Tag Archives: Macy's

1999-2000 TSI: Finding the Best Person

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Our attempt to hire René Conrad. Continue reading →

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

However, the company did face some serious issues.

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

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

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

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

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

1) Job description

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

2) Relocation

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

As I said, we have no death marches.

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

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

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

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

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

3) Compensation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2000-2002 TSI: AdDept Client: Meier & Frank

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Department store division of the May Co. with headquarters in Portland, OR. Continue reading →

Since 1932 M&F’s flagship store had occupied an entire block in downtown Portland.

Meier & Frank was a chain of departments stores owned by the May Company. Its headquarters was in Portland, OR. TSI never pitched the AdDept system to the store’s advertising department. In 1998 the May Company decided to order AdDept systems for the three department store divisions that were not already using it—Robinsons-May, Meier & Frank, and Filene’s.

M&F was by far the smallest of the May Company’s department store divisions. At the time of the installation it had only seven stores, which made it barely a quarter the size of the next smallest division.

These installations were quite different from the other systems that TSI had installed at May Co. divisions. They began with three days of rather intense sessions in TSI’s office in Enfield. We were teaching them about the system design of AdDept, and they were informing us about their policies and expectations for the system.

The previous May Co. installations began with a site visit in which I had learned about each department’s business procedures and priorities. TSI then presented a formal proposal for the base system and any custom code that I thought was needed. Only after the system had been delivered and installed did we provide training, and it took place at the company’s location.

At some point in 1996 a group of people from M&F visited TSI’s office for orientation and training. Those sessions were also attended by people who would be involved with the installation at Rob-May. Robert Myers, with whom we worked in the AdDept installation in the advertising department of the Foley’s division (described here), also was there to provide the perspective of a user of the system.

I found several photos that I took on the occasion of their visit as well as photos that I took in Portland. Since I was still using disposable cameras in those days, the quality of the prints is not great. I was lucky to have this much. On one trip I left a camera that was full of photos in my rental car. I called Avis on my next visit and learned that they had found the camera. They later mailed it to me.

The people: The photo at the left was taken after one of the training days in Enfield. On the last evening we all went to the Mill on the River restaurant, but I think that this photo might have been taken at a different place.

Robert Myers was seated next to me. In the photo he is on the far right. Three representatives of M&F are on the left. I am pretty sure that the guy with glasses was Brent Stapleton1, who managed the departmental network and was our liaison for the first part of the project. I do not remember the name of the fellow on his left, but I am pretty sure that his hobby was making root beer at home. He might have been Steve Mulligan, the Co-op Coordinator who moved to Ireland the following summer. I don’t remember the woman’s name or function, and I don’t recognize the next fellow. He might have been from Robinsons-May. None of these people appear in any of the photos that I took on my trips to Portland.

The last person on the left side of the table was definitely Doug Pease, TSI’s Marketing Director, who sat in on some of the training sessions. The other two people were from Rob-May and are described here.

The system was not actually installed at M&F until March of 2000. I think that they postponed it because Kaufmann’s and Rob-May were higher priorities.

The next five photos were taken at the department’s office on the thirteenth floor of the flagship store in Portland. The building had fifteen floors.

In the photo on the right, the seated woman was Dori Tierney2, who was responsible for scheduling M&F’s ads in the newspapers. She also produced the weekly calendar that was the primary document that was used by many people inside the department and out. The other woman was her boss, Sheila Wilson3, the Newspaper Manager. She formerly had worked at Hecht’s.

In the first year of the installation I worked with Dori more than anyone else because producing that calendar was the department’s first objective for the AdDept system.

I am almost certain that the woman surrounded by papers in the photo on the left was Kathy Reed, the Business Office Manager. One of her primary responsibilities was to produce at the end of the month the report of expenses and co-op income by CCN in the May Company’s required format, the so-called 790. AdDept produced this at all of the other divisions. We never succeeded at completely automating that process at M&F for reasons that are explained in the section about AdDept projects below.

I have no recollection of the people in the photo at right. Maybe I took this shot because they were both so photogenic.

Many of the people in the advertising department at M&F did their work on clunky old IBM PC’s. They complained that all of their machines were hand-me-downs from their counterparts at Robinsons-May in California.

