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1991-2012 TSI: AdDept: The Whiffs

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A few notable failures. Continue reading →

We had a very good record of closing AdDept sales. Most of the whiffs fell into one of two categories:

  1. Divisions of Federated Department Stores. Our relationships with various Federated divisions are described in detail here. They are not included in this entry.
  2. Companies that did not advertise enough to justify a high-quality multi-user centralized database. We actually sold the AdDept system to a couple of these anyway.

TSI’s first efforts to market AdDept were concentrated around New York and New England. I figured that there were not very many retailers who could afford the system to keep track of advertising, but, then again, I did not really expect to justify the cost of the system at Macy’s in the very first module that we activated—ad measurement.

The strip mall in which the Enfield store was located was named after Caldor.

Our first attempt was a quintessential whiff. Kate Behart (much more about her here) had been in contact with someone in the advertising department at Caldor, a discount department store based in Norwalk, CT. Kate arranged for me to give a presentation to them at the IBM office in Norwalk. Of course, we had to make sure that the office had the BASIC program, and I had to install both the AdDept programs and some data that I had dummied up from Macy’s real data.

My presentation was flawless. The only problem that I encountered that day was the lack of an audience. No one from Caldor showed up. We never did find out why not. Kate called them repeatedly, but no one returned her calls. It may have had something to do with the fact that in 1989, the year that we installed the first AdDept system at Macy’s, the May Company sold Caldor to a group of investment houses.

Caldor went out of business in 1999.

I also paid a visit to another local retailer, Davidson and Leventhal, commonly known as D&L. Theirs were not exactly department stores, but they had fairly large stores that sold both men’s and women’s clothing. So, they had quite a few departments. The stores had a good reputation locally. The headquarters was in New Britain, CT.

This D&L ad was on the back cover of the issue of Northeast that featured my story (described here).

The advertising department only employed three or four employees. They wanted to know if they could use the computer for both D&L ads and ads for Weathervane, another store that they owned, as well. That seemed vaguely feasible to me, and so I said they could. In fact, we later did this for Stage Stores and for the Tandy Corporation, but both of those companies were much larger, and I had a much better understanding by then of what it entailed.

I didn’t even write up a proposal for D&L. The person with whom I spoke made it clear that what we were offering was way out of their price range.

D&L went out of business in 1994, only a few years after our meeting. Weathervane lasted until 2005.

I have only a vague recollection of doing a demonstration at IBM’s big facility in Waltham, MA, for a chain of auto parts retailers from Phoenix. The name of the chain at the time was Northern Automotive. My recollection is that I spoke with a man and a woman. If they told me how they heard about AdDept, I don’t remember it. After a very short time it was clear that AdDept was much more than the company needed. Although Northern Automotive had a lot of stores with four different logos, it only ran one ad per week. So there was really not much to keep track of. I had the distinct impression that the demo was just an excuse for the couple to take a vacation in New England on the company’s dime.

I don’t remember either of their names, but the experience list on LinkedIn for a guy named Paul Thompson (posted here) makes him a strong candidate. Northern Automotive changed its name to CSK Auto, Inc. not long after our meeting. In 2008 CSK was purchased by O’Reilly Auto Parts.

Won’t Paul be surprised to be busted thirty years later in an obscure blog?

Tom Moran (more details here) set up an appointment with employees of Genovese Drugs at its headquarters in Melville, NY. The two of us drove to Long Island to meet with them.

I probably should have talked to someone there over the phone before we left. The only impression that I remember getting from the meeting was that they were not at all serious about getting a system. We had a great deal of trouble getting them to describe what the advertising department did at the time and what they wanted to do. I was frustrated because I had considered this a relatively cheap opportunity to learn how chains of pharmacies handled their advertising. It was actually a waste of time and energy.

Tom tried to follow up, but he got nowhere. We did not submit a proposal.

J.C. Penney bought the company in 1998 and rebranded all the stores as Eckerd pharmacies.

Woodies’ flagship store in downtown Washington.

While I was working on the software installation at Hecht’s in 1991, Tom Moran coordinated our attempt to land the other big department store in the Washington, DC, area, Woodward & Lothrop, locally known as Woodies. I found a folder that contains references to correspondence with them. Tom worked with an IBM rep named Allison Volpert1. Our contacts at Woodies were Joel Nichols, the Divisional VP, and Ella Kaszubski, the Production Manager.

As I browsed through the file, I detected a few warning signs. The advertising department was reportedly in the process of asking for capital for digital photography, which was in its (very expensive) infancy in 1991. Tom was told that they hoped to “slip in” AdDept as part of the photography project. Furthermore, the fact that we were not dealing with anyone in the financial area did not bode well.

Someone wrote this book about Woodies.

Finally, we had no choice other than to let IBM propose the hardware. Their method of doing this always led to vastly higher hardware and system software costs than we considered necessary. I found a copy of IBM’s configuration. The bottom line was over $147,000 and another $48,600 for IBM software. This dwarfed what Hecht’s had spent. If the cost of AdDept was added in, they probably were facing a purchase price of over a quarter of a million dollars! That is an awful lot to “slip in”.

I don’t recall the details, but I remember having an elegant lunch during this period with someone from Woodies in the restaurant of the main store. It may have been Joel Nichols. It seemed like a very positive experience to me. He seemed eager to automate the department.

We lost contact with Woodies after early 1992. I seriously doubt that the advertising department even purchased the photography equipment that they had coveted. The early nineties were very bad for retailers. By 1994 the owner of Woodies and the John Wanamaker chain based in Philadelphia declared bankruptcy and then sold the stores to JC Penney and the May Company. Many of the stores were rebranded as Hecht’s or Lord and Taylor.

In some ways Fred Meyer, a chain of department stores based in Portland, OR, seemed like a perfect match for TSI. At the time they were almost unique, and we usually excelled at programming unusual ideas. Their approach to retail included what are now called “hypermarket” (department store plus groceries) stores, although they definitely had some much smaller stores as well. The one in downtown Portland was very small. I really thought that we had a good shot at getting this account, largely due to the fact that the IT department already had one or two AS/400’s. So, the hardware cost would probably be minimal.

