was the Battle of New Orleans, which actually occurred after the war was over. He had two full terms as president and strongly influenced American history in that role.

Although some sites on the Internet state that the Generals began playing in 1998, the statistics for the team in 1996 can be found here. I was astounded to discover that a factory-sealed complete set of the baseball cards for the 1996 team could in 2023 be purchased on Ebay for only $7.95. I was tempted to buy the one remaining set as a present for Doug. The site is (or at least was) here.

3. Ivy Klaras died in 2017 at the age of 52. Her obituary is posted here.

4. Claims are the documents that advertising sends to the merchandise people to show the amount of money they must collect from their vendors for cooperative advertising.