I took the two photos shown above at the M&F office in Portland, OR. I do not remember the name or function of the woman on the left. The guy on the right was Bryan Kipp, the Planning Manager.

From searches on LinkedIn I discovered that the Broadcast Manager at the time was Shauna Thompson, and the Direct Mail Manager was Linda Farrington. I probably worked with both of them.

The first visit: A month or so after the training session in Enfield Doug Pease and I flew out to Portland so that I could install the TSI software on the AS/400 that IBM had delivered. We also met with several executives to make sure that we understood and could address the department’s priorities.

I was surprised to see that the entirety of eastern Oregon was essentially desolate, and the coast was so rugged as to be almost uninhabitable. The majority of Oregonians were concentrated in the cities along the Willamette River.

Multnomah falls is about 30 miles east of Portland on the Columbia River.

In those days it was much cheaper to fly on Saturday than on Sunday, and Doug and I did that on the first trip. I found among my M&F photos several of Mt. Hood and Multnomah Falls. On Sunday we took our rental car on a spin around the very scenic areas east of Portland. Kate Behart and I had also visited these sites on a sales trip to Fred Meyer4, another retailer based in Portland, a few years earlier.

Emily.

The Senior Vice-president of Marketing at M&F was Emily White5, whom Doug knew from when they both worked in the advertising department of the G. Fox department store chain in Hartford. She knew about TSI’s capabilities from her time at Macy’s West. The Advertising Director was Laura Rutenis6. I think that she had previously worked at Hecht’s.

On the first visit Doug and I spent quite a bit of time talking with Emily and Laura. They explained their difficulty as the smallest of the May Co. divisions. They had far fewer employees than the other divisions, but their stores had just as many selling departments, and they ran just as many ads (in fewer newspapers, of course), and they were expected to produce the same reports as all the other divisions.

The primary objective of the AdDept system would be to get the module for newspaper ads up and running as quickly as possible and to produce their weekly calendar in the format that they currently used. At the same time the quantitative and qualitative information for ads for all of the other media needed to be entered into the system so that all the expenses could be entered in AdDept (or imported from PC systems) and uploaded to the corporate accounting system. So, the remainder of the time on the first visit was spent familiarizing the employees with the programs for entering the data and showing them how to check their work.

The projects: I don’t remember much about most projects that we did for M&F. I am sure that the May Company wanted them to produce the 790 report using the AdDept system’s cost accounting programs. That would require them to enter (or upload from another source) all the expenses from every media. I am pretty sure that we reached the point at which all of the necessary data was in the system.

Nevertheless, AdDept never produced the 790 report at M&F because the department’s Business Office Manager had been fudging some of the allocations required by the May Co. The corporation’s internal auditor surely knew about this, but she had no assistants to help her in the Business Office, and it would not have been practical for her to implement all the required steps within the strict time restraints. I thought that it would be feasible for her to do it in AdDept, but I could understand why she did not want to commit to a process that she could never verify produced results that were consistent with her existing methods. Also, she was more confident that she could meet the deadline every month without using AdDept.

I definitely remember spending many hours working on the weekly advertising calendar, which was designed to be printed on a special Hewlett-Packard laser printer that the advertising department had purchased. It could handle very large forms. Printing from the AS/400 was ordinarily limited to text of at most 198 characters per line and a single non-proportional font, Courier New. So, it would not be easy to replicate what they were doing.

Every advertising department that we worked with produced a calendar that was the basis of communication with other departments and the brass. In every other case we had been able to convince them that what the AS/400 could produce in the usual way—with whatever changes they needed—would suffice. The alternative was for us to produce output files that could be downloaded to a PC and formatted for printing in Word, Excel, or other software, and a few chose that method. The people at M&F insisted that that was not good enough. They needed the calendar the way it currently looked and they did not want to take extra steps to provide it.

In order to produce the calendar that they required I decided to make use of research and coding involving PCL, the language that Hewlett-Packard’s printers used. Instead of creating “spooled files” that the AS/400 translated into PCL using its printer drivers, the program that I wrote for M&F created files of instructions that were sent directly to the printer. They bypassed the AS/400’s drivers because the files were already in the language that the printer understood.