She would be lucky to make it in nine hours; there were no direct flights.

I was asked to work with a consultant who, believe it or not, commuted from Buffalo, NY, to Portland, OR. I can’t remember her name. She knew computer systems but virtually nothing about what the advertising department did. She wanted me to tell her what AdDept could do, and she would determine whether the system would work for them. I have always hated it when a “gatekeeper” was placed between me and the users. I understand that they do not trust the users to make a good decision, but advertising is very complicated, and almost no IT consultants know much about it. I would not have minded if the consultant sat in on interviews that I conducted with people in advertising.

If I was allowed to meet with anyone from the scheduling or financial areas of the department, I do not remember it at all. I do remember spending an afternoon with the head of the company’s photography studio. AdDept had a module (that no one used) for managing shoots and another (used by Macy’s East) for managing the merchandise that is loaned to the studio for a shoot.

I remember the photo studio guy mentioning that they also did billable work for outside clients. He mentioned Eddie Bauer by name. He could not believe that I had never heard of it/him.

I probably botched this opportunity. Before agreeing to come out the second time, I should have insisted on meeting with whoever placed their newspaper ads and the person in charge of advertising finance. I did not want to step on the toes of the lady from Buffalo, but I probably should have been more aggressive.

Kate accompanied me on one of these trips. We probably flew on Saturday to save on air fare. On Sunday we drove out to Mt. Hood, where we saw the lodge and the glacier, and visited Multnomah Falls on the way back.

Freddie’s was acquired by Kroger in 1998, but the logos on the stores were maintained. There still is a headquarters in Portland, but I don’t know if ads are still created and/or placed there.

Aside from our dealings with Federated divisions2 TSI had very few whiffs during the period that Doug Pease (described here) worked for us. After one of our mailings Doug received a call from Debra Edwards3, the advertising director at May Ohio, a May Company division that had its headquarters in Cleveland. Doug and I flew Continental non-stop to Cleveland and took the train into downtown. My recollection was that we were able to enter the store from the underground train terminal.

The presentation and the demo went very well. I am quite certain that we would have gotten this account were it not for the fact that in early 1993 the May Company merged the Ohio division with Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh. Management of the stores was transferred to Pittsburgh. Debra was hired as advertising director at Elder-Beerman Stores.

We stayed overnight in Cleveland and had time to visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which was right down the street from the huge May Co. building. I cannot say that I was greatly impressed with the exhibits.

A few years later Doug and I undertook a second trip to Cleveland to visit the headquarters of Sherwin Williams. Doug had talked extensively with the lady who was the advertising director there. He was very enthusiastic about the prospect of making this sale. By that time Doug had already closed a few big deals for us, and so I trusted his judgment. However, I could not understand how a company that really only sold one product could possibly need AdDept. Yes, they have thousands of stores, but how many ads do they run?

I don’t honestly remember anything about our discussion with them. Needless to say, Doug did not close this one, although he never stopped trying to revive it.

I don’t really count it as a whiff, but Doug was unable to close the deal with Liberty House in Honolulu after our epic trip to Hawaii in December of 1995. The details are recounted here.

I drove past two of the stores in Texas, but I never went inside.

Just as Marvin Elbaum had backed out of his contract with TSI for a GrandAd system in 1986 (as described here), so also one company signed an agreement for TSI’s AdDept system and, before we had installed the system, changed its mind. There was one big difference in the two situations. The second company was the Tandy Corporation, which had actually ordered installations of AdDept for all three of its retail divisions. At the last minute the company decided to close down Incredible Universe, one of the three divisions. The other two companies became TSI clients in 1997, as is described here.

It was not a big loss for TSI. IU was one of a kind. Its stores were gigantic multi-story combinations of electronics and theater. There were only seventeen stores, and only six were ever profitable. Those six were sold to Fry’s Electronics. The other eleven were sold to real estate developers at pennies on the dollar.

I did a demo for Mervyn’s California, a department store based in Hayward, CA. I think that I must have done the demo after finishing a training/consulting trip at Macy’s West in San Francisco. I cannot imagine that I would have flown out to the west coast to do a demo without spending a day or two gathering specs.

The IBM office nearest to Hayward was in Oakland. I took BART in the late afternoon from San Francisco to Oakland. There was quite a bit of excitement at the Holiday Inn at which I was staying. Someone had been murdered on the street in front of the hotel the previous night. There was one other very peculiar thing about this stay. I checked into a Holiday Inn with no difficulty, but I checked out of a different hotel (maybe a Ramada?). The hotel had been sold, and its ownership had changed while I was asleep.

The demo went fine. The guy who had contacted me—his name was Thiery or something like that—liked what he saw. However, the sale never advanced any further. This was almost always what happened whenever I got talked into doing a demo without taking at least a day to interview the potential users. At the time that I did the demo Mervyn’s was, unbeknownst to me, owned by Target. This might have explained the lack of progress. Target may have been restricting or rejecting any capital purchases at the time.

Mervyn’s was sold to some vulture capitalists in 2004. A much smaller version of the chain went out of business in 2009.

For some reason Doug and I once had a very short meeting with the president of Gottschalks, a chain of department stores based in Fresno, CA. He told Doug and me that he would get all of the other members of the Frederick Atkins Group to install AdDept. This organization (absolutely never abbreviated by its initials) somehow enabled its members to shop for foreign and domestic merchandise as a group. Nearly every department store that was not owned by the May Company or Federated belonged to it.

A few years after he made this promise he (or someone else at Gottschalks) arranged for me to speak before the members at one of their conventions in Naples, FL. I flew to Fort Meyers and rented a car from there. Naples was beautiful and reeked of new money. I gave my little spiel, but I did not have an opportunity to interact with any of the members of the audience. So, I did not get any direct feedback.

We eventually did sign up a few members of the group—notably the Bon-Ton (described here) and Elder-Beerman (described here). I don’t know whether my speech had any effect.

