2001-2006 TSI: Weekly Partners’ Meetings

Posted on May 4, 2023 by Mike

Agendas for meetings. Continue reading →

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

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

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

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

By 2001 the nature of and name for A^xN¹ had been decided. Our focus was on how to roll it out to the AdDept clients and what we could do to make it more attractive both to the advertisers and the newspapers. We also discussed potential support issues and how the new model 170 that TSI had recently purchased could handle the load of handling the traffic from AdDept clients and newspapers. Occasionally we talked about personnel and other business-related matters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never had to make an onsite visit to our A^xN client in Guam.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We never mastered the trick of Cloud Computing.

How could we set ourselves up to manage systems for our small clients? Bon Ton, Gottschalks, Neiman Marcus
1. IBM (like Federated)?
2. TSI
  1. Dedicated high-speed line for each user?
  2. On the net?
    1. Telnet? How would they print? Pdf?
    2. VPN: AS/400 to AS/400?
    3. VPN: PC to AS/400?
  3. High availability?
  4. Disaster recovery?
3. A third party?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trip to Macy’s West
515
Dick’s quotes
Foley’s

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

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

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

I enjoyed those meetings immensely, and I miss them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2002-2005 TSI: Bringing AxN to Market Part 2

Posted on March 5, 2022 by Mike

Selling newspapers on the use of AxN. Continue reading →

A^xN was an Internet-based product developed and marketed by TSI. It allowed advertisers to send insertion orders (reservations for advertising space) to newspapers. It also managed communication between the two parties that culminated in the newspaper rep confirming the order. The process that Denise Bessette and I employed in designing and creating A^xN, including the division of labor, was described here. Details of the system design are posted here.

Part 1 of the marketing of A^xN is posted here. The narrative concludes with the signing of a contract by representatives of Belk¹, the department store chain based in Charlotte, NC, to purchase AdDept, TSI’s administrative system for advertising departments of large retailers. Part of the plan for the installation was to use A^xN for insertion orders. At the time none of the other AdDept retailers were using A^xN yet.

In the previous thirty or so AdDept installations the scheduling of newspaper advertising in AdDept had almost never been very difficult. It was always the first part of the project that we got to work smoothly.

I encountered an unexpected problem in that area at Belk. The company had recently consolidated the administration of four of its divisions into the office in Charlotte. Each of the four previous newspaper coordinators was now working in the office there and managed the advertising for the same papers that they had before. Usually, I trained the manager of the coordinators or just the AdDept liaison about how the programs worked. He or she trained the individual coordinators. In this case there was, at least initially, no manager. I was expected to train each of the coordinators separately. Most of them had been scheduling ads manually and ordering them over the phone. Some had never even worked on a computer before. Worst of all, all four soon realized that there was no way that Belk would need four coordinators when AdDept was up and running. There was not much incentive to cooperate.

Eventually these issues were all resolved, but the delays that the process caused meant that the rollout of A^xN would be postponed for a month or two. That was a headache, but it actually proved to be something of a blessing for TSI. It gave Denise and me some time to develop a plan for getting the newspapers aboard. Here is a list of the most important items:

TSI’s accounting system would needed to be changed to accommodate the newspapers as customers. Because the client file used a three-digit number as the identifying field, this task involved a significant amount of programming.
Belk would provide TSI with a list of its newspapers. For each we needed the contact name, phone, email, and address. These would be entered into TSI’s accounting system as (potential) customers. The three-character codes organized them by state. We also needed the name and contact information of the advertising rep at the paper.
I wrote a letter to be sent to the newspapers. It would be signed by someone at Belk but mailed by TSI. The purpose was to ask them to participate in a three-month test period of A^xN with no charge. Afterwards they would be asked to continue to use the system with a monthly fee roughly equal to the price of one column inch of advertising. One full-page ad in a broadsheet contained over 120 column inches.
Each newspaper would be sent the A^xN: Handbook for Newspaper Users, a copy of which is posted here. TSI would also provide telephone support, but we hoped that it would seldom be needed. We knew how to make systems that were easy to use.
At the same time the newspapers would be sent a contract for the test period. It emphasized that there was no charge for three months and that TSI was not acting as an agent for Belk. It also limited TSI’s responsibility to making a good-faith effort to address all reported problems in an expeditious manner.
After a week or so someone representing TSI would need to call the newspapers that had not returned contracts.
As soon as signed contracts were received, a TSI employee would activate the papers on the company’s accounting system and on the A^xN database. Then he/she would notify the appropriate coordinator at Belk to change the field on each variation of the newspaper’s record on the pub table in AdDept.
I would carefully monitor the processing of the first batch of orders. The system had never been stress-tested.
A second letter (from me) and a permanent contract would be sent to the paper after two months. It emphasized that either side could cancel the contract at any time with one month’s notice. The language about agency and responsibility was the same as in the contract for the test period. The starting date was at the end of the test period. There was no ending date.
When the contracts were returned the client records in TSI’s accounts receivable system were marked as active, and the newspapers were billed for the first month or quarter (their choice).
After a week or so someone representing TSI would need to call the newspapers that had not yet returned contracts.