This approach had the advantage of allowing the use of proportional fonts such as Ariel or Times Roman. It also allowed the use of simple graphics such as boxes, variable font weights and sizes, italics, bolding, etc. The end result was definitely more attractive, but the big advantage was that the format was already familiar to the executives from other departments to whom it was delivered. It could all fit on one page that included attractive fonts, boxes, and other things that no one ever saw on a computerized report in the nineties.

From TSI’s perspective there were, however, serious disadvantages to this kind of approach. None of the other people at TSI were even slightly familiar with PCL. On this project I wrote all of the code myself.

By 1998 I was generating only a fairly small percentage of the new code at TSI’s office. I spent the bulk of my time traveling to clients, installing new systems, training, writing up proposals for new systems, modules, and requests for custom programming. I also had important administrative obligations, including locating more appropriate offices for TSI.

I suppose that I could have asked Denise Bessette, TSI’s VP of Product Development to learn PCL 5 from the handbook that I had found somewhere, but there was no guarantee that we would ever use this technique again. Besides, time was of the essence, and she already had a lot on her plate. By far the fastest way to deliver the code was for me to do it. There definitely was too little time for me to teach her in a formal setting how it worked.

Also, as will become obvious, the logistics would not have worked if the programming “team” had more than one member. Denise did not want to travel more than necessary.

Another big disadvantage was that it took much longer to write code for the printer than to write reports that could be sent to the printer driver for translation. We had been using the AS/400 long enough that we had that process down pat.

Furthermore, because TSI did not have a printer that could handle the oversized form, there was no way to test the finished product in the office in Enfield. I had to write little programs that produced segments of the calendar, test them on an HP printer that we did have, and then write the code that stitched them together. Also, I could not even look at the output on the screen. I ended up delivering the code to M&F in person and testing it at their site with real data.

I should mention that Denise did not like this kind of cowboy coding at all. She thought that everything should go through the tried-and-true process.

Finally, if M&F had run into problems with the calendar when I was on the road—which I often was during that period—Denise and the programmers might have trouble isolating the cause.

In retrospect it might have made sense for me to decline this project. Someone from the May Company would probably have stepped in to help them find a reasonable substitute. However, I wanted a happy client, and I was quite sure that the people at M&F would not have been happy with anything less than what I did.

I did get the calendar program to work, and I do not remember them reporting problems with it after the first few days. I might have needed to make small changes to handle situations that they forgot to tell me about. That almost always happened.

According to my notes by February 25, 2000, things were going reasonably well:

So far I have not picked up specs for a lot of custom programming. I spent much of yesterday working on the calendar and the insertion orders. I finally got the calendar so that it is exactly the way they wanted it. The first faxed insertion order cut off the top ten lines of the page. I fixed it by rotating 270 degrees instead of 90. I can’t understand why that would make a difference. We also had a query class for the people who have some experience in working with AdDept.

Life in the M&F advertising department: In general the people in the department, like nearly everyone that I met from the May Co., were hard-working and enthusiastic about their jobs. They did feel that they were the parent company’s ugly step-child, and there were many things besides the outdated electronic equipment to bolster that feeling. For example, there were no restrooms on the thirteenth floor that the department occupied. The store’s selling floors certainly had very nice restrooms, and the employees were allowed to use them. However, that involved taking an elevator down from the thirteenth floor and back, which could add several minutes to the project.

The alternative was to climb the stairs up to the fourteenth floor. That floor must have had a purpose at one time, but by 1998 it was just a relatively empty area with plumbing. I found it sort of exciting to go up there. It was like being in someone else’s attic. You never could predict what had been put up there just to be out of the way.

I used the men’s room up there whenever I felt adventurous. It was quicker, and I had very low standards in those days. The picture on the right is surely worth a thousand words. There was only one stall in the men’s room, but it was almost never occupied even though, as you can see, the one urinal was permanently out of order. The sign on it helpfully advised “DON’T PEE HERE.” Someone had added a “K” to the verb.

I seem to recall that there was also a ladies’ room up there, but it did not get used much. At any rate I did not try to persuade anyone of the fair sex to take photos for me.