I think that the Frederick Atkins Group is defunct in 2021. The references to it that I could find on the Internet were all from decades past.

In (I think) 1999 Doug Pease and I made an unproductive trip to Columbus, OH, to talk with the IT director of of Value City about the possibility of installing the AdDept system for use by the advertising department. That adventure is described here.

First stop: Norfolk.

TSI got a phone call from a chain of furniture stores in coastal Virginia, Norfolk4, as I recall. As part of my crazy automotive support trip, I stopped by to talk with the advertising director at this company on my journey from Home Quarters Warehouse in Virginia Beach to Hecht’s in Arlington. I spent a couple of hours with him. When I discovered that the company had only three stores, I knew that this was a mistake. I told him that our software could address his problems, but the cost and effort would not be worth it for either of us. I advised him to hire someone who was a wiz with spreadsheets.

I think that I got a free cup of coffee out of it.

I can’t tell you what happened to the company thereafter because I don’t even remember its name.

We had two reasonably hot leads in 2000. I had to handle both of them myself. The first was at Bealls department store, which has its headquarters in Bradenton, FL. This was another situation is which I had to deal with the IT department rather than the advertising department. I am pretty sure that the company already had at least one AS/400. I have a few notes from this trip, but it is not clear whether I intended to do the demo on their system or on one at a nearby IBM office.

In any case I think that there was a technical problem that prevented a successful installation of the software needed for the demo. So, I had to improvise, and I did not get to spend much time with the people who would have benefited from the system. The whole thing made me very depressed.

I had some free time, and so I went to the beach. I stopped at a Jacobson’s store to buy a tee shirt to wear at the beach. The cheapest tee shirts in the store cost $100!

The beach was lovely, and it was unbelievably empty. The weather was pretty nice. A beach in Connecticut would have been packed in this type of weather.

All of these stores are gone.

We did not get the account, but the tale has an interesting coda. Bealls is still in business today. For years Bealls could not expand outside of the state of Florida because a different store with exactly the same name was already using it in other states. These Bealls stores were run by Stage Stores, a long-time AdDept client that was based in Houston. Stage Stores was still using AdDept when TSI went out of business in 2014.

In 2019 Stage announced that it was changing all of its stores into Gordmans, its off-price logo (which did not exist while I was working with them). When the company declared bankruptcy Bealls purchased, among other things, the right to use the Bealls name nationwide.

I remember going to Barneys New York in late 2000 to talk with someone in advertising. I also have discovered three emails that I sent to Christine Carter, who was, I think, either in charge of the advertising department or in charge of the financial side. Barneys only had twenty-two stores, and that included some off-price outlets. I don’t know how much they actually advertised.

Flagship store on 60th Street.

We never heard from them after my last email, which emphasized how easily AdDept could be adapted to differing needs even for companies the size of Barneys. By this time the very affordable AS/400 model 150 had been introduced. It would have been perfect for them.

I think that Barneys is dead or nearly so in 2021. All of the stores in the U.S have been closed, and even the “Barneys New York” brand was sold to Saks Fifth Avenue. However, the company also had a Japan division, which is evidently still operational.

I received a very unexpected phone some time in 2001 or 2002. It came from a man who had formerly worked at Saks Fifth Avenue and had taken a job as a Vice President at Sears. He knew that the advertising department at Saks had been doing things with its AdDept system that Sears’ advertising department seemed utterly incapable of. He invited me to the Sears headquarters in Hoffman Estates, IL, to investigate the possibility of installing AdDept at Sears.

At about the same time I had been in contact with the agency in a nearby town that Sears used for buying newspaper space and negotiating newspaper contracts. They wanted to talk with me about the possibility of working together. The agency’s name was three initials. I think that one was an N, but I am not sure.5

I arranged to spend consecutive days at the two places. It was cold on the day that I visited the agency. I learned that it recruited new clients by claiming that they could negotiate better rates for them because they also represented Sears. I suspected that this was baloney. Sears was a bid dog nationwide, but the amount of newspaper ads that they bought in any individual market was not that impressive. They were just in a lot of markets.

After the people explained the services that they offered to clients, I remarked that about 10 percent of what they did overlapped with about 10 percent of what we did. Privately I could not imagine that any of our clients who would benefit from their services.

I told them about AxN, our Internet product. They informed me that the papers did not want to sign on to their website for insertion orders. Of course, they wouldn’t, and they had nothing to hold over the papers.

We ended the meeting with the usual agreement to stay in touch and look for synergies, but privately I considered them the enemy.

I did not see a parking structure. Maybe I entered on the wrong side of the pond.

The next day was bitterly cold, and there was a strong wind. I located the sprawling Sears complex and parked my rented car in a lot that was already nearly full. I had to walk a long way to the main building, and I have never felt as cold as I did on that walk.

I could hardly believe it when I walked into the building. The ground floor was billed with retail establishments—a drug store, a coffee shop, a barber shop, and many more. I had to take the escalator up to get to Sears. I was met there by the woman with whom I had been in contact. She was from the IT department.

OK, now I get it. Our problem was that we did not have enough architects.

She took me up to meet the “advertising team”. Six or eight people were assembled in the room, and they all had assigned roles. I remember that one was the “system architect”, and one was the “database manager”. I almost could not suppress my amusement. What did all these people do? There was no system, and there certainly was no database. At TSI I handled essentially all the roles that everyone at the table described.

They asked me some questions about the AdDept system. When I told them that it ran on the AS/400, the system architect asked me if that system was not considered obsolete. I scoffed at this notion and explained that IBM had introduced in the AS/400 64-bit RISC processors that were state-of-the-art. I also said that, as far as I knew, the AS/400 was the only system that was build on top of a relational database. That made it perfect for what AdDept did.

I wonder how many “OS/2 shops” there were in the world.

They informed me that Sears was an OS/26 shop. I did not know that there was such a thing. In the real world Windows had already left OS/2 in its dust by that time. In all my time dealing with retailers I never heard anyone else even mention OS/2. It might have been a great idea, but IBM never did a good job of positioning it against Windows.