This was by and large a good plan, but it had one rather obvious flaw. None of TSI’s current employees was suitable to play the role of “someone representing TSI” in steps 6 and 11. The programmers, including Denise, were far too busy with request for custom work in AdDept. The slot of marketing director at TSI was empty. I did not trust the administrative person to do this. That left only me, and I was notoriously bad at interactions by telephone. I have always hated talking on the phone, and people can often sense my discomfort. Besides, I wrote all of the new code. It was unquestionably a bad idea for the developer and the sales rep to be the same person. The sales person needs to know how to work with the potential customers, not the machine.

Denise devised a great solution to this problem. She informed me that one of her husband Ray’s cousins, Bob Wroblewski, sometimes did similar work for companies on a commission-only basis. She also came up with a sliding scale of commission rates. It was high in the first year and decreased in subsequent years. After three (or maybe five—I am not certain) years, there would be no commission.

We invited Bob, who lived in Rhode Island, to come to TSI’s office in East Windsor to discuss the matter with us. He liked what he heard, and I was favorably impressed with his experience and communication skills. He agreed to take on the job for Belk’s papers. After that we would assess how well the arrangement worked for both parties.

In reality it worked very well indeed for all of us. Bob was able to persuade all of the papers to agree to the test period. On that fateful day that Belk sent its first batch of insertion orders to TSI my recollection is that more than one hundred papers were involved. The A^xN programs flawlessly handled the orders and wrote the appropriate records on the data files. Emails were then sent to all of the newspaper reps. Very little time lapsed between the sending of the emails and the reps signing on to look at the orders. That surprised me a little.

Then a terrible thing happened. TSI’s trusty AS/400 locked up! No one—not even TSI employees—could do anything. I signed on to the system console, for which the operating system always reserved the highest priority. I was able to examine several job logs, and I determined that one of the steps that was being executed as soon as a rep looked at an order was performing an unexpectedly high amount of disk processing and using an inordinate amount of memory. I killed the interactive jobs for all of the newspaper and made sure that no one else could start a new session until the problem was addressed.

This was one of the tensest situations that I had faced in my career. I had to fix this problem, and fast. The step that I had determined was jamming the system would not be necessary until the rep decided to print the order or maybe it was the option to download the order as a csv file. I changed the code on the fly so that the onerous step was postponed until it was necessary. I hoped that that would spread out the activity so that the system was not overwhelmed right after a new order was processed.

There was no time to test what I had done. I removed the routine from the initial opening of the order and installed it in the routine that might be executed later. We then sent an email to the papers with an apology and a request that they try to sign in again. This worked much better, and, in fact, A^xN never had any notable performance problems again.

After Belk had been running successfully on A^xN for a few months, we decided to take our show on the road. Bob and I flew to California to meet with employees from two AdDept clients, Robinsons-May² and Gottschalks³. We enjoyed a pretty good relationship with both of them, and I wanted them to feel comfortable about working with Bob. I think that we spent only one afternoon at each location.

I don’t remember the details of the travel arrangements. We must have rented a car and driven from the L.A. area to Fresno. I don’t remember where we stayed or what we ate. I only remember that I was limping when I got off the plane, and I explained to Bob that I had tendinitis in my IT band. He said something like, “Don’t we all?”

Robinsons-May was quite interested in what we were doing with A^xN, but they did not go crazy over it. When I later asked them to let us approach their papers, however, they quickly agreed, and Bob was eventually able to sign up almost all of their papers, including the L.A. Times and the Los Angeles News Group, which included the Daily News and a group of suburban papers.

Some IT guys attended our demo at Gottschalks. They uniformly thought that our approach was great. However, the newspaper manager in the advertising department, whose name was Stephanie Medlock, had never used the faxing feature, and I never persuaded her to use A^xN either.

The trip was worthwhile. The people in both advertising departments had an opportunity to meet Bob, and he had a chance to see what it was like in an advertising department. Bob I got to know each other a little better, and Bob got a better idea about how A^xN fit into the process. However, I don’t think that he ever comprehended why it would be very difficult for us to approach advertising departments at places like Home Depot or Walmart—who did not have AdDept—about using A^xN.

