Tag Archives: Comparetto/Wavada, Sue

1992-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Neiman Marcus

Posted on by
2

The store with only two sales per year. Continue reading →

My recollection is that the first inquiry from Neiman Marcus came in early 1992 On the other end of the phone line was the manager of the advertising business office. Although I worked with her pretty closely for a fairly extensive period of time, I don’t remember her name.

She must have responded to a mass mailing that I sent after the installation at Hecht’s was under control. I addressed those letters to advertising directors. So, the advertising director must have given it to her. In our telephone conversation she explained to me how they did things at Neiman’s. I told her that I thought that our system could help her with some of their problems. I then sent her materials about how AdDept worked and tried to relate aspects of AdDept to Neiman’s situation.

She asked us to pay them a visit. I arranged for Sue Comparetto and me fly to Dallas to meet with the potential users and to do a demonstration for them at IBM’s local office. The business office of Neiman’s advertising department was on one of the upper floors of the company’s flagship store on Main Street.

When we arrived there I was surprised to find that the rest of the advertising department would not be involved in the discussion. Although Neiman Marcus was still using the system in 2014, I never spoke with anyone from the rest of the department. They used an advertising agency for most of their advertising, including newspaper ads. In fact, the lady that we were dealing with did not even want the rest of the department to have access to the system. She really just wanted a system to keep track of expenses and co-op.

The stores only had two sales per year— First Call in February and Last Call in August, or maybe the other way around. They used the traditional 4-5-4 retail calendar (described here) with which we were already familiar, but Neiman’s first month was August, not February.

My AdDept demo needed a major change of emphasis. I usually emphasized that the main reason for a centralized database was for everyone to take advantage of work done by others. She did not want the others involved at all. Also, the most impressive part of the demo was how quickly a newspaper ad could be scheduled. She had little interest in that task, which was the agency’s responsibility. Nevertheless, the reaction to what I showed was quite positive.

After the demo Sue and I rented a car and drove to Austin for a little R&R with Marlene Soul, one of her friends from high school. She was, if you can believe it, a consultant in feng shui, which she claimed was mostly about being organized.

Marlene took us to a comedy club in downtown Austin, which was definitely a swinging place. I also remember sitting around at her house while she tortured her cat with a long flexible semi-rigid wire that ended with a feather. The slightest twitch made the feather jump and fly.

I made a note to myself to buy one of these when I arrived back in New England so that I could use it to drive my cantankerous cat Woodrow crazy. I did, and it did. He had to hide under the couch so that he could not see it.

The following morning we went birding with Marlene and a group that met every Saturday morning. I was exceptionally bad at it. I have had poor vision since the third grate, and I have always been notoriously bad at finding things anywhere. However, this gathering did spark enough interest in me to become a little more knowledgeable in ornithology.

Upon returning to the office I spent a couple of days putting together a detailed proposal for Neiman Marcus. It did not include as much custom programming as usual. The main objective was for the AS/400 to be able to generate a file to be used by the expense payable system on the mainframe.

The business office manager accepted the proposal a short time after receiving it. I sent her a software contract, which she signed. I then ordered the hardware and system software from IBM and we received an installation date. I knew that we would not have the interface done by then, but we would need some data to test the interface anyway, and there would be no data on day one.

From our perspective this was by far the easiest sale that we had ever had, and the installation, which took place in August of 1992, also went rather smoothly. I had to spend quite a bit of time fine-tuning the coding for the incredibly complicated interface with their corporate financial system. I did not care. I loved to do that kind of work because, once it was in place, the chances of them scrapping the system were minuscule1.

People in the IT department2, however, were furious that the lady from the advertising business office had signed a contract with TSI without consulting them. They were nice enough to me, and they were quite cooperative about establishing the interface between the two systems. However, her career at Neiman Marcus did not last long after AdDept was installed and working smoothly.

The key to the success of the installation was effecting the financial interface. It involved a considerable amount of two-way communication between AdDept and the corporate mainframe. Gary Beberman, who had been TSI’s liaison for the first AdDept installation at Macy’s East (described here), was extremely effective as the go-between for TSI and the mainframe programmers.

I found this list of the steps involved in a document written in 2000:

1. A list of general ledger accounts is downloaded. AdDept’s general ledger account table is updated.
2.A list of departments with the accompanying hierarchy is downloaded. The department table and the rest of the hierarchy is updated.
3. Expenses are uploaded to the accounts payable system. The accounts payable system feeds the general ledger.
4. Co-op transactions are also uploaded to the accounts payable system. The accounts payable system feeds the general ledger.
5. General ledger transactions in the advertising accounts are downloaded at the end of the month. An AdDept program compares the downloaded transactions with the uploaded transactions. A list of exceptions is printed. Additional transactions are placed in a batch file, which can be converted to real AdDept transactions.

The walk down to Dealey Plaza is an easy one.

I made a fairly large number of visits to Dallas during the installation period. Thereafter, a few years would sometime go by between requests for visits. Here are a few memories that I have maintained of those trips.