Besides, just because the corporation endorsed OS/2 should not eliminate consideration of multi-user relational databases where appropriate. The devices with OS/2 could serve as clients.

They explained to me that Sears’ advertising department had hundreds of employees, most of whom served as liaisons with the merchandise managers. Most of the ads were placed by agencies. I presume that the newspaper ads were produced in-house. No one whom I talked with seemed to know. The people on the committee did not seem to know anything about how the department did budgeting or planning.

The competition.

Someone talked about Sears’ competitors. The example cited was Home Depot. I don’t know why this surprised me. I must have been taken in by the “softer side of Sears” campaign a few years earlier.

After the meeting my escort took me to a remarkable room that was dedicated to the advertising project. It was a small theater that had ten or so posters on the wall with big Roman numerals at the top: I, II, III, IV, etc. There were no statues, but otherwise I was immediately struck by the resemblance to the Stations of the Cross that can be found in almost any Catholic church in the world. I asked what the posters represented. The answer was that they were the “phases of the project”. I was stunned by the assumption that the project required “a team” and that it was or indefinite duration. No one ever allowed us more than a month or two to have at least portions of the system up and running.

At some point I was allowed to give my presentation. The man who had worked at Saks attended along with a fairly large number of people. Maybe some were from advertising. I was never allowed to speak with them individually.

I never got to read the advertising department’s Wish Book.

My talk explained that AdDept was a relational database that was specifically designed for retail advertising departments. I described a few of the things for which it had been used by other retailers. I could not do much more than that. I had not been able to talk with any of the people in the department, and the IT people were clearly clueless.

When I returned to Connecticut I wrote to both my escort and the man from Saks. I told both of them that I did not know what the next step might be. I had not been given enough access to the advertising department to make a proposal. The whole experience was surreal. If someone had asked me to return, I would only have done it if I were granted unfettered access to potential users.

No one ever contacted us. I told Doug not to bother following up.

One puzzling whiff occurred during the very short period in which Jim Lowe worked for us. The strange case of Wherehouse Music is explored here.

Perhaps the strangest telephone call from a genuine prospect that I ever received was from Albertsons, a very large retailer with is its headquarters in Boise Idaho. The person who called was (or at least claimed to be) the advertising director there.

I had heard of Albertsons, but I did not know very much about the company. All I knew was that they were a chain of grocery stores in the west. Since advertising for grocery stores is basically limited to one insert/polybag7 per week, they had never seemed to be great prospects for AdDept. However, I never hung up on someone who expressed interest in the system.

The problem was that this lady insisted that I fly out to Boise to meet with her and her crew the next day. I tried to get her to explain what the situation was, but she said that she had no time to talk. She needed to know if I would make the trip. It was a little tempting for a peculiar reason. Idaho was one of the few states8 that I had never visited. Still, this sounded awfully fishy. I passed.

The incredibly bumpy road that Albertsons has traveled is documented on its Wikipedia page, which is available here. I don’t remember when the call from the advertising director came. I therefore have no way of knowing whether she was in charge of advertising for a region, a division, all of the grocery stores, or none of those. I might well have passed up an opportunity that might have extended the life of the company. Who knows? It looked like a goose, and it honked like a goose, but maybe going to Boise would not have been a wild goose chase.

Jeff Netzer, with whom I had worked in the nineties at Neiman Marcus (recounted here), called me one day in 2010. He asked me if I remembered him. I said that I did; he was the Aggie who worked at Neiman’s.

He informed me that he was now working at Sewell Automotive, the largest Cadillac dealership in the Dallas area. He said that they were looking for help in automating their marketing. I was not sure how well AdDept would work in that environment, but I agreed to visit them. His boss promised to buy me a steak dinner.

I flew Southwest to Dallas, and for the first time my plane landed at Love Field. It was much closer to Sewell than DFW would have been.

I found a great deal out about their operation. I doubted that we could do much for the agency for a reasonable amount of money. On my computer I recently found a three-page document dated September 23, 2010, in which I had listed all of the issues that I learned about at Sewell. A woman named Tucker Pressly entered all of their expense invoices into a SQL Server database. It was inefficient, and there were no programs to help them compare with budgets.

The main objective of the marketing department was to make sure that they were taking advantage of all available co-op dollars from Cadillac and other vendors. We could not help with this unless we wrote a new module. I described my reactions to their issues in a letter to Jeff.

I never heard back from Jeff, who left Sewell in 2012. Nobody ever bought me a steak dinner.

Sewell Automotive is still thriving in 2021.

In 2011 or 2012 I received a phone call from a lady from the advertising department at Shopko, a chain of department stores based in Green Bay, WI. I don’t recall her name. She said that she worked for Jack Mullen, whom I knew very well from both Elder-Beerman and Kaufmann’s. Before Doug Pease came to TSI, he had worked for Jack at G. Fox in Hartford.

I flew out to Packer Land to meet with her. They had a very small advertising department. They basically ran circulars in local newspapers on a weekly basis. As I remember, she and one other person ran the business office.

I worked up a proposal for the most minimal AdDept system that I could come up with and sent it to her. When I had not heard from her after a few weeks I called her. She said that the company was downsizing and, in fact, her position was being eliminated.

Jack also left the company in July of 2012. His LinkedIn page is here. Shopko went out of business in 2019.

1. Allison Volpert apparently still works for IBM in 2021. Her LinkedIn page is here.

2. As I write this I can easily visualize Doug stabbing a box with a pencil after a frustrating telephone conversation with someone from a Federated division.

3. I worked fairly closely with Debra Edwards when I installed the AdDept system at Elder-Beerman stores in Dayton, OH. That installation is described here. She was the Advertising Director there. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. The “l” in Norfolk is silent, and the “ol” sounds much more like a short u.

5. I later learned that there were actually two affiliated agencies across the street from one another. I encountered the other one, SPM, in my dealings with Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc., which are detailed here. The agency was still around in 2023. Its webpage is here.

