During the period that TSI had a business relationship with Filene’s Basement, the company operated a chain of off-priced department stores. Most of the locations were in New England.

It is pretty easy to guess how the company started. The Filene’s department store in downtown Boston had been in operation for twenty-seven years when, in 1908, it opened up its basement for the sale of surplus, overstock, and closeout merchandise. It proved to be a very popular concept. Filene’s opened similar stores in other areas. In 1988 Filene’s Basement Inc. was spun off as an independent entity with its headquarters in Wellesley, MA.

In 1994 Doug Pease signed up the advertising department of the Basement to purchase the AdDept system to run on one of the AS/400’s that they already owned. In two ways it was an ideal installation. The fact that our proposal included only software made it much easier to justify the cost, and its location within driving distance meant no costly airplane tickets or hotel rooms.

However, the advertising department was much smaller than at our other installations and the analytical requirements were much less sophisticated. There was no co-operative advertising, and the planning was not complicated. We therefore needed to implement some sophisticated interfaces to justify the installation. We could not count on reducing the payroll much.

I announced the contract to the other retail clients and prospects in an issue of Sound Bytes, TSI’s newsletter:

Filene’s Basement, the off-price retailer based in Wellesley, MA, has installed AdDept in its advertising department. The AS/400 on which the advertising programs reside is actually located in the company’s nearby data processing center. The system was installed with the twin purposes of organizing the advertising department’s work and improving communication with the stores about late-breaking changes in advertising and merchandising strategy. The latter goal is being implemented through connections with the AS/400 and other computers (one an AS/400, the other a mainframe) in the data center. When advertising calendars are released from the advertising department they are automatically sent to printers located in the stores. In addition, store managers will be able to view the latest calendars for their region on their own terminals or PC’s whenever they wish.

The communication abilities of the AS/400 are critical to the successful implementation of this scheme. Stores cannot actually sign on to the advertising department system because they are not connected directly to the AS/400. However, because all computers are connected, they get all the information that they need from their own local computers.

In addition to the connection with the stores, we also constructed an interface with the company’s accounts payable and general ledger systems, which, if memory serves were Software 2000¹ products.

Shortly after I installed the system the advertising director² revealed to me that he planned to use his staff and AdDept to get other retailers in the area to let the Basement do their advertising for them. In effect, he intended to run an ad agency as a sideline. This was, of course, an area in which TSI was very familiar, and we had written (but never sold) a version of the ad agency system that ran on the AS/400. It was called ADB, which stood for Agency Database. Unfortunately, this was the only time that I heard anything about this venture.

I have only one clear recollection of the installation at the Basement. We had a meeting in a conference room in their office to discuss some proposed change; I don’t remember precisely what it was, but it did not concern accounts payable or the general ledger. Nevertheless a woman from Software 2000 calmly sat through the entire discussion, which lasted perhaps two hours. She said nothing, and she took no notes.

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At some point during this period I was driving in my Saturn with the radio turned to NPR’s evening edition, I think. There was a nightly economic report done by the Wall Street Journal. The headline almost made me drive off the road. They claimed that department stores were moving back into downtown locations. The devil was in the details. They reported that Filene’s had opened a new store in Manhattan. This sounded preposterous to me. Why would Filene’s want to challenge Macy’s, Saks, Lord & Taylor, A&S, and Bergdorf-Goodman on their home turf, and where would they find affordable real estate in the Big Apple? When I looked it up online, I discovered that it was not Filene’s, it was Filene’s Basement that was testing the waters by opening a small off-price store. The store was closed within a few months..

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For several years the installation at the Basement was very successful. We did only a few custom projects for them, but they seemed to be very happy with their system.

In 1999, however, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. They owed us a few thousand dollars, and they never paid us a penny of it. However, the company continued as a client until 2000, when the business, by then owned by executives of the corporation, was sold to Value City³ in Columbus, OH, which was owned by the Schottenstein family.

I⁴ flew to Columbus to meet with the IT director of Value City. We thought that we were pretty well positioned. They had AS/400’s, and the advertising department had no software. We expected people from that department to attend the meeting, but none did. This was a very bad sign.

In the late afternoon the IT guy said that he would take me out for an evening on the town. He said that he had “filed a flight plan with the wife.” When I declined his offer, he called me a lightweight.

Nothing came of it. I suspect that I was only invited so that the guy could enjoy an evening at his favorite watering holes or strip clubs when someone else was paying for. If I was going to go carousing, the very last place in the world that I would want to be was Columbus, OH, where someone might ask me where I went to college. I was too proud to lie.

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After Doug left TSI he stopped in at our office once. In his new job he had spent a little time with some people who had worked at the Basement. They told him that they never considered abandoning the AdDept system. In fact, they were constantly discovering new ways to use it.

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1. Software 2000 (not the developer of video games) still seems to be in business. It is located in Hyannis MA and is a subsidiary of Summit Partners. Its website is here.

2. I don’t remember the name of the advertising director or anyone else at Filene’s Basement, and I could not find any names in my notes. I found this link on LinkedIn for Lesa Anthony. I think that I must have worked with her, but the memories refuse to coalesce. She also worked at Harte-Hanks, which was where Doug went after he left TSI. The quote about finding new uses for the system probably came from her.

3. Value City went out of business in 2008. The Value City Furniture chain is separate.

4. My fairly clear recollection is that Doug was with me on this trip, but he was not employed at TSI in 2000. Perhaps we knew that the sale was coming and went in 1999.