Neiman’s flagship store at Christmas time.
  • In the nineties I spent a lot of time in the American Airlines section of the DFW airport. My favorite restaurant there was a Mexican cantina.
  • I also spent a lot of in autos driving between the airport and either Dallas or Fort Worth, where TSI had several clients. Sometimes I took a cab; usually I rented a car from Avis.
  • On my first solo trip to Neiman’s I was a little late and a little lost. I crossed Main Street in the middle of the street. A cop stopped me with every intention of giving me a ticket for jaywalking. I was polite, however, and he let me go with only a warning.
  • One of my early visits was in December during the running of the Dallas Marathon. I went out for a jog and watched some of the real runners near the finish line. This must have been on a Saturday or a Sunday.
  • The temperature on that day was around 30. I was wearing stretch leggings, shorts, a tee shirt, and a nylon jacket. Most of the real runners were wearing shorts and singlets. At Neiman’s on Monday the business manager, who was a originally from Pittsburgh, confided to me that she and her husband were concerned about whether the cold weather might harm their child if they let her play outside. She admitted that no one in Pittsburgh would have thought twice about their kids being out for hours in such weather.
  • On another occasion I walked to the State Fair grounds on a Friday evening. I was surprised to discover thousands of people celebrating Juneteenth. I had never heard of this event before.
  • One summer evening after working at Neiman’s I took a stroll down to Dealey Plaza, which is the the location of the ramp to I-35. I wanted to conduct a personal investigation of the interchange, the “grassy knoll”, the Texas Book Depository (which had been converted into a museum), and the other locations associated with the assassination. A few minutes earlier the fatal presidential motorcade had passed right by Neiman’s flagship store, which is .6 miles from the plaza.
  • One day after the system was operational the business office manager drove me to lunch for some authentic Texas barbecue. I cannot say that I was very impressed. I have never understood the idea of cooking all of the flavor out of meat just so it could be coated with barbecue sauce.
  • Neiman’s made a big deal out of Christmas. Not only did they publish their famous catalog with one outrageous gift idea, but they also sponsored an evening in which their VIP clients could shop without dealing with the riffraff. The store open that evening only to those who were sent an invitation. Each was assigned an employee to tour the store with them. I am not sure what the employees were expected to do. I looked for members of the Ewing family, but I did not see any.
  • On my visit on September 9, 2000, the temperature reached 109°. It was also the thirty-fifth day in a row with no rain. That was the day that I understood why the streets in Texas are almost all concrete, as opposed to asphalt. Anything that was paved with asphalt turned gooey when the temperature got that high.

I did not actually work with most of the subsequent Neiman’s employees enough to burn in lasting memories. I did find some notes that provided me with some information on some of them;

Jeff Netzer.
  • I was surprised to discover that many of the successors to the female business office manager mentioned above were Aggies, that is, graduates of Texas A&M. The first was Jeff Netzer3, who worked at Neiman’s from 1996-1999. He called TSI a few years later when he was employed at Sewell Automotive Company. I saw Jeff there when they invited me to assess the possibility of us designing a system for this company. This experience is described here.
  • The second Aggie was named Brian Harvey4. He worked in the advertising department from 1998-2000. I met him in 2000, but I don’t remember him.
  • After Brian’s departure the advertising business office was run by Alea Montez. I remember that she called the office for support several times. I don’t think that I ever met her.
  • The last Aggie was Brian Davis5, whose title at Neiman’s was Media Analyst. I don’t remember him at all. I don’t think that I ever met him in person.
  • A striking omission in this list is everyone in any other area of advertising. I never succeeded in interesting anyone in even considering what TSI had done for so many others in similar positions.
  • I had quite a bit of contact with a number of IT people at Neiman’s. I met a few in person, but I don’t remember any names.
  • In the 2000’s Neiman’s hired an AS/400 consultant to help them with connectivity and to upgrade their system. We had a good relationship with him, but I don’t remember his name.

1. In fact, the AdDept installation at Neiman’s lasted longer than that of any other client. Part of the explanation for that was that Neiman’s was one of the few AdDept clients that was not bought out by another company. When we closed TSI’s doors for the last time in 2014, Neiman’s was still using AdDept. For all that I know, it may have continued after that.

2 The IT people worked in a building in Las Colinas, a few miles from the flagship store in downtown Dallas. I went there a couple of times and met a few people there.

3. Jeff Netzer’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Brian Harvey’s LinkedIn page is here.

5. Brian Davis’s LinkedIn page is here.

1989-1993 TSI: AdDept-Camex Interface

Posted on by
1

An exciting new feature. Continue reading →

The first time that I ever heard the word “Camex” was when I was researching the requirements for the first installation of TSI’s AdDept system1 at Macy’s East2. One of the job titles that Macy’s used for employees assigned to production of a newspaper ad was “Camex operator”. I asked Alan Spett, a vice president at Macy’s who was our principal contact during this period, what a Camex was. Alan told me that Camex was a company in Boston that had designed and implemented software and networking for workstations from Sun Microsystems. The workstations were used by many newspapers and some of the largest newspaper advertisers to help with the design of pages to appear in newspapers.