6. In fact IBM stopped updating OS/2 in 2001 and stopped supporting the operating system in 2006. I cannot imagine how Sears dealt with this. I pity their employees with nothing OS/2 experience at Sears on their résumés.

7. Polybags are the plastic bags that hold a group of flyers from diverse retailers. they are ordinarily distributed to people willy-nilly.

8. The others are Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska. I am not certain of Arkansas. I might have gone there with my grandparents when I was a youngster. The only place that I have been in Utah is the Salt Lake City airport.

1996-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Robinsons-May

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May Co. department stores based in North Hollywood, CA. Continue reading →

Robinsons-May was a chain of departments stores owned by the May Company. Its headquarters was in North Hollywood, CA. Most of its stores were in southern California, but eventually the advertising department in NoHo bought space and time for stores with various logos throughout the western states.

Rob-May’s headquarters was in the upper floors of this department store. It had the largest parking lot I had ever seen for one store, much more than needed.

TSI never pitched the AdDept system to the store’s advertising department. In 1996 the May Company decided to install AdDept in the department store divisions that were not already using it—Robinsons-May, Meier & Frank, Kaufmann’s, and Filene’s.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 while the hardware was on order from IBM. We were teaching them about the system design of AdDept, and they were informing us about their policies and expectations for the system.

I later learned that the Northridge earthquake of 1994 had demolished the rest of the 25-acre Laurel Plaza, but Rob-May’s headquarters survived.

Previous May Co. installations had begun 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 always took place at the company’s location.

At some point in 1998 a group of people from Rob-May visited TSI’s office for orientation and training. Those sessions were also attended by people who would be involved with the installation at Meier & Frank (described here). 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 snapped on the occasion of their visit as well as a dozen or so that I took in California. I also found text files containing notes from 1999-2003 that helped me remember some of the details of the installation and other happenings in my trips to southern California.

Rob-May’s training visit at TSI: The training sessions were held in what was ordinarily my office. All of my stuff was moved out. Everyone sat around tables, one of which I ordinarily used for a desk. Training booklets were provided for everyone. The photo to the lett was of one of the first sessions, in which Sandy Sant’Angelo (pink shirt on the right) showed the visitors how to sign on to the AS/400 and how the AdDept screens basically worked. Yes, we were still using “green screens”. We occasionally fielded complaints about them, but seldom from the people who actually used them.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is MF_Table-1024x679.jpg

The photo on the right 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. The other two people on his side of the table were Rusty Hansen1, the Planning Manager in the Rob-May advertising department and Beverly Curtis-Frethy2, the Controller. Across from Rusty was Doug Pease, TSI’s VP of Marketing. I don’t recall the name of the fellow across from Beverly. He might have been in charge of the department’s network. The other three people in the photo were from M&F.

Rusty Hansen was our primary liaison with Rob-May in the critical first few years.

The installation trip: The first of many enjoyable trips to Rob-May occurred a few weeks after the training session in Enfield. Doug and I flew to Los Angeles. from Hartford. We probably changed planes in Chicago. In those days I liked to fly on American Airlines because I could get frequent flyer miles both from the airline and from Avis for rental cars.

On those early trips I usually stayed at the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn3 in the Studio City neighborhood of North Hollywood, but I am pretty certain that Doug and I were advised to stay at the Sheraton in Studio City on the first trip to set up the AdDept system. I found a photo that I took of its entrnce

Robert was also present for at least part of this to provide another user’s perspective and to assist where he could. .

Rob-May treated us to meals with key employees more than once on that first trip and at least once on every subsequent trip. The smiling guy on the right across from Beverly (red coat) was Mario, the Direct Mail Manager. His last name was nowhere in my notes.

The main purpose of the visit was to install the AdDept software in the AS/400 that IBM had delivered. I did all of that myself. The secondary purpose was to make sure that a regimen had been set up whereby the tables that the system needed—newspapers and other vendors, selling departments, the organizational structure for the merchandise, employees, etc. I also needed to show Rusty how to set up user profiles both for the AS/400 and for AdDept and how to deal with the printers and errors reported by the system. Finally Doug and I needed to talk to the managers of the various areas of the advertising department to try to discover special needs and any procedures that were unique to Rob-May. For example, invoices from the Los Angeles Times were recorded in a general ledger account that was different from the one used for all of the other newspapers.

Beverly, Karen, and Robert at Karen’s favorite restaurant in Beverly Hills. Where was Doug?

Finally, and perhaps, most importantly, we got to meet Karen Jones, the Advertising Director. She provided us with insight as to the department’s highest priorities. Karen and I hit it off very well right from the start. She was (unduly) impressed by an analogy that I made: “Memory is to disk as electricity is to magnetism. If you lose power, the system loses what is in memory but retains what is stored magnetically on the disk.”

In retrospect this does not seem like a great pickup line to me, but she definitely became enamored of me and treated me royally whenever I visited Rob-May. I once casually mentioned to some employees at Rob-May that “Karen Jones loves me.” Everyone agreed. I did not think that we made good headway in the first year or two, but Karen always seemed to think that I could do anything.

Sonia.

My goal from the first trip was for the software for one of the media (newspaper, direct mail, or broadcast) produce something useful. It was very important that the system not be regarded as on that they fed a lot of information but got little in return.

As I usually did, I concentrated on printing a schedule for their newspaper advertising and the faxing to some papers of a set of insertion orders. To that end I worked closely with Sonia Ban. I think that there was still work needed on the schedule when I left, but we did manage to send some faxed insertion orders to newspapers, and they were impressed by that.

My home for the week.
View from the courtyard of the BG Hotel.

The new system: For various reasons the people in the IT Department of the May Co. decided that Rob-May’s system should be upgraded in 1999. The original system had been purchased from and installed by IBM. The new system was a model 270, and it was purchased from Savoir Technology Group, a company that was authorized to sell IBM midrange systems. I flew out to Robinsons-May to complete the process by installing the AdDept software on the 270 and migrating the data.