This was not the only unusual sight at M&F. Here is what I wrote on February 25, 2000:

Meier& Frank is a strange place. They have by far the worst facilities of any department store I have been in. I will try to take some photos today. One guy’s office is so small he can easily touch both walls at the same time. Several people are sitting in a former conference room. There is a pile of discarded computers in one hallway. Many places are dirty. One corner in the main part of the office had huge dust bunnies. It could not have been cleaned in months. Nevertheless, everyone seems in good spirits.

Most of my time in the the first few trips was spent with Dori. She had a small desk in a fairly large office that also held a lot of records and that big printer. Dori had one very peculiar trait, that she did not try to hide. She would verbally accompany her work with a softly spoken play-by-play: “I am walking over to the printer to get the schedule. Now I am getting last week’s schedule out of the file. Now I am taking them to …”

At the time I found it incredible that they would put up with this annoying behavior. In retrospect I think that I was too judgmental. She did her job, and they kept her isolated enough that she did not drive anyone else crazy.

I remember that for one visit they assigned me to work in a very small two-person office. I swear that it was so narrow that I could touch two parallel walls at the same time. I was put there because one of the occupants was on vacation. I found my temporary officemate quite funny. I remember that he had posted on the wall a cartoon of Beavis and Butthead talking about the newly elected team of Bush and Cheney. The balloons read “He said ‘Bush’, heh heh,” and “He said ‘Dick’, hee hee.”

In those days I drank a lot of Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. I couldn’t tell the difference, but I could definitely tell if someone served me an off-brand. I happened to mention that I once tried to mix them. The guy with the cartoon solemnly warned me that that might not be legal.

I had completely forgotten about the following until I read it in my notes from February 23, 2000:

Brent got a call from someone from the May Company. Evidently they are considering getting new AS/400’s for both Meier & Frank and Filene’s because Dave Ostendorf told them that IBM is withdrawing support for the CISC systems.

Robinsons-May and Filene’s definitely got much faster systems, but I don’t think that M&F ever got an upgrade.

Life in and around Portland: I think that on our first visit Doug and I stayed in a Holiday Inn on the other side of the Willamette River. On later visits I think that I must have stayed somewhere closer to downtown. I ran nearly every day in those years, and I have a vivid recollection of running both through the streets of downtown Portland and in a large park along the Willamette River. I considered it very cool that the city allowed its citizens easy access to the riverfront. By contrast it was almost impossible to get from downtown Hartford to the banks of the Connecticut River on foot.

My memories of running in Portland are vivid and diverse, but I cannot remember being in a single restaurant or any other kind of store there. I think that I might have purchased lunch from a food truck or from a kiosk in the beautiful Pioneer Square, which was right across the street from M&F. I often saw a human statue there—a guy with silver clothes and makeup who posed in the square. In the above photo he is taking a break. I could not imagine a worse job than his.

Here are some tidbits that I wrote on June 12, 2000:

I often see strange things on the streets of Portland. Tuesday a pit bull was chained to a parking meter. It had a stick in its mouth. A guy was playing the “Lone Ranger” part of the overture from Rossini’s Guillaume Tell on a mandolin.

Someone from Salem Oregon stole over 300 lawn ornaments and decorated her lawn with them. She had hit houses in five counties.

I could park my rental car all day at a surface parking lot near the M&F store for a reasonable price if I arrived before the stores opened, which I always did. I also remember a building that had a huge octopus atop its front door, but I do not remember what was inside.

On the last few trips to M&F I stayed at a Homewood Suites hotel in Vancouver, WA. I selected it because it served free breakfasts and because it was fun to run along the mighty Columbia River.

The drive from the Homewood Suites to the M&F building, which was less than ten miles, was mostly on I5 and ordinarily took me only about fifteen minutes. If there was heavy traffic or an accident it might take twenty minutes, but I am pretty certain that I never spent as much as a half hour on the trip.

I remember that one of those evening runs was shortly after my tendinitis of the IT band had been diagnosed, and I had begun the prescribed exercise regimen. This outing was the first time that I had really tested how my knee had responded to the therapy.

I had to stop a couple of times because of the pain, but a thirty-second stretch allowed me to resume running. This was very encouraging to me because it indicated that the doctor’s diagnosis was accurate.

  • Homewood Suites.
  • My jogging path.
  • Sailboats on the Columbia.