I later did a little research on the company. It was founded in 1974 by George White and a partner whose name I never discovered. The first customer was the Boston Globe. Once that installation stabilized, the company grew dramatically by selling expensive systems (roughly $2 million each) to newspapers around the country and then to large retailers.

In 1989 the company was sold to DuPont, the chemical giant. George White stayed with the company until 1993.

Camex had a booth near TSI’s at the Retail Advertising Conference in Chicago that Tom Moran3 and I attended in 1991 or 1992. Our booth was the smallest allowed. Camex’s booth, which was near ours, was perhaps ten times larger. They must have brought twenty salesmen and lots of workstations and network servers.

Alan may have voiced an interest in creating an interface between AdDept and Camex in those early days. However, it was included in neither the original installation nor the first set of enhancements.

Dan Stroman, TSI’s contact for the AdDept installation at P.A. Bergner & Co.4, told me that Bergner’s wanted to implement an interface between AdDept and Burgner’s Camex computers. I told Dan that Macy’s might also be interested in such an interface, and I gave him Alan’s telephone number. The two of them agreed to make a joint project of the interface.

My recollection of the details is fuzzy. I think that AdDept was supposed to create a file that contained all relevant production job information for jobs in specified ad types that had not yet been released. Camex would create files for AdDept that indicated job steps had been completed on those jobs.

There were many issues to resolve.

  • What was the naming convention for jobs on Camex? That field would need to be added to the AdDept database.
  • Should AdDept require that each Camex job name be unique? If not, will uniqueness be enforced at the time of the interface? If not, how will Camex handle two jobs with the same name?
  • Should the source for the interface file from AdDept be the live database or the history records?
  • Are history records for the interface itself necessary?
  • How should AdDept tell Camex about jobs that have been killed?
  • What if the size or shape of the ad had changed?
  • And so on.

There were also technical details about the nature of the interface files. IBM’s PC Support program for the AS/400 could be used to transfer data to and from a PC, but it probably would not work with a Sun workstation. So, a PC would probably be necessary between the Sun Workstation and the AS/400.

My recollection is that two meetings were held at Camex’s headquarters at 75 Kneeland St. in Boston. The first was mostly just to get acquainted and set an agenda. I have no notes from these meetings, and I don’t remember anyone’s name. I seem to remember that Alan may have attended. Sue Comparetto and I drove up to Boston. Camex’s office was very close to Chinatown, and the Camex people treated us to lunch at one of the nearby Chinese restaurants. My other vivid recollection is of my wonder at what Camex had accomplished in a fairly short time.

I am pretty sure that Dan attended the second meeting. Sue and I definitely drove up from Enfield. This meeting was disrupted by a fire alarm. Everyone was asked to abandon the building and stand around in a nearby parking lot. It does not take much for me to be cold, and I was absolutely freezing. I am sure that we were outside for at least an hour. We finally did get to go inside for an hour or two. My recollection is that we made a little progress, but at the end I still did not know what data Camex was planning to send to AdDept. This was because the people with whom we were talking knew very little about the database portion of their system, and the database programmer was not available.

I wrote up a programming quotation for the portion of the interface that AdDept would initiate. I submitted the quote to Dan and Alan. They both approved it. I even started work on it.

Then a very strange thing happened. The person who served as the client liaison at Camex called Dan and told him that Camex had decided not to participate in the interface. They also volunteered to refund deposits that Bergner’s had made for additional equipment.

We got paid for the work that we did—luckily avoiding the bankruptcies of both Macy’s and Bergner’s. Shortly thereafter DuPont split Camex up into pieces and spun them off as separate companies. Camex did not last long after that.

I cannot remember where this happened, but I overheard someone at a large retailer talking with their rep from Camex. The rep said that Camex no longer recommended the Sun workstations. Instead they recommended that advertisers just buy Macintoshes and off-the-shelf software. I was both dumbstruck and disappointed. I had envisioned our relationship with Camex as a possible entrée to many excellent AdDept prospects. Sic transit gloria mundi.

The episode has an epilogue. A few years later I had a meeting in in Mobile AL with some programmers who previously worked at Camex and Gilbert Lorenzo, the advertising director at Burdines department store. That meeting is described here.

1. The design of the AdDept system is described in some detail here.

2. The AdDept installation at Macy’s East is described here.

3. Tom’s time at TSI, including our time at the RAC, is described here.

4. The ups and downs of the AdDept installation at Bergner’s are detailed here.

1998-2005 TSI: AdDept Client: Proffitt’s

Posted on by
2

Proffitt’s was a chain of department stores based, for the period in which I was associated with the company, in Alcoa, TN. Proffitt’s was the first division in the entity Proffitt’s Inc. The corporation changed both its name and orientation … Continue reading →

Proffitt’s was a chain of department stores based, for the period in which I was associated with the company, in Alcoa, TN. Proffitt’s was the first division in the entity Proffitt’s Inc. The corporation changed both its name and orientation in 1998. The new entity was called Saks Inc. TSI’s relationship with that corporation and the people in Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG) has been described here.