I still have the notes that I sent back to TSI about this trip. At the time American Airlines had a direct flight from Bradley International to LAX. I flew out on a Sunday morning and arrived early enough (gaining three hours) that I could pick up my rental car at Avis, drive to Malibu, the home of my icon, Jim Rockford, and spend some time at the beach.

I went to Topanga State Beach, which is in Malibu. It was pretty nice but cool. I don’t think that it even reached 80 degrees today, and there was a fairly strong breeze from the north. I made a little camp. I lay on my beach towel, listened to my CD’s, finished my Ethan Coen book4, and watched the surfers and the rest of the California scenery. I took a long walk all the way up and down the beach. I got a lot of sun. I think I am as dark now as my last day in Hawaii5. If I had stayed any longer, I would have been sunburned.

I think this was the first time since Hawaii that I have just goofed off during the day for more than an hour.

Incidentally, Malibu is where Jim Rockford parked his trailer on the beach. The Rockford Files is by far my favorite TV show ever. I looked for the trailer, but I didn’t find it6.

Valley Village Park is the green area in the middle. NoHo West is the new name of Laurel Plaza. I usually drove on the 101. The exit went right into Rob-May’s parking lot.

What I discovered on Monday did not meet my expectations. I had started the day at dawn by driving my rental car from the Beverly Garland Hotel to the park that was halfway to Rob-May to get my five mile run in. Then I returned to the hotel, showered, got dressed, ate breakfast, and drove to Rob-May. The following excerpt provides a glimpse into what it was like to be a cowboy coder at the turn of the century.

I expected the system to be set up and the TCP/IP connection established. I figured that I would install AdDept and BASIC. I would also migrate the user profiles and the data libraries from the old box. Instead, I found that the system was still in the box. I had to set it up using the instructions in the box. This went OK. However, when I got to the point at which I had to do a system save, it balked and said that QGPL and QUSRSYS were not installed. I had Rusty look through his boxes to see if he had system software. He did. I spent many hours installing the operating system and PTF’s. I kicked off the system save just before I left.

I don’t suppose there is any great harm. Everyone will have to use the old system tomorrow. Their connectivity consultant is coming in tomorrow. I hope he will be able to tell me how to do the TCP/IP connection.

Keep in mind that I was not (and am not) an engineer. Far from it. I am not good at this type of thing. I am good at designing systems and writing code. Things were still FUBB on Wednesday evening, when I wrote the following.

The problems we had here were cabling. They decided to run the new system on Ethernet rather than Token Ring, which meant that they had to change the hub into which they were plugged. The IT guy had no empty sockets. He unplugged something he thought was unimportant. It brought down the e-mail system. Before he found this out he was out putting out a fire somewhere else. People had a hard time chasing him down.

I don’t know if I got blamed by anyone for the company’s lack of email that day, but it would not surprise me. The dispatch I sent on Friday at least contained some good news.

Yesterday went much better. Their new system is now almost completely functional. I still spent most of the time putting out small fires. I ran CMPPFM last night for every member of QBASSRC to see if I can find any more changes that the black box was missing. Robinson’s new system is incredibly fast. Reports that took over half an hour run in one minute.

I figured out how to copy the system directory entries over to the new box. I had to copy a bunch of files from QUSRSYS that start with QAOKP.

I copied ADDEPT, QGPL, and QUSRSYS from the old machine to the new one and named them ADDEPTOLD, OLDQGPL, and OLDQUSRSYS. Last night I ran the source comparison program on QBASSRC in ADDEPT. I printed out the differences and was surprised at how many there were. I then realized that the old box was a week ahead of the 150 at TSI. I thought for sure that I checked this. I created a change library but there was no time to install it. I will have to do it after hours. This cut down on the number of differences, but there is still be a pretty good number. There must be a flaw in my updating routine.

By Thursday evening Rob-May had successfully used the system for one full day. I left fairly confident that the people in TSI’s office could deal with any remaining glitches. However, one of the last notes that I sent back to the office was prescient.

These guys need a lot of training. Most of them do not know what an error is and what to do about it. Rusty just kind of lets them go on their own, even the ones that he works with.

I flew back on Friday. It was an excruciating experience. Seven and a half hours after I left the hotel I was still in LAX! I wrote the following when we had finally boarded.

LAX, which is my least favorite airport in the country, was playing some kind of shrieking sound over the intercom the last 20 minutes that we were there. I was afraid I would miss an announcement, so I had put my CD player and headphones away. A couple to my left has not one but two babies. They paid for two tickets, but were using two rows! After they made us get off7, the situation became so ridiculous that I took it easier. This lasted until about ten minutes ago when the stewardess whacked my elbow, which was not sticking out at all. At the time it was about 40 degrees in the cabin. After takeoff it went up to about 90. Now it is dropping again.

The new team: The turn of the century brought a lot of changeover among the employees at Rob-May with whom TSI dealt. My notes said that when I came to install the new box, Karen Elmo had been replaced by Heidi Houghton. I have a vague recollection of Karen Elmo, but none of Heidi. The notes also report that I worked with the Co-op Coordinator, Doyle O’Dell, who asked for a report of committed co-op v. actual. I was able to show report #DM594 to him. I took a photo of him; he evidently was happy with the report.

Mary Ng at Rob-May.

The biggest changes happened in 2000. Rusty Hansen was replaced by Mary Ng8, and Beverly Curtis Fethy’s replacement was Steve Ornee9. Mary was the new liaison with TSI, and we worked closely together for several years. Chad Sesser’s title was Newspaper Analyst. He reported to Karen Jones.

The notes that I have from the three-day trip in October of 2000 show that Mary was very direct about what she wanted from AdDept.

Direct mail was on the menu for lunch in the Rob-May cafeteria with (I think) Kyle Levine11, Mary, and Dan Rothbauer12, the Direct Mail Manager.

Mary said that their objectives are to do all of direct mail on AdDept, to pay all invoices on AdDept and to upload them to CAPS10, to use AdDept for closing, and to use AdDept for planning. This was way too much to cover in three days. Even with three days I was barely able to gather enough information to put together a game plan.