Epilogue: The M&F advertising department used AdDept up until 2002, at which time the division was folded into the Robinsons-May division of the May Co. The stores still carried the M&F logo until 2006.

The flagship store in Portland, which at the time carried the Macy’s logo, was closed in 2017. The structure is still relatively intact in 2022. The developers have posted a web page that describes its current state. You can view it here.

The principal occupant is a luxury hotel called The Nines, but several other businesses are located.there including a Japanese store called Muji.

1. Brent Stapleton’s LinkedIn page is here.

2. Dori Tierney’s Facebook page is here. When I looked she had three times as many friends as I had.

3. Sheila Wilson returned to Hecht’s after M&F was folded into Rob-May and then worked at Marshall Fields/Macy’s in Minneapolis. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. My Fred Meyer adventures are chronicled here.

5. Emily White-Keating also appears in the entry on Macy’s West. Her LinkedIn page is here.

6. Laura Rutenis also returned to Hecht’s. Her LinkedIn page is here.

1991-2007 TSI: AdDept: Federated Department Stores/Macy’s Inc.

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TSI’s dealings with Federated and Macy’s Inc. Continue reading →

Let’s buy Macy’s!

For more than a decade after TSI began marketing AdDept, its software system for retail advertisers, the chain of department stores now known as Macy’s Inc. was called Federated Department Stores (FDS). The company was acquired in the eighties by Robert Campeau, a Canadian real estate magnate. For a short time it was merged with Campeau’s other stores and called Federated and Allied Department Stores. In 1992 the company emerged from bankruptcy as FDS, the same year that Macy’s filed for Chapter 11 protection. In 1994 FDS found enough cash in the cushions of the sofas in the furniture departments of its stores to purchase Macy’s shortly after Santa’s favorite retailer emerged from its own bankruptcy. Details of the takeover can be read here.

In the early nineties I was just beginning to learn about retail in America. It shocked me that a bankrupt company could stiff all of its vendors and then have the wherewithal to buy another company of about the same size. A lot of craziness like this happened in the nineties. I never did figure it all out, and the two companies involved in this transaction were a thorn in the side of TSI for the rest of its existence.

I don’t know why Val used a photo that cut off her chin.

In 1992 FDS had eight regional divisions. Each division produced and placed its own advertising from the divisional headquarters. The first FDS division that contacted TSI about purchasing the AdDept system was the Bon Marché, which was based in Seattle. I was called by Val Walser1, the Director of the Advertising Business Office there. She had received one of TSI’s mailings in late 1989 or early 1990, and she thought that the system might be what they needed. I talked with her in person twice, once at the Retail Advertising Convention in Chicago and once in Seattle. I gave Val a private demonstration in Chicago, and I showed the system to the rest of the team in Seattle. Those encounters have been described in some detail here.

No mention of Federated.

I don’t think that I knew at the time that the Bon Marché was part of FDS. Even if I did, I don’t think that I realized then that the parent company was about to declare bankruptcy. I was inexperienced; I probably made some errors in judgment. Perhaps I made a mistake by proposing a system that would only be minimally sufficient for their existing operation. Maybe we did not follow up often enough or in the best way.

Although Val informed us that she had requested funding for the system, it was never approved, and after a while we did not hear any more from her. We continued to send materials to her periodically. Until I began the research for this entry I was unaware that she had any involvement in deploying a system that was initiated by the FDS division most distant from Washington, Burdines in Florida. Val apparently oversaw the development of the administrative part of the FedAd (or whatever it was called at that time) system. By then her division was known as Macy’s Northwest, which was folded into Macy’s West, a long-time AdDept user, in 2008.

TSI’s fruitless contacts with Burdines have been documented here.

From the beginning I thought that Jordan Marsh, the Boston-based department-store chain, would be a valuable customer for TSI. Like the Bon Marché, Jordan Marsh was actually part of the Allied group before Campeau acquired Federated and merged all the stores into one gigantic chain. At one time there were also Jordan Marsh stores in Florida and San Diego, but by 1991 all of those stores had closed or were no longer controlled from Boston.