Proffitt’s headquarters was four miles south of the airport. I usually stayed at the Hampton Inn at the top of the map. Although the town of Maryville was only about a mile away I seldom went there, and I never went to Knoxville.

I don’t think that I did a demo for Proffitt’s. Rather, the decision to use AdDept there was made by PMG based on the success of the installation at McRae’s that is described here. I definitely remember my first trip to the divisional headquarters. In April of 1998 I flew on Delta from Atlanta and arrived at McGhee Tyson Airport1, which is also located in Alcoa. I rented a car and drove the short distance to Proffitt’s headquarters, which was in a strip mall that did not have a Proffitt’s store. The mall’s anchor store, if you could call it that, was a Burlington Coat Factory.

By the day that I arrived, the advertising department’s AS/400 was already installed in a closet. Next to it was the system console. There was already a premium on space there, and it got worse very quickly. On some occasions I was required to work in that closet. It was a strong contender for the worst work environment that I had to endure.

The connectivity was also installed and configured by someone else. Specifically, TSI had nothing to do with the selection of the emulation software for the Macs.

Proffitt’s advertising department was not very large. The primary reason for this was that much of the creative and production work had been outsourced to an ad agency in Chicago named Ambrosi. I wrote this about the agency’s practices in April of 2000:

Ambrosi has a minimum charge of $175 for materials. They sent an invoice to Proffitt’s with a line on it with a $175 charge for “eye shadow kit.” Proffitt’s paid it without questioning it. The bill was nearly $20,000 over the budget – for one catalog.

The people: My original contact was the production manager, Tom Henry. All that I remember about him is that he took me to lunch that first day in his Corvette that was not really a Corvette. He said that it was “a knock-off”. I should have asked him to elaborate on the subject, but I did not. I think that we ate at an extremely inexpensive pizza place where you just pointed at the slices that you wanted. I have forgotten the name of the place.

Long after I posted this entry I discovered this photo of a meeting at PMG in Birmingham. Tom Henry is on the left in the shirt with horizontal stripes. On the opposite side of the table are two other people from Proffitt’s: Tom Waltz at the far end and Cindy Karnoupakis in red and white. I think that Tom W. was the manager of the business office before Jim Pierce. Cindy may have been his assistant. Steve VeZain of PMG is waving on the right. I don’t remember the meeting, and I have no firm recollections of Tom W. and Cindy.

I did not work with him much after that day. He was in charge of the department’s computers. Therefore, he had me train some people who worked for him how to check the backups. Leaving this important role up to them was a mistake.

I wrote this about the situation in early 2000:

This installation got off to a very slow start. All the people involved in the project initially bailed out when the data entry started. Three people are now involved – Jeannie Gorman for ROP, Lucy Delk for other media, and Jim Pierce in the business office. Jim, although a very laid-back guy, has more or less taken the bull by the horns in the last few months. They are now using AdDept for closing – accruals and the prepaid to expense journal entry for all media.

Don Alexander2 was the Senior VP of the department until July of 2000, but I do not remember dealing with him much. In fact, I remember very little about most of the people in the department until Marianne Jonas came from McRae’s to become the Advertising Director in August of 2000.

  • Cindy, Lucy, and about half of Jim.
  • Jeannie Gorman.
  • Charlene.

Jim Pierce handled the finances. His assistant was named Charlene. Christi Bullock worked with her. Jeannie Gorman scheduled and purchased newspaper advertising. Lucy Delk handled other media. I also took a photo that included a woman named Cindy. I don’t remember any of these people very well. I need to rely on the notes that I have discovered, and they do not begin until 1999. Furthermore, my research has been unable to determine anything about their subsequent lives.

Hardware issues: Most users of the AdDept system on AS/400’s experienced few if any problem with their hardware. If they did, they solved it themselves or got the IT department involved. My notes from Proffitt’s for 1999 and 2000 are replete with references to SNAFUs attributable to hardware. On July 13, 1999, I wrote “Evidently the power failure at Proffitt’s fried their fax modem.” This modem was used to send insertion orders automatically to the newspapers. If it was not working, Jeannie had to print the orders and send them one at a time via a fax machine.

The very next day I wrote the following about an incident handled by Jamie Lisella2 at TSI’s office:

Jamie got frustrated with Proffitt’s. As usual they have no one who is both willing and able to do something, in this case switch the modem cables for IBM.

TSI also had an HP Laser Jet 5 in its office.

TSI even was called about very trivial printer issues. This note is dated exactly two months after the modem cable problem:

Their HP 5 printer wasn’t working. The Powersave feature was on. I think when they had a power failure it may have reverted to the factory settings. I turned it off and restarted it. I printed out five copies of my write-up of how to take care of this. Maybe someone will read it this time.

In April of 2000 much of my attention was dedicated to getting TSI’s insertion order project, AxN, operational. I needed to document potential benefits vis-à-vis having the computer generate faxes.

I asked Jeannie Gorman to try to think of everything she hated about faxing insertion orders. She told me that she has to fax about one in ten by hand because they do not go through. While I was in the computer room I heard several busy signals.

