In retrospect it is difficult to choose among TSI’s AdDept clients. I enjoyed working with the people at most of them. If I were forced to pick the one that I liked the best, several would contend. However, if the question were changed to “Which of the AdDept accounts was the most profitable?”, the answer is clear. It was Michaels Stores, the national chain of stores selling arts and crafts. What a strange tale!

Our first contact with Michaels was a telephone call from the IT Director in, I am pretty sure, 1994. I don’t recall his name. He told me that the people in the advertising department had contacted him about automating the department’s functions. He had in turn asked IBM whether there was a third-party software product for retail advertising departments. Someone at IBM provided TSI’s phone number.

Since I had never even heard of Michaels,¹ I had to ask him a few questions. He told me that they were a retailer that specialized in arts and crafts. Their headquarters was in Irving, TX, not too far from DFW Airport. They had no stores in New England yet, but they were almost everywhere else.

The best news was that Michaels was an AS/400 shop. That meant that there would probably be little or no expense for hardware. It was a lot easier to justify the cost of the AdDept system without additional hardware costs.

The IT director was very impressed with our client list. Foley’s, Neiman Marcus, and even Macy’s were very familiar names in Texas. I felt compelled to tell him that our programs were written in BASIC. He was surprised at this, but not put off. He had actually taught a course in BASIC for the System/36. I told him that the AS/400 version was much more powerful. He invited me down to give a demonstration to the people from advertising.

I told him that I would like to talk with them before the demo. He gave me the name and phone number of the lady who was the assistant to the vice president of advertising. I don’t remember her name either. In my conversation with her I learned that the department had no system at all; everything was done by hand. There were only ten or fifteen people in the department. There was little or no internal structure. The VP had been there for many years, and everyone in the department loved him.

I flew down to DFW, rented a car, and made the short drive to Michaels’ headquarters. I set up the demo data and the AdDept programs on their AS/400. It was not necessary to install BASIC because the compiled versions of the program did not need it. As I suspected, the whole AdDept system was like a fly on their elephant. No expansion would be necessary unless it was for connectivity.

The demo seemed to go pretty well. After I returned to Connecticut, I wrote up a proposal. If we included any custom code, I don’t remember it. It definitely was not much by the standards that we were accustomed to.

They accepted our quote immediately and sent TSI the deposit check. Shortly thereafter, I flew back to Irving and installed the system. I then spent an additional day or so showing the employees how to use the AS/400’s—I had booklets to help with this. I also outlined what needed to be done to set up the tables and enter their ads.

I spent time working with nearly all the employees of the department. I cannot say that I was impressed with any of them except for the lady that I spoke with on the phone. I had to do quite a bit of hand-holding, but we reached the point at which they were ready to put in the basic tables so that they could subsequently build their advertising schedules. We also set a tentative date for the second training session.

The atmosphere in the department during this visit was much different from what I experienced before. In the short period of time that had elapsed since my demo the VP of advertising had “retired” and had been replaced with a much younger guy named Bill Dandy², who lived in Glastonbury, CT, a suburb of Hartford. He had been working at Ames, a chain of discount department stores in Rocky Hill, CT, as, if I remember correctly, advertising director. I knew that Ames had just come through a very rocky period after its disastrous acquisition of and merger with Zayres,

Bill had not yet moved to Texas, but he was there in the advertising department at the same time that I was. We were introduced. He was cordial. He was surprised to learn that I was from Connecticut.

Before I left Michaels I had a short meeting with the IT director. He told me that he was really upset that they had brought in a new VP of advertising just as they were putting in a new system. He was worried that they might never get the system working because Bill Dandy might tell them not to use it.

As it happened, Bill Dandy was on the same American Airlines flight back to Connecticut that I was. I took a few minutes to speak with him even though he was in first class, and I was in steerage. This was well before 9/11; airplanes were much friendlier places back then. He remarked that the people at Michaels “had no idea how to run an advertising department.” I replied that I had noticed that. I emphasized that, on the other hand, I definitely knew how to organize the work, and the employees will learn as they learn the system.

That’s not what happened. The day after I landed back at Bradley I sent the invoice for delivery of the system to the IT director, and he paid it. The lady with whom I had dealt soon quit the advertising department. Bill Dandy brought in one of his employees from Ames, who had developed a set of spreadsheets there.

I never made another trip to Michaels. No one in the advertising department ever called for support, and so I assume that they did not use AdDept. That was OK with me. At the time TSI did not need another reference account in Texas³, and we had a lot of bigger fish to fry.

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1. There has been a Michaels Store in Enfield for several years now. I bought something there once, but I don’t remember what it was.

2. Years later I crossed paths with Bill Dandy at Dick’s Sporting Goods. He had had several jobs in between, and he has had several more since his stint at Dick’s. His LinkedIn page can be found here.

3. In fact, however, the AdDept system later was installed at Radio Shack, Computer City, Color Tile, and Stage Stores. Stage actually had two a separate installation for its Peebles Stores.