Kate Behart, whose career at TSI is described here, arranged for me to do a demo for people from Jordan Marsh’s advertising department at an IBM office. I don’t remember any of the names of employees at Jordan Marsh. In fact, the only things that I remember about our meeting with them were that Kate was very upset that I had used the word “gals” at one point and that they informed us that they wanted our system.

I am sure that Kate must have followed up on the presentation. She was very conscientious. However, nothing came of it.

Bloomingdale’s, the high-end department store with headquarters in New York City, contacted TSI several times. The last of these exchanges of telephone calls was handled by Doug Pease, whose successful marketing career at TSI is detailed here. We certainly sent them detailed materials about AdDept and the AS/400. I might have done a demo for them at the IBM office. I clearly recall that we went to their headquarters in Manhattan and gathered specs about their needs. I can still picture the Manager of the Business Office, who wore a three-piece suit and had a long pony tail. Guys with pony tails were not unusual in the creative and production areas of advertising departments, but he was the only one that I ever saw in the financial area.

Doug followed up on our visit with several telephone calls. At one point he became certain that Bloomies would buy the AdDept system. Nevertheless, not long after he had voiced his certainty, he got the telephone call that dashed his hopes. He never told me the details, but he was visibly upset about it.

One of the biggest disappointments in my career was not being able to land Liberty House, the department store in Hawaii and the Pacific, as a client. When Doug, Sue, and I flew out to Honolulu in December of 1995 to meet with Karen Anderson (detailed here), Liberty House was an independent chain of stores that included both department stores and much smaller stores in locations convenient to tourists. Those stores specialized in “resort ware”.

Macy’s on Union Square in SF.

Our presentation went very well. Karen told Doug in a subsequent conversation that she had requested funding for AdDept, but there was a freeze on capital purchases. The freeze persisted until the company entered bankruptcy in 1998 and closed most of the resort stores. When it emerged from bankruptcy it was gobbled up by FDS. At that point the remaining stores were relabeled as Macy’s, and administrative functions were transferred to Macy’s West in San Francisco, one of TSI’s clients.

So, this was as close as we came to a victory in our dealings with FDS/Macy’s Inc.. Many of the newspapers that had been used by Liberty House still subscribed to AxN in 2014.

AS/400s at FSG. I thought that I had a photo of Len, but I cannot find it.

At some point the AS/400 systems used by the three Macy’s divisions that used AdDept—Macy’s East, Macy’s South, and Macy’s West—were moved to the headquarters of Federated Systems Group (FSG) in Alpharetta, GA, a suburb of Atlanta. I flew down there to consult with Len Miller2, who was in charge of all of the FSG’s AS/400s. I don’t remember exactly what the agenda for this meeting was, but I remember that Len said that long-range plan of FDS was to replace the AS/400 systems with home-grown software running on other platforms. However, he assured me that at that point—soon after the merger with the May Company—it was a very low priority. They would still be using the AS/400s for several years.

My other vivid memory of that day was when we passed a room that contained perhaps twenty desks. At each desk sat someone working on a computer. All of the people were IBM employees who were consultants for Federated.

Len’s predictions both turned out to be true. All of the divisions except Bloomingdale’s were eventually folded into one gigantic Macy’s run from the Herald Square Building in Manhattan. The plan was apparently to use the system built for Burdines and the Seattle division, but it did not have all of the features that the people in New York needed. For several years they maintained AdDept in order to run the Loan Room (merchandise loaned to photo studio for shoots) module that TSI wrote for Macy’s East in the early nineties.

In May or June of 2005 I received a telephone call from Robin Creen3, whose title was Senior Vice-president of Macy’s Corporate Marketing. She wanted me to come to New York to discuss the AdDept and AxN systems. I made an appointment and took Amtrak to Penn Station. Robin instructed me to use the executive elevator at one of the 34th St. entrances rather than the employee’s entrance that I had always used on the other side of the building.

Robin’s office was not in the advertising department. It was on executive row. I don’t remember too much of the meeting, and I cannot locate my notes. I recall that I only got to meet with her once or maybe twice, and I never heard from her or about her again.

I did, however find a copy of a letter that I sent to her on October 7, 2005. Here is the text:

At our last meeting you told me that it was still too early to talk about the future of the existing May Company divisions. Since there have now been several definitive press releases about the makeup of the new Macy’s after the merger, I assume that those restrictions no longer apply.