Jenifer, Ali, Denise, and Bob at L&T’s office in Manhattan. This was the only photo of Bob that I could find.

Bob also accompanied Denise and me on a trip to Lord & Taylor⁴, the May Company division with headquarters in New York City. We took Amtrak and a taxi. I did not have any recollection of that trip at all until I found the photo that Bob appeared in. I don’t know when we went, but it must have been before 2005, the year in which I purchased my Cascio point-and-shoot camera for our second trip to Italy and stopped purchasing disposable cameras.

We met with Jennifer Hoke and Ali Flack, the two newspaper coordinators. I know this because I wrote their names on the reverse side of the photo that I found.

On the morning of October 14, 2003, I served as a pall bearer at a funeral in Passumpsic, VT, for Phil Graziose, the husband of my wife Sue’s good friend, Diane Robinson. After the funeral I drove to Providence, RI, for the wake of Bob’s wife. I have only attended perhaps a dozen wakes and funerals in my adult life. It was stunning to do it twice in one day.

Bob continued to represent us in dealings with newspapers until we ran out of prospects. From the beginning it was a mutually beneficial relationship. Bob earned a good amount of money in commissions, and the A^xN product complemented AdDept very well right to the end.

Over the years Bob and I had very few interactions other than the ones that I have described. Neither Denise nor I ever monitored his conversations with the newspapers. I always suspected that he may have overstated how important A^xN was to the retailers who paid for the newspaper ads, but what do you want? He was a salesman.

1. The people and events involved in the installation of AdDept at Belk and TSI’s relationship with the company are described here.

2. Robinsons-May was the May Company division based in North Hollywood, CA. My adventures in Tinsel Town are recounted here.

3. Gottschalks was an independent chain of department stores based in Fresno, CA. The company’s AdDept installation—including one of the worst experiences of my life—is discussed in some detail here.

4. The twenty-year relationship between TSI and L&T is explored in the blog entry posted here.

1993-2012 TSI: AdDept Celebrity Sightings

Posted on October 3, 2021 by Mike

All of the famous people that I can remember spotting on my trips were on airplanes or in airports. I probably saw others that I either did not recognize or have forgotten about. After all I spent a lot of … Continue reading →

Sports celebrities: Once in a while I would recognize a famous person in an airport or on a plane. I only talked to two of them, and both conversations were very brief. Most of the celebrities were from the world of sports, or at least “sports entertainment”. Three of them were from ESPN, which is based in Bristol, CT. ESPN’s announcers flew out of Bradley International, the airport in Windsor Locks that I always used.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee was a passenger on one of my flights back to Hartford. She sat in coach. A few people recognized her. She had won three gold, one silver, and two bronze medals at four separate Olympic Games. Her events were the heptathlon and the long jump. Sports Illustrated for Women magazine voted her the Greatest Female Athlete of All-Time.

She was also a star basketball player at UCLA. In 2001 she was voted the greatest female collegiate athlete of the previous twenty-five years.

My recollection is that JJK was in the Hartford area for a charity event. I read about it in the Hartford Courant the next day.

On one of my trips (I think that it might have been on a side trip to visit my parents in Kansas City), I rode on the same plane twice in a row with the same person. That is, my first flight was from BDL to an airline’s hub airport and then from there to my destination. The person who was also on both flights was Chris “Boomer” Berman, a long-time studio host on ESPN.

I had seen Boomer on television many times. My favorite bit was when he adopted his “Swami” persona to give his predictions for NFL games.

I only saw Boomer getting on and off of the airplane. On both legs of our common journey he sat in first class while I was relegated to coach.

My all-time greatest thrill in sports viewing was when Desmond made this spectacular catch against Notre Dame.

I never purchased first class tickets, but because I flew so much, I occasionally was was upgraded. I almost never recognized anyone else in the comfortable seats. Once, however, I sat in first class with a famous sports personality. In fact, I sat right next to Desmond Howard, who was working at ESPN at the time, on a flight that terminated at Bradley. I was in the window seat; he had the aisle seat.

It took me a couple of minutes to recognize him. He did not look like a football player at all. He was only 5’10” and weighed much less than 200 pounds. His most recognizable feature was his broad smile. He had a portable DVD player with him. I was engrossed in a crossword puzzle or a magazine article or something. I had a strong feeling that I was sitting beside someone whom I had seen on television somewhere, but it was not until Desmond smiled at the flight attendant that I recognized him as the 1991 Heisman Trophy winner from my alma mater, the University of Michigan.

When we landed, Desmond quickly rose to exit. I noticed that he had left his DVD player in the magazine storage area on the rear of the seat in front of him. I retrieved it and gave it to him as he was waiting for the exit door to open. He gave me a big smile and thanked me.