They wanted to know which division they should visit if they wanted to see how to use AdDept for direct mail. I recommended Kaufmann’s. Lord & Taylor uses AdDept extensively for direct mail, but they do not use our cost accounting for closing of direct mail.

Chad is on the left. I don’t remember the fellow with whom he was talking.

I also spent quite a bit of time with Chad Sesser. He told us that he had already downloaded sales from the mainframe at least once. He did not remember how he had done it, but he knew the name of the person in their Information Services department who had helped him.

On the last evening Karen Jones again sprang for supper at the restaurant in Beverly Hills. I might have gotten lost crossing the hills; I distinctly remember that I did on one occasion.

At the restaurant I noticed a blonde woman who was much more buxom than Ellie Mae Clampett. She was sitting with some other people a few tables away from the group from Rob-May. The most astounding thing to me was that for all of the time that we were there—which must have been at least ninety minutes—she was talking on her cellphone while paying scant attention to anyone at her table.

I should mention that I did not have a cellphone in 2003, and the people who talked on them loudly in airports bothered me a lot. I could not imagine anyone answering a phone in a restaurant, much less talking for an extended period. It seemed unimaginably rude to me, but I realized that I was partaking of a totally different culture in Milburn Drysdale’s town.

The projects: TSI did quite a bit of custom coding for Robinsons-May. We also helped them to integrate the data from M&F when the responsibility for managing the stores previously in that division was transferred to North Hollywood. Fortunately, their 270 was easily up to this task. I did not need to travel to California to install another upgrade.

Rob-May had two types of ads that I had never heard of: TMC’s and PWP’s. TMC stands for “total market coverage”. On certain days of the week or on special occasions some newspapers delivered a greatly reduced version of their paper to all households in an area that did not subscribe to the paper. If the same ad (ROP or insert) was run in the regular edition and this reduced edition, it had a higher rate because more eyeballs would see it.

I don’t remember what a PWP was, but I think that the concept was similar. Newspapers were desperate to retain the same level of revenue even as their circulations shrank in the twenty-first century.

My first visit to Rob-May after Mary Ng’s arrival triggered a very large number of fixes (changed for free) and requests for changes (quoted). This was definitely good news in that they were finally interested in taking full advantage of the system. On the other hand, it meant more pressure on the programming staff to produce what Rob-May—and other clients—needed in a reasonable amount of time.

The programming that was most valuable from TSI’s perspective was constructing an interface with another system. In some cases AdDept was the sending system; in others it was the receiver. Our expense invoice entry and claims system had the ability to feed the corresponding corporate accounting system (CAPS). Several changes had to be made to this module to accommodate peculiarities at Rob-May.

Our sales analysis and productivity programs used tables that were fed by the corporate sales system. Most of the May Co. divisions used the same ad agency (Doner) for broadcast. The agency sent a file to Rob-May. The departmental employees ran a program that TSI provided to update the broadcast section of the schedule in AdDept.

The last item on my notes from the trip in April of 2003 reported:

I spent ten minutes talking with Chad, Bobby McIntosh14, and the QPS programmer about the interface that they want to create. Nothing came of it.

Chad said that he will write up the details of what they would like the QPS interface to do. We can then quote it. The problem that he could not handle with query is how to treat sections. QPS has a job for each page, but the media schedule is on the book.

Bobby McIntosh was the Manager of Advertising Systems. The advertising production area used the Quark Publishing System (QPS) to manage the workflow of some of their direct mail catalogs and newspaper ads. I do not remember this meeting described above at all. If we were to undertake an interface like this, it would have been a massive job that would have taken at least several months. Therefore, I don’t think that we ever got to the point quoting construction of the interface.

My adventures in southern California: North Hollywood is best known for the unbelievable attempted bank robbery in 1997 at a Bank of America branch that was only a mile or so north of the Rob-May headquarters. The two robbers wore home-made body armor and bore much better weapons than the police. Foiled in their escape, they shot it out with the lawmen for an extended period of time. They were eventually killed, but not before the two sides discharged roughly two thousand bullets. Twelve police officers and eight civilians were wounded, but no one besides the perpetrators died.

A slightly fictionalized made-for-TV movie about the incident aired in 2003. No one from Rob-May ever mentioned it in my presence. If I had not seen the movie, I probably never would have known about it.

The LAPD Museum has an exhibit that features the perpetrators, their weapons, and their body armor. Because it was not opened until 2007, I never went there. By then Macy’s had taken over the May Co., and Rob-May was no longer a client.

OK, there was a little fire damage.

The most interesting thing that I saw in North Hollywood was an apartment building that had a large sign on it offering “Free Rent”. I took a photo of it from my rental car.

At the time TSI was actively looking for a new site for our office. I sent an email to Denise Bessette, who ran the office when I was out of town, about it. I suggested that we move our operation to North Hollywood in order to take advantage of this opportunity. If we had rented a handful of apartments, we would have had plenty of room to grow our business. For some reason she did not urge me to sign a $0 lease while I was in the vicinity.

One evening I decided to take a drive into Hollywood itself. I arrived at the corner of North Highland Ave. and Hollywood Blvd., where I saw a throng of people around the Ripley’s Believe it or not. The whole neighborhood was incredibly touristy. I did not even park my car. I drove back to my hotel in Studio City as quickly as I could.

For my last few trips to Rob-May I abandoned Beverly Garland and drove a little farther north to stay at a Hampton Inn. I did this for a couple of reasons. I had found that I liked Hampton Inns better than other hotels. I had an American Express card that I used for stays at Hamptons and other Hilton hotels. This paid off in free stays, which I used either for business trips or vacations.

I also was not enamored with the neighborhood in Studio City. I only found one place to run, and it was a little boring. I had to make several circuits of the path in the park, and the scenery no longer interested me. The biggest factor, however, was food. I had not been able to find many places that served tasty and healthy meals and also could be used—takeout or sit down—comfortably by a lone diner. My notes of July 1999 reported:

I had trouble finding affordable edible food in California. I ended up eating twice at Koo Koo Roo15, which has vegetables. The problem is that the only main courses they serve are rotisserie chicken and ¼ pound of turkey. I had the chicken both times.