The Disk Crash: In all of the time that TSI worked with IBM midrange systems, only one catastrophic disk failure2 ever occurred. It happened at Proffitt’s in late November or early December of 2000, only a few months after Marianne Jonas had moved to Tennessee from Jackson, MS.

One problem with IBM midrange and mainframe computers was that they were so reliable that users sometimes took them for granted. When I set up the system for Proffitt’s I programmed backup jobs that ran every night. All files used by AdDept were saved to tape. A different tape was used every night. They were recycled weekly. So, if there was a failure on Thursday, they could restore from the Wednesday night tape. If, for some reason that tape could not be used, the Tuesday night tape could be used, and so on. Total system saves were done whenever a new version of the operating system or a new set of PTFs4 was installed.

The process could not be completely automated. Someone had to change the tape every day and check to make sure that the backup completed normally.

Every multi-user system must have some method to prevent one user from overriding what another user has just done. On the AS/400 this was done at the record level. So, if one person was working on an ad or an invoice, other users were prohibited from deleting or changing information about that ad or invoice while the first person had the record open for editing. When the user finished working on an item or closed the program, the locked record or records were released. This occasionally caused problems when someone called up a record in a program that allowed editing and left the program open.

IBM’s backup procedure was also affected by locked records. It could be set either to skip backing up the locked files altogether or to back up the previous version of the locked records (called “Save While Active”). The latter sounded like a good idea, but it ran the risk of leaving some files out of sync with others. Besides, the backup was only really useful if all the files on it were complete.

When the disk drive was reported faulty, IBM replaced it with a new one. At that point it was discovered that the backup tapes for every day of the previous week were incomplete. The last usable backup was from the system save tape from more than a month earlier. Evidently no one had been checking the backup logs.

Of course,I changed planes in Atlanta.

When these facts were reported to TSI I ordered an “all hands on deck” response. The problem must have been discovered on a Friday. Jamie made a reservation for me to fly to Alcoa in time for business hours on Monday. Denise Bessette5 and I worked out a plan for getting as much of the data as possible back on the system while retaining the system’s integrity. We also devised ways of checking the consistency of the data and printing lists of records that should have matched but did not.

When I arrived at Proffitt’s Marianne escorted me to a conference room, closed the door, and screamed at me for a very long time. She said that it was irresponsible of me not to tell the people involved how to check the tapes. I explained that I had shown the people at Proffitt’s how to do this, and I had shown the two IT people whom she had designated how to perform this task at McRae’s. I also showed her the letter that I had sent to all of the divisions emphasizing how important it was to check the backup logs. It also explained the service that TSI offered for $150 per month whereby a TSI employee would sign on and check the logs every morning. Employees in the advertising department were notified if anything was amiss. Parisian was the only division that purchased this service.

Marianne was not persuaded or even mollified in the slightest by any of these facts, but she let me go on with my work to salvage as much as possible. The notes below include a lot of technical jargon, but at least they show how much effort I made to righten the ship. I have inserted footnotes to explain a few items.

Proffitt’s Recovery Journal

1. Sandy located all of the files missing from the save tape.

2. I used CHGJOB to bring all of the missing files up to speed.

3. I created records on the season file 6 for 001, 002, 011, and 012.

4. I deleted all logical files7 with 00 in them. These files were ones on the system save tape that were overridden by the ones on the nightly save tape.

5. I deleted all logical files whose source had been changed since 1/1/01. I then created them again.

6. I wrote a program named CRTPROFJCS to create DPJCSUM from DPJCSXMO. I ran it for 001, 002, 011, 012, and 021.

7. I created a logical file named DAACTSTAD2 to use in my program to create ads in 001 and following.

8. Dave Weeast left Jim a message that I should IPL8. I did so.

9. I used SQL to set the values of the latest projections in DPJCSUM to the sum of the open purchase orders plus the actual invoices for 001, 002, 011, 012, and 021. I did not change the original estimates. I tried to explain this to Marianne and to find out whether I should, but I couldn’t get her to understand what I was talking about.

10. I set up the user profile and the directory entry for Marianne, Ivy, and Phyllis Compton. These were the only people that had records in DAUSERS but no user profile.

11. I change the system value QINACTIV to 180. I also scheduled a job to end and start the interactive subsystem at 1 a.m. Bill9 said that we should do both of these things.

12. Marianne seemed to think that the store cost accounting would be worthless, but I still think that it is better than nothing for 002 and for the past.

13. Dave Weeast could not get the Mac network to come up. Daniel Moore10 came in at noon on Monday. Evidently it was never plugged back in. After he plugged it in it worked OK.

14. The HP network printer did not work. The IP address was wrong. I got the new one from Daniel and gave it to Dave Weeast. He changed the address, and it worked fine.

15. I changed DAACTSTAD2 to sort by expense class and month before ad number, so I could do a month at a time.

16. After a great many false starts I was able to get a program called CRTPROFADS to create the ROP ads for 011. It did not put in headlines. I set the columns and inches to 1 each. I set the ad type to 2 (B&W). I used defaults for everything else, borrowing the code from DM021 and DM041. I used storewide as the principal participant and assigned it 100% of the costs.