The other ESPN personality whom I recognized was Jim Donnan¹, the former head football coach at the University of Georgia. I enjoyed his commentary on college football teams before the games were televised. He was always seated behind a desk.

Donnan was the only “personality” whom I approached in an airport. He was dressed in a suit, but he also wore white sneakers. I asked him if he changed his shoes when he went on camera. He said that he wore the sneakers because dress shoes made his feet hurt, and they never showed his feet on camera.

In my experience celebrities generally flew in first class. It was therefore extremely surprising for me to sit across the aisle from Vin Baker² on a flight back to Hartford. It was not a shock that he was going to Hartford. After all, he was by far the most famous person who ever played basketball at the University of Hartford. What was surprising was that he and his entourage were seated in the coach section. I had trouble finding a place to put my legs, and Vin Baker was 6’11” tall!

I don’t recall whether Baker was still playing in the NBA when he made this trip. His last year was 2006. So, I suspect that he was still playing.

On another occasion I sat next to another large man. This guy I did not immediately recognize, but I could tell from the papers that he was reading and annotating that he was on a recruiting trip as a coach for the University of Oklahoma football team. When I got home I used google to retrieve a list of the Sooners’ coaches. I quickly recognized Kevin Sumlin as the person whom I had sat beside. At the time he was the tight ends coach for Bob Stoops at OU.

In 2008 Sumlin was named the head coach at the University of Houston. He led the team to a 12-1 record and an appearance in a bowl game in 2011. Before that game he accepted the top job at Texas A&M.

In his first year at A&M the Aggies, with Johnny Manziel at quarterback, went 11-2 and beat Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl. After that his teams, first at A&M and then at Arizona, seemed to get worse every year. His last game as a head coach was an ignominious 70-7 loss to Arizona State in 2020.

The other sports figure whom I recognized on an airplane was more famous than any of the others so far listed. I saved him for last because I only saw him for a few seconds. Also, he was only a “sports entertainment” star.

Many people know of two characters named Steve Austin—the Six Million Dollar Man and Stone Cold. I saw the second one on a flight from Birmingham, AL, to Atlanta. He was sitting in seat 1B, and he had a very large bandage on one of his knees. He apparently boarded early, which meant that absolutely everyone on the plane walked by him. I recognized him immediately, but I didn’t say anything. I assumed that he had received medical attention at one of the sports medicine centers in Birmingham.

I was quite familiar with a third Steve Austin, Stunning Steve Austin, a lithe young wrestler whom I had seen many times on televised WCW performances from Texas. At the time Stunning Steve had long blonde hair, was skinny for a wrestler, and was usually cast as a good guy. His finishing move was called the stunner. Unlike Stone Cold, he was well known for his speed and agility. Also, he never wore armor on his knees or crushed beer cans.

It was hard to fathom, but he was the same guy who later grew into the legendary Stone Cold Steve Austin.

Other celebrities: I saw two fairly famous political figures on airplanes. The first was my congresswoman, Nancy Johnson. One evening we were on the same flight from Washington National to Bradley. I was somewhat surprised by how short she was.

I don’t remember the other person’s name or even what his position was. My recollection was that he was head of the EPA, but I cannot find him on the list of administrators. I can picture him very clearly in my mind and even hear his voice.

On another trip to Hartford in 1999 or 2000 the first class section was largely populated by vivacious young men who were obviously neither salesmen nor investment bankers. They were, in fact, the boy band NSYNC, and at the time they were extremely popular with the teeny bopper set.

Halfway through the flight one of them, Joey Fatone, came back to the coach section and got down on one knee to talk with an elderly couple that was seated right behind me. They were evidently his grandparents.

My recollection is that NSYNC was going to some venue in the Hartford area to give a surprise performance. I don’t think that this gig was part of one of their tours. It might have even been a private gathering. There were no screaming girls waiting for them at the airport.

I did not see many people in wheelchairs in airports, and of that small number only one (to the best of my recollection) was traveling alone. I recognized him immediately as John Hockenberry. He has been on many shows on public TV. I saw him shopping at one of the stores at the Kansas City airport (KCI).

Seeing him made me wonder what he would do if he got hungry. The food concessions at KCI are on the second floor above the stores. Maybe there was an elevator he could use, but I don’t remember seeing one.

The other person of note whom I saw in my travels was not famous in her own right. The woman sitting next to me on a flight told me that her husband, Bill Haast, had held the record for being bit by a poisonous snake the most times. He was often flown to donate blood to bite victims because he had developed immunity to many varieties of snakes.