Needless to say we are concerned about what effect the realignment will have on TSI. We have spent the last 17 years developing AdDept, the software product which has become the standard of the industry for administration of retail advertising departments. The May Company was our largest client.

We know that Federated Department Stores has been working with its Florida division for the last decade or so on a system which overlaps considerably with ours. I am sure that the company has by this time invested a considerable amount of time, money, and manpower in it. It may surprise you to know that I was supposed to be an integral part of the original plan. I met with Mike Rafferty and Gilbert Lorenzo in Huntsville, Alabama, back in the mid-nineties. Their plan at that time was to use AdDept for the accounting functions.

They wanted us to convert our system to run on a PC network using a home-grown relational data base and Microsoft Visual BASIC on each client. To me this seemed like a huge step backwards for us. Their approach would definitely have improved the appearance of AdDept’s front end and provided an integration with the production area, but no one could explain to me how we could possibly support such a system in many locations. The principal problem was that with their proposed architecture someone—presumably TSI—would be required to support both server software and client software. We have never had to support clients—the individual desktop PC’s and Macs. At the time networks were unreliable, Windows was not a mature product, and the Internet was in its infancy. TSI was already supporting a half dozen or more companies, including the two Macy’s divisions, which at the time were not affiliated with Federated. I honestly think that had we participated in the project at the level that they expected, TSI would not have survived as a company. Gilbert and Mike must not have liked my attitude, because we never heard from them again.

Since that time, as I wrote you earlier, most of the rest of the department stores in the country—as well as several other large retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods—have successfully implemented AdDept in their sales promotion departments. They were able to get affordable systems tailored to their requirements. AdDept is not a sexy system, but it gets the job done.

No one in the entire country—no one—has the experience that TSI has garnered over the last 17 years in understanding the intricacies of administration of advertising systems. We are offering that experience to Macy’s Marketing. Four of the seven newly aligned Macy’s divisions—East, West, Midwest, and whatever the Marshall Field’s division is called—are long-time AdDept users. Lord & Taylor also uses AdDept. Moreover, a large number of May Company employees have considerable experience using AdDept in many different areas. If I were in your shoes, I would consider this as a valuable asset.

TSI has a very strong relationship with its users—both at the corporate and division level. If you talk with the people at the May Company, I am sure that they will verify that we have always done what they asked, that we do an excellent job of supporting our product, and that we give them a lot of bang for the buck.

There is one big additional factor. We are not on their payroll. When they wanted to spend money to make the system do new things, they used us. When they were tightening their belts, they did not have to worry about paying the salaries of programmers, system architects, data base administrators, etc.

So far in our discussions TSI has done most of the talking. What we would really like now is to learn what you and the other people in Federated’s management need to get out of the system. A goal-oriented approach works best for us. We have moved mountains for other clients, and we would definitely appreciate the opportunity to tell you how we would attack your biggest problems. We have never shrunk from such a challenge in the past. Our track record in this regard is essentially flawless. If someone will tell us what they need, we will provide it.

Do you think that we could schedule a face-to-face meeting with you and whoever else is involved in this project about this challenge? We have always been straight-shooters, and we would be eager to listen to whatever you have to say.

My last two encounters with Macy’s were both about insertion orders for newspaper advertising. TSI had developed and successfully marketed an Internet-based system for insertion orders to newspapers. Macy’s West, Macy’s South, and most of the May Company divisions that FDS acquired in the merger used it, and they all loved it. We called it AxN, which was pronounced “A cross N”.

I knew that, compared to our other AdDept clients, Macy’s East used a small fraction of the programs that comprised AdDept. Still, they were entering the ads, and, therefore, they were a good candidate to use AxN. I wrote to the Media Director, whom I had never met, and requested a meeting about AxN. He seemed very interested. We scheduled a meeting, I made a dozen or so copies of our sales materials for AxN, I packed them in my briefcase, and I boarded the 6:30 train again. I was alone because TSI had no marketing/sales person at the time.

The meeting was not what I expected. It was conducted by a man named Roman from the IT area, not the advertising department. My presentation was very well received. Roman said that it was very impressive.