17. I wrote a query named ROPSEQ10 to extract the first pub on every ad. The results were stored in FEB01ROP, MAR01ROP, etc.

18. I wrote a program named RPFIXCI to calculate the column inches for each ad. It also deduced the ad type – black & white (2), one-color (6), or full color. I then changed the ad types in option 9 for the color ads and the size in option 1 for all ads.

19. I wrote a query named ACTST0011M to get the costs for each insertion in DAACTST. I wrote a second query named CHK0011M to compare this file with DMPSDET and report the discrepancies. I then fixed the obvious ones and kept the short list of the remaining ones.

20. I ran CRTPROFADS and RPFIXCI for February and March. I also did step 19 for both months. The March files and queries have 0012 instead of 0011.

21. The CPU attention light seems to be permanently on with SRC A6001730. Dave Weeast said that it is was OK.

22. Marianne complained about getting stuck in the “Cost” column in DM029 if she accidentally puts something there. I changed DM029S to accept blank, which is what they put in 90% of the time any way.

23. Jeannie did not put in a tape on Monday night, so we could not check the backup. She did put one in on Tuesday.

24. On Monday I worked in an office that had been turned into a shrine to Dale Earnhart. On Tuesday I worked in the closet in which they keep the AS/400. No kidding.

Issues

1. Marianne would like to be able to lock quantities in DM025.

2. I only got through March 2001. I ran CRTPROFAD3 but got no farther.

While I was at Proffitt’s I spent a little time researching what could have caused this problem. I was pretty sure that everyone turned off their terminals or PC’s before leaving every evening. I was quite certain that no one ever worked so late that their session would overlap the period scheduled for the backup. Moreover, there were only a few other scheduled jobs, and none of them locked records for important files.

Eventually I discovered that one person—a Mac user—did not close active AS/400 sessions before turning off the computer. The third-party emulation software running on the Macs, unlike the PC software that had been written by IBM, failed to notify the AS/400 that the session had ended abnormally. So, the job was still running, and records were locked. That user was Marianne herself.

When I left on Tuesday evening, I thought that the system was in pretty good shape. I left Marianne with a list of the ads that were still inconsistent and told her what needed to be done to fix them.

My recollection is that instead of proceeding as I suggested she decided to delete a large number of ads and have her employees key them in from scratch. That, of course, was her right.

Needless to say, TSI sent an invoice to Proffitt’s for the two days that I spent there. We did not bill them for any of the employees’ time. Marianne refused to pay the invoice. She insisted that the whole mess was TSI’s fault, and Proffitt’s would not pay.

The next time that I was in Alcoa I asked for a meeting with the man (whose name I do not recall) who replaced Don Alexander as Senior VP. I explained the situation to him. The invoice was promptly paid. I never mentioned anything about this to Marianne, and she never said anything to me. Our relationship thereafter was cordial but a little distant.

The Atmosphere:The trip to try to recover Proffitt’s files was no fun, but I went there a number of times, and I had quite a few memorable moments. I usually stayed at the Hampton Inn that was near the airport but not so near that the air traffic disturbed me. One night I was pleasantly surprised to see that I was the Guest of Honor. I received a basket of fruit and, I think, a bottle of wine.

My favorite place to eat was within walking distance of the Hampton Inn. Here is what I wrote about El Sazon11 in September of 1999:

I treated myself to chicken chimichanga last night at El Sazon, a nice little family-run Mexican restaurant within walking distance of the hotel. It came with rice, beans, guacamole, pico de gallo, chips and salsa. I also ordered iced tea with a free refill. My bill was $8.34 with tax. Things are a little cheaper here.

I wonder what you can get for $8.34 today.

My favorite place in all of Tennessee was Springbrook Park, which was about halfway between the Hampton Inn and Proffitt’s. It contained a 1.4 mile dirt path that wound through some very interesting scenery. I vividly remember jogging there nearly every night while listening to opera arias on my CD player or Walkman. Here is how I described one of those experiences:

I had a delightful seven-mile run yesterday evening. It was close to 70 with a gentle breeze. I love running in Springbrook Park – through the woods, alongside the brook, around the fountain, across the wooden bridge, up towards the playground. A few dog walkers, a few amateur joggers who never seem to do more than one lap, a few strollers (mostly in pairs), a lady just sitting in the sun on one of the many wrought iron benches, and two adolescent girls using a jar to catch something in the stream and then — on the next lap — painting each others’ faces with mud divert my attention momentarily from Professor Greenberg’s12 dissection of Verdi. The very end of the path is steeply uphill. On the last lap the tape had run out, and my calves started to cramp, but I liked the feeling. It meant that I was pressing just enough.

The atmosphere at the Proffitt’s building was also remarkable. The shrine to Dale Earnhardt had a serious competitor for most unusual workspace in the advertising department. One lady’s cubicle was filled to the brim with Warner Brothers cartoon characters—cutouts and stuffed versions of Bugs, Porky, Sylvester, and all the others.