I had never heard of Bill Haast. When I looked him up I discovered that he was even more amazing than his wife’s depiction of him. His Wikipedia page is here.

He died in 2011 at the age of 100.

1. Jim Donnan seemed to disappear from ESPN early in the teens. I recently learned that in 2011 a Ponzi scheme in which he was a partner collapsed. His partner pleaded guilty, but Donnan was acquitted on all 41 counts in 2014. The government apparently could not prove that he knew about the fraud. Donnan took a job at the American Sports Network in 2014.

2. In 2021 Vin Baker is an assistant coach with the Milwaukee Bucks. His path has been a rocky one. A Los Angeles Times article with the details has been posted here.

1996-2006 TSI: AdDept Clients: May Company

Posted on September 6, 2021 by Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My hotel room in St. Louis is absurd. It is a huge suite. I located a microwave and refrigerator inside what looked like a chest of some kind. For some reason it is much easier to find these two features in places where it is impossible to buy food (because I am downtown). The bathroom is right by the door, about a quarter mile from the bed. There are two TV sets, but no Jacuzzi, at least not in the room. The thermostat is out of whack. You have to set it to nearly 80 to keep the room from being frigid. I fear that they may not offer free breakfast here. They did not mention anything when I checked in.
It is supposed to rain all day here. There may even be thunderstorms. I was too lazy to run on Sunday. I will probably regret it today.
I hope that the May Co. has a comfortable nap room. I have become quite accustomed to the two-hour post-breakfast naps.

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

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

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

TSI
1. People
2. History
  1. Founded in 1979.
  2. Advertising in 1981
  3. Retail in 1988.
  4. First May division (Hecht’s) in 1991
3. Custom programming
  1. Good at diagnosis.
  2. Incredibly efficient system of delivering custom code using BASIC.
  3. Two principles:
    1. There should be one version of the truth;
    2. Everyone should be able to take advantage of work done by others.
  4. People capable of completing difficult projects within parameters.
AdDept
1. Intent
  1. All administrative aspects.
  2. All media.
  3. Easily customizable.
  4. Require a minimum of local support — AS/400.
2. Retail advertising is difficult.
  1. All the difficulties of retail — stores, merchants, accounting, A/P, and co-op
  2. All the difficulties of advertising
    1. Multiple media, each with almost completely different structure
    2. Media scheduling, production scheduling, estimating, loan room, etc.
3. System design
  1. Scheduling:
    1. Every media represented in the ad file.
    2. Open on-line database works best when each person updates the system with information as soon as it is available.
    3. One main program, many well-normalized files.
    4. History of significant changes:
      - Production.
      - Financial.
  2. Financial:
    1. One main set of files (header and detail).
    2. Many front ends with supporting detail files.
    3. Two months, three amounts.
    4. Interfaces
  3. Cost accounting (data warehouse)
    1. Detail at the department level using May Company rules.
    2. Can also be used for other purposes:
      - Planning
      - Store-level analysis
  4. Add-ons
    1. Productivity
    2. Competitors
    3. Loan room inventory and transactions
    4. Photo studio
May future plans
1. Filene’s
2. Uniformity
3. Best practices
Technology
1. Explain CFINT
2. Explain performance of 5250 v. browser-based
3. Why “web-facing” doesn’t help
4. Explain V5
  1. BASIC compiler.
    1. Should we convert to C?
    2. Should we convert to Net.Data?
    3. Should we convert to WAS/Java?
    4. Should we look to Wintel?
  2. Can’t save back very far.
  3. InfoPrint server allows output as .pdf files.
5. Browser-based programming requires VPN or the equivalent for support.
Other things
1. AxN.
2. Peggy Southworth labels.
What else?

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. The Hecht’s installation is described here.

3. The account of the installation for Foley’s is provided here.

4. The troubled AdDept installation at Filene’s has been documented here.

5. The Lord & Taylor installation is described here.

6. Doug and I made a strong pitch to Debra Edwards at May Ohio, but the division was eliminated before we could close the deal. That “whiff” is described here.

7. I think that Famous-Barr may have already committed to getting AdDept before Doug arrived on the scene, but their decision was probably made because of the May Company’s commitment to the project. The installation at Famous-Barr is described here.

2000-2002 TSI: AdDept Client: Meier & Frank

Posted on July 23, 2021 by Mike

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.

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.

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.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Robinsons-May

2001-2006 TSI: Weekly Partners’ Meetings

2002-2005 TSI: Bringing AxN to Market Part 2

1993-2012 TSI: AdDept Celebrity Sightings

1996-2006 TSI: AdDept Clients: May Company

2000-2002 TSI: AdDept Client: Meier & Frank