He pressed me on whether TSI planned to provide a way to send the layouts for ads over the Internet. This surprised me. I thought that this was a problem that had been addressed years earlier. The market leader was the Associated Press’s AdSend service, but I also knew of several competitors. I said that TSI had no plans to enter that market. I explained that we had neither the infrastructure nor the expertise necessary to compete in that arena. Besides, none of our clients had asked for it, and they were not shy about requesting our services.

He said that we should consider it. Macy’s was looking for someone who could enable them to use the Internet for both insertion orders and the delivery of ads, “because, you know, one-stop shopping is better.”

What should I have said?

I had three hours on the train to mull this over. I had made a mistake by letting this remark go unchallenged. It seemed like such a silly thing to say. I thought that they would want expertise and experience, not fewer phone numbers.

If one-stop shopping really was the objective, then I had no chance of ever persuading them to use AxN. Therefore, nothing could be lost by asking for proof of any real value associated with having one vendor doing both tasks. I knew very well that the people who placed orders for newspaper ads were completely separate from the employees who created the actual layouts and sent them to the papers. This was true at Macy’s in New York and at every other large retailer that I had met with.

We never heard from them after that.

I learned later that Macy’s East’s advertising department had never used AdDept for insertion orders, even though they could have easily faxed the orders from the AS/400. Instead, each coordinator had developed ways to communicate with the reps at the paper. It sounded chaotic.

My last frustrating encounter with FDS (by then known as Macy’s Inc.) occurred in, I think, 2007. This one revolved around Dave Ostendorf, whom I had known quite well when he had been the liaison between TSI and the advertising department at Famous Barr, the May Company division based in St. Louis. Much more about my relationship with Dave and the installation at Famous Barr is posted here.

This is the only picture I could find of Dave Ostendorf. He is on the far left side of the table in the white shirt.

Dave called me about the use of AxN. He said that the people for whom he worked in Macy’s Corporate Advertising department asked him to find out how much we would charge for an interface between AxN and the system that had been developed internally. Dave was a very straight arrow. I trusted him (unlike everyone else mentioned in this entry) implicitly.

Of course, I asked for more details, but Dave would not provide them. He was rather sheepish about this. He advised me just to write up a proposal in our usual format with as many disclaimers as I wanted to include. He also specifically warned me not to low-ball it. So, I wrote up a quote for $20,000 that may have set a world’s record for use of phrases like “assuming that”.

A short time after I talked with him Dave resigned his job at Macy’s and moved back to his home town of Indianapolis. Needless to say, no one ever called about the quote. I have always suspected that it had been used as a justification for further investment in the corporate system.

So, my interactions with FDS and its successor Macy’s Inc. were completely fruitless. If FDS/Macy’s Inc. was the Brass Ring of our field of software, it was in sight quite a few times, but we were never able to snatch it.

My only real regret is that I do not completely understand why we continually failed. Our success with every other department store chain was close to universal, and the employees in the advertising departments at FDS and Macy’s divisions seemed enthusiastic about what TSI had to offer. However, in these situations we were up against an amorphous alternative, the system developed for Burdines and the Bon Marché, about which I knew very little.

One thing that struck me when rereading the letter that I had written to Robin Creen. I seemed to be asking for an opportunity to see the alternative. As a debater and a debate coach I was much better on the negative. I seemed to feel confident that if they just told me what they were using or planning to use, I could demonstrate what was wrong with it. Even if our software was lacking in some areas, I felt confident that we knew how to change AdDept to make it better.

Fortunately TSI found plenty of work outside of FDS/Macy’s up until the time that Denise and I were ready to dispose of the business. If some of these opportunities had gone the other way, it seems likely that we would have missed out on some of our other achievements.

1. Val Walser worked int the advertising department in Seattle until Macy’s brought all of her division’s administrative functions to San Francisco in 2008. Her LinkedIn page, which is here, says that she “directed development of a sophisticated, integrated software product, which was Macy’s premier marketing/advertising system managing all departmental functions.” I presume that this refers to the system once known as FedAd that was begun by Burdines.

2. Len Miller apparently still works for Macy’s in 2022. His LinkedIn page is here.

3. Robin Creen left Macy’s in 2008. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. Dave Ostendorf’s LinkedIn page is here.