The Elder-Beerman Stores Corporation owned and operated a chain of department stores based in Dayton, OH. That is, the flagship store was in downtown Dayton. However, the corporate offices were on El-Bee Road in nearby Moraine, OH.

In 1994 or 1995 Doug Pease, TSI’s marketing director, received a telephone call from Jack Mullen¹, the Senior VP of the advertising department at Elder-Beerman. Jack had known Doug from the years in which they both worked in the advertising department at G. Fox, the Hartford-based department store chain that was owned by the May Co. We flew to Dayton (on Delta through the Cincinnati airport, which is actually in Kentucky). I don’t remember much about the department’s requirements or the demo except that everyone talked as if the purchase of the AdDept system were a done deal. I suspect that Jack must have already secured funding before inviting us.

Jack invited us to his house for supper. I remember a few things about the experience:

• Jack had a weird handshake. He extended his forefinger to the inside of my wrist. I found this vaguely threatening. Is this a Masonic handshake? In the photo the guy on the left demonstrating the same grip is George W. Bush.
• Jack and his family lived in a very nice house in the suburbs. We sat for a while on the patio in the back There was a brook or something in the back yard. It seemed to be an embodiment of the American dream. I am sure that Doug, who had a family of his own, felt the same way.
• Dayton is about as far west as possible in the eastern time zone. It was still light after 9:00 in the evening.

I made several trips to E-B for training and exploration of further software development. On most occasions I flew to the Cincinnati airport, rented a car there, and drove north. I usually stayed at the Holiday Inn² in Franklin, OH. The door in every room in this hotel opened onto a corridor that went all the way around a huge pool. I was never tempted to enter the pool, but for some reason this configuration appealed to me. Perhaps it was the persistent odor of the chlorine.

I usually arrived at the hotel rather late at night. In the morning I ate breakfast somewhere and then drove to Moraine. On the way I was startled to see a sign at the office of a company with the name Tailored Systems Incorporated³.

In the preparatory phase of the installation I worked mostly with Debra Edwards⁴, E-B’s Advertising Director. Doug and I had met her in Cleveland when we were pitching an AdDept system for May Ohio. That division was abruptly folded into Kaufmann’s before TSI even made a proposal. A description of that event has been posted here.

Thereafter TSI’s primary contacts at E-B were with the business office manager, whose name I don’t remember, and Julie, the ROP manager who had the misfortune to attend the large state university in Columbus. Fortunately, all of this occurred during a stretch of dominance by the Wolverines in The Game.

We did not do a lot of custom programming for Elder-Beerman. I am sure that they had a few peculiarities, but the only two that I can remember were 1) the advertising calendar, which had separate columns for the days of the week, but Sunday had two columns, and Monday and Tuesday were crammed into one, and 2) the six-digit department numbers. AdDept’s system design provided for only three-digit. One thousand different departments was for some reason not enough for E-B. I came up with a workaround, but it would not have worked if they had wanted to enter measurements or use the productivity or cost accounting programs. They never did.

From October of 1995 to December of 1997 E-B was under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Nevertheless, I don’t remember that TSI suffered much, if at all, from this situation. The regional department store model that had generated huge profits in the eighties and early nineties was clearly no longer reliable. For the most part the retailers that used AdDept seemed to adapt to this new reality better than the ones that didn’t.

Lori Brunswick worked in the advertising business office when we started the installation. By 1999 she was the manager. In 2021 I found some notes that I had written about her management style: “Lori is an interesting case. She doesn’t even let me talk to any of the people that work for her.” Nevertheless, I found everyone at E-B rather easy to work with. We never had a crisis that I can recall.

I found another note from the same period that asked, “What ever happened to the project to convert Elder-Beerman’s debit memo system?” At a distance of over twenty years, I could not tell you what a “debit memo” was in the context of their operation. I certainly don’t remember whether they hired TSI to code a system to replace the one that they had.

For the next couple of years the hardest work that TSI did for E-B was opening the envelopes containing the checks for software maintenance. However, in 2003 E-B, a publicly owned corporation, was acquired by another TSI client, the Bon-Ton⁵ of York, PA. Almost all of the jobs at the EB headquarters were immediately eliminated. By 2018 all of the E-B stores had been closed and sold to liquidators.

A very thorough documentation of the entire history of Elder-Beerman is available at this website.

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1. I dealt with Jack Mullen several times after he left E-B in 1999. His LinkedIn page is here.

2. This Holiday Inn has, I think, been converted into a Holiday Inn Express with two much smaller indoor pools.

3. This company still has a status of “active”, but its principal contact is a lawyer whose office is in Dayton.

4. Debra Edwards’ LinkedIn page is here.

5. My recollections of the AdDept installation at the Bon-Ton are provided here.