In 1998 the University of Tennessee, located in nearby Knoxville, won the national championship in football. At the beginning of the 1999 season enthusiasm for the prospects of the Vols was at a feverish pitch, and Proffitt’s participated. Here is what I wrote about the most obvious manifestation.

Proffitt’s has put up a whiteboard across from the lunch room. Employees are encouraged to write their predictions for the Tennessee-Florida game. All day long yesterday people were standing around the board, which has also sprouted derogatory comments about various Southeast Conference schools.

After Marianne Jonas arrived, the atmosphere in the department became more serious. On the first occasion in which she invited me to Alcoa she did not let me rent a car. Instead she told me to stay at the Hilton at the airport. She personally drove to the airport and picked me up the next morning. I complained to her that my room was a very short distance from the end of the runway where the delivery service planes departed from between 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning. I got very little sleep because of the roar of their engines.

I needed to use cabs to get back and forth to the hotel for the rest of that trip, but thereafter she let me rent a car and stay at the much cheaper Hampton Inn.

Epilogue: In 2005 Saks Inc. sold the Proffitt’s and McRae’s stores to Belk13. The administrative offices in Alcoa were closed. Within a year all of those stores were converted to Belk stores or closed.

To the left is a photo of the Belk store in Foothills Mall in Maryville, TN. It was formerly a Proffitt’s.

1, McGhee Tyson Airport serves the greater Knoxville area. It is located south of the city in the town of Alcoa, which was named for its biggest employer, Alcoa Corporation.

2. My on and (mostly) off relationship with my sister Jamie is addressed in several blog entries. My relationship with the Lisella family is detailed here. The big crisis that developed shortly after her modem incident is described here.

3. Later versions of the AS/400 circumvented this problem using a technique called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) by which a set of disk drives could be recovered from redundant information on the remaining drives when one failed.

4. PTF is one of hundreds of three-letter abbreviations used by IBM. It stands for Program Temporary Fix. Every few months IBM would release a new set of PTFs for problems in the operating system or in IBM-provided programs.

5. More information about Denise can be found here and in many other blog entries.

6. The season file had two seasons per year. 001 was the spring season of 2000; 002 was the fall season of 2000. The two seasons that began with 01 were for 2001. Thus there was a mixture of past, present, and future on the file.

7. A “logical file” does not contain data. It contains pointers to data that may be sorted in a different order and may not include all of the records.

8. Dave Weeast was in charge of all AS/400’s for Proffitt’s Inc. More information about him can be found here. IPL, which stands for Initial Program Load, is IBM-speak for rebooting the system.

9. I am not sure who Bill is, maybe Bill Giardina, who worked in IT at McRae’s. That installation is described here.

10. I don’t remember Daniel Moore.

11. El sazon means “the seasonings”.

12. Robert Greenberg made a series of recordings for The Teaching Company (which subsequently changed its name to The Great Courses). They analyzed various aspects of classical music and opera. Sue Comparetto and I also attended a few lectures that he gave in association with performances by the Hartford Symphony Orchestra.

13. The advertising department at Belk was in a huge complex in Charlotte, NC. It used AdDept to manage its advertising. The details are posted here.

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

Posted on by
7

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.

1995 December: Hawaii Trip Part 1

Posted on by
4

Doug, Mike and Sue in Oahu. Continue reading →

In the second half of 1995 Doug Pease, TSI’s Director of Marketing, had been in fairly constant communication with Karen Anderson, the Advertising Director at Liberty House, a chain of department stores in Hawaii. One day he came into the equipment room, which also served as my office, and told me that Karen asked for someone from TSI to fly to Honolulu to show the AdDept system (described here) to them. We arranged to meet with them on two days in the first week of December.

I was very excited about this opportunity, not so much for the potential business as for the chance to go to Hawaii. Sue and I had been through a very rough period (as described here), but the one thing that we really both liked to do was to travel to new places. Moreover, the weather would be starting to get nasty in New England, and it was almost never nasty in Hawaii.1 I decided to extend our stay in Hawaii to allow enough time to sample all the islands.

I went to Barnes & Noble on the way home the evening that I learned about the trip and purchased two books: The Maverick Guide to Hawaii and Kauai Trails, written by Kathy Morey. I had determined from previous trips that the more that I planned a trip the more that I enjoyed it. Sue and I did a really good job of planning this one.

Doug was not very happy that Sue was coming along. He worried that her presence would be a distraction to the main purpose, which was to land another AdDept client. I listened to his concerns, but I was not about to tell Sue that she had to stay home.

I tried to persuade Doug to take some time at the end and make a vacation out of it as we were doing, but he said that he needed to get back to his family. So, Doug scheduled a separate flight back to Connecticut by himself.

On the morning of our scheduled departure, neither Sue nor her car were around. I called her at her business in Springfield, MA, that she called Dance Space. She said that she had been working on the wiring all night. I told her that it was almost time to leave. She had no idea what time it was.