The closest Hampton Inn was in Santa Clarita. The drive did not bother me much. The inconvenience was more than offset by the free breakfasts and occasional free snack in the evening. It was close to a large suburban shopping center. I don’t remember exactly where I ate, but I had no problem finding what suitable restaurants.

The best aspect of staying in Santa Clarita was that I discovered a really interesting trail in Quigley Canyon, a park that is very close to Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch. I really enjoyed running through the hills in the park. I had to climb a fairly steep incline to reach the trail that ran along a ridge. A sign at the trailhead warned about snakes and mountain lions, but I never encountered any wildlife while I was running.

Departure: I almost always flew back to Connecticut on a red-eye flight. I would leave LAX at 9 p.m. or later, arrive somewhere on the eastern side of the Mississippi at dawn or earlier, change planes, and then catch another flight to Bradley.

I always filled the gas tank before returning the car to Avis. I once made the mistake of stopping at a gas station in south-central L.A., an area that was close enough to LAX that the gas gauge would appear full. It was past sundown, and the place was not well lit. This was one of the very few times in my life that I felt afraid. I had lived for over three years in inner-city Detroit, but this area was fairly notorious because of the Rodney King incident.

What was scary about this gas station was that a few young men were walking around and approaching customers who were pumping gas. One came up to me and asked me something. I made some kind of noncommittal reply. He was annoyed with my response, but he did not do anything. I got back in my car and returned to the highway with deliberate speed.

On another occasion Karen Jones took me and a group of employees to a restaurant that was in either Burbank or Pasadena. I had my car, and after supper someone outlined for me how to get to LAX. Everyone assured me that I had plenty of time to make my flight. I probably did, but I made a wrong turn somewhere, and by the time that I arrived at the Avis counter, I was really pressed for time.

This was the first and only time that it took a long time to check my car back in at an Avis location. In every other instance no more than five minutes was required. However, this time there was a long line that moved very slowly. By the time that I returned the car and boarded the Avis bus, there was little chance of arriving at the gate in time for my overnight flight on Delta16 to Hartford by way of Atlanta.

When the bus let me off at the terminal I rushed up to the Delta desk with my suitcase. The agent confirmed that I had missed my flight. She then calmly booked me on a different flight that went to Bradley through Cincinnati and was leaving within the hour. I was not charged anything extra for this change, and I arrived in Connecticut less than a half hour later than my scheduled arrival time.

Epilogue: Rob-May used the AdDept system until 2005 or 2006 after the May Co. was purchased by Macy’s. On August 30, 2005, administration of the stores was transferred to another AdDept client, Macy’s West in San Francisco. The history of the installation at Macy’s West is detailed here.

The store in North Hollywood was turned into a Macy’s. It and its oversized parking lot stayed open until October of 2016. The entire acreage is still, six years later, in the process of being transformed into a mixed-use area renamed NoHo West. The retail part of the project evidently suffered from the emergence of the pandemic. A directory map can be found here.

An aerial photo of NoHo West taken in 2019, at which time it was described as “fully framed”.

1. Rusty Hansen does not seem to have an Internet presence in 2022, but I did receive a phone call from him once after he left Rob-May in 2000. Jim Lowe, TSI’s marketing person, and I later talked with him briefly at his new place of employment, Wherehouse Music in Torrance. That experience has been recounted here.

2. Beverly Curtis-Frethy left Rob-May in December of 1999. Her LinkedIn page is here.

3. Beverly Garland was an actress in Hollywood. Among many other roles she was Fred McMurray’s wife in the last few years of My Three Sons. She died in 2008, but her hotel still is thriving in 2022, and it is still a Holiday Inn.

4. I don’t remember reading a book by Ethan Coen. Since my notes did not mention the name or describe the plot, it might have been Gates of Eden, a book of short stories published in 1998.

5. This refers to the trip that Sue, Doug, and I took in 1995 to pitch the AdDept system to Liberty House. The description begins here and continues in two subsequent blog entries.

6. I am almost positive that I have seen every episode of The Rockford Files several times. The only bad one is the first one, the pilot, which had a different Rocky and was too much like Philip Marlow. Rockford lived at 29 Cove Road in Paradise Cove in Malibu. The beach that I went to was approximately twelve miles east of Paradise Cove.

At some point on one of my trips I took a late evening photo of the Los Angeles River. It is posted at the right. The river bed was concrete, and the trickle of water that it contained was laughable.

I could swear that back in the seventies I saw on an episode of The Rockford Files a chase scene that took place in the river itself. However, when I watched all of the episodes again (and again) in the twenty-first century first on MyTV and then on Peacock, I never saw such a scene. The show was recently removed from Peacock. I may never know for certain about that chase scene.

7. There was some kind of hydraulic leak that forced us to leave our scheduled plane and board a different one.

Mary Ng.

8. Mary Ng worked at Rob-May until 2005. Her Linked-In page is here.

9. Steve Ornee was employed at Rob-May until 2006. His Linked-In page is here.

10. CAPS was the mainframe corporate accounting system. It was located in St. Louis.

Kyle.

11. Kyle Levine worked at Rob-May until 2004. His LinkedIn page is here.

Dan.

12. Dan Rothbauer did not leave Rob-May until 2006. His LinkedIn page is here.

13. I still hate cellphones in 2022. While sitting in my right front pants pocket my first “smart phone” ordered pizzas on its own. I did not mourn when it somehow got fried by European current. That story, and a lot more is detailed here. Its replacement has not ordered pizza yet, but it did turn itself on while resting in the right front pocket of my blue jeans. I was playing bridge at the time.

Bobby.

14. Bobby McIntosh stayed at Rob-May until 2006. His LinkedIn page is here.

15. Koo Koo Roo went out of business in 2014.

16. By this time I flew on Delta whenever I could. Delta had the most connections to places that I often visited, and I had a Delta American Express card on which I accumulated thousands of valuable miles that I used for vacations.