I later came to understand that Sue’s approach to long-distance travel was to leave exhausted, sleep fitfully on the airplane, and totally crash upon landing. Needless to say, this was not my approach. I did not want to waste one second of daylight in Hawaii.

The three of us flew together from Bradley to Honolulu. It was a very long trip, but we gained five hours, and so, despite the time lost in the layover in Los Angeles, it was still daylight when we landed. I fell in love with Hawaii the instant that we landed. There were palm trees on the airport grounds, the terminal was, for the most part, defiantly open to the elements, and the weather was perfect—sunny, dry, and around 80°.

The Honolulu airport was noteworthy for many things. One that I remember clearly was the ubiquitous stands that contained booklets and leaflets describing things to do in Oahu. I later discovered that similar stands at the airports on the “neighbor islands”. We soon learned not to put too much stock in the recommendations in the booklets, which seemed mostly limited to the heaviest advertisers.

We rented a car and drive to our hotel. The “Interstates” in Hawaii start with the letter H rather than I. It is a safe bet that the two systems will not connect any time soon. I don’t remember the name of the hotel, but I am pretty certain that it had free parking and was near the canal ,only a few blocks north of Waikiki. It was not luxurious, but it seemed nice enough to us. I remember that our room had a balcony, which in Hawaii is called a lanai (lah NIE).

The business visit: I think that we did the demo at IBM’s office before we talked with the people at Liberty House. I much preferred to arrange the visit in the other order. Perhaps we could only get time at IBM on the first day. Karen was extremely positive about the system after my presentation. She also told us that we did not need to wear suits at the Liberty House office. She said that most people there wore “aloha-wear”. We wore suits.

We learned the next day at the Liberty House headquarters in downtown Honolulu that the chain had two types of stores: large department stores that were equivalent to the regional department stores on the mainland, and much smaller boutique stores that catered to tourists. The newest department stores was actually on Guam.

At the end of our meetings we told Karen that it had been snowing when we left Connecticut. She said that she would really like to see it. I told her that she could have it. She insisted, “But it’s so beautiful.”

I replied, “Well, it’s white, if that is what you like, but that’s only for the first day or two, and it sometimes stays around for weeks or even months turning dirtier and uglier by any standard.”

A ;arge Liberty House store was in the Ala Moana shopping center on the southern side of Honolulu. This shopping center was essentially just like a mall on the mainland except that this one has no roof over the interior courtyard. People in Hawaii are not afraid of “Liquid Sunshine” even when shopping. Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus, and Nordstrom have stores there, and there are innumerable boutique stores.

While Doug and I were in meetings, Sue explored Honolulu. At the time she was really into ballroom dancing. She walked to a place near the hotel that had a famous dance floor. I can’t say that I was sorry to miss that visit.

The pitch to Liberty House went as well as could be expected. When we got back to New England, we sent them a proposal, and Karen put in a request for funding. I had every hope for a second trip to paradise to install, train, and investigate a few things that Sue and I had missed. Unfortunately, Liberty House’s corporate management imposed a freeze on capital spending. In fact, Liberty House declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1998, and when it emerged from bankruptcy in 2001, it was acquired by Federated Department Stores and merged into Macy’s West, an enthusiastic AdDept client.

So, the return trip to Hawaii was delayed for twenty-three years. That adventure is described here.

Fun on Oahu: We knew that we needed to get our Luau Cards punched. No one is allowed to leave Hawaii without attending one. I think that we asked Karen and her staff which of the luaus we should was the best. They all recommended Germaine’s, and insisted that it was worth the drive.

Sue, Doug, and I attended, and we all had a good time. The entertainment was pretty good. The food was plentiful if not spectacular, and, best of all, we learned that we had not missed anything by never eating poi. I am sure that Sue took many photos, but I could not find them. Germaine’s website contains an abundance of photos. They can be viewed here.

ABC stores could be found on almost every block of the touristy parts of Honolulu. I spent some time buying postcards to make acquaintances back in New England envious. It occurred to me that people in Hawaii probably never receive postcards. So, I bought one and sent it to Karen.

Notes on the images displayed here: I am virtually certain that somewhere within the house at 41 North St. in Enfield, CT, are hundreds of stunning photographs of this trip. I have only located two of them, and those two have been on display in a collage on the wall of my office for at least ten years. They have faded badly, to the point that their only real use now is to prove that I am not making all of this up.

So, I have been forced to use images copied from the Internet. If anyone objects to the use of any of the images, I will remove the objectionable ones.

Sue, Doug and I drove to the memorial in Pearl Harbor. It was OK, but I did not feel like tearing up or anything. I enjoyed the drive past Aloha stadium better.

Doug and I climbed to the top of Diamond Head one morning. At the time I was in pretty good shape from running, and Doug did a lot of riding on his mountain bike. So, neither of us held up the other. The view from the top was easily worth the effort.

After Doug flew back to New England, Sue and I stayed on the heavily populated island of Oahu. That adventure is described here.

1. Hurricane Iniki had struck the islands (especially Kauai) very hard in 1992. Otherwise you could count on periods of rain every day in the rain forests in the center of every island and clear and warm weather everywhere else.