I have been putting off the writing of this page for the last few months. Macy’s West was a big and important client, but my memories of most of the people and the projects that we did for them are hazy. To make matters worse, I have found very few notes about the installation and no photos whatsoever.
Macy’s flagship store and Union Square.
Macy’s was acquired by Federated in 1994 shortly after both companies emerged from bankruptcy. TSI had been pitching Macy’s West, the division that was administered in San Francisco, about purchasing an installation of the AdDept system for some time.
I am pretty sure that the original inquiry from Macy’s West came from Gary Beberman, who had been our liaison for the very first AdDept systems at Macy’s East in New York City (described here) and who had also consulted on the installation at Neiman Marcus (described here). He and his wife, who also worked at Macy’s, had moved to the Bay Area, and Gary had taken a job at Macy’s West. The advertising department was looking for a system, and Gary recommended that AdDept be considered. He told them what we had accomplished in Manhattan and probably also mentioned things that could have been done but weren’t.
I vaguely remember doing a demo in San Francisco, and I think that Doug Pease might have come with me. I have a vague recollection that someone from the I. Magnin stores, by then managed by Macy’s West, was in attendance. It may very well be that the Macy’s West advertising department was able to use an AS/400 that had formerly been used (probably for accounting) by I. Magnin.
In the first few years most of our dealings were with Gary. I did quite a bit of consulting on my trips to San Francisco, but he did most of the training of the users in San Francisco. Since they used hardware they already owned, we were not involved in quite a few aspects of the installation that we often were.
That arrangement was positive in that it allowed me and the rest of the people at TSI to spend more time on more productive activities. The down side, however, was that none of us at TSI had a good feel for how well the installation was going. Macy’s West seldom called for support and used AdDept for fifteen years. Our association stopped only when the corporate bigwigs brought all of the administrative functions to the Big Apple.
My visits to Macy’s: I made a half dozen or so trips to Macy’s West over the years. I flew to San Francisco on whatever airline had the best rates at the time. It might have been United, Delta, or American. The flight back was always on a red-eye.
The advertising department at Macy’s was located in a building that was a few blocks from the huge store in Union Square. It might have been on Fremont St. I stayed at a Holiday Inn that was on either Mission St. or Market St. I don’t think that the hotel is still there. It may have been sold to another chain.
I did not rent a car; I took BART from and to the airport, and I walked from the hotel to Macy’s headquarters. I may have taken a taxi once or twice. I only remember one meal that I ate in San Francisco. Gary Beberman and I walked to one of his favorite restaurants that was, I think, in Chinatown. I remember no further details. My meals on other occasions were probably grabbed in passing from fast food places.
I am pretty sure that on one occasion I took the cable car from the turnaround on Powell Street up to the top of the hill. I did not visit the Cable Car Museum. It was in my price range. So, either I did not know about it, or I might have been pressed for time.
The people: I only have notes and memories of two people whom I worked with in the first twelve or thirteen years. Emily White was the Senior VP of the advertising department from May 1996 to October 1998. Doug knew her from their time together at G. Fox in Hartford. I later worked more closely with her at Meier & Frank in Portland.
Around the turn of the century there was a major upheaval in the department. This is what I wrote in 2000:
They have recently undergone wholesale personnel changes. We have done a lot of work for them designing interfaces. We have designed very few reports. They must use a number of queries to create reports. The original training was done by Gary Beberman, who lives in San Francisco, and was our first liaison at Macy’s East.
I do not have a good feel for what they are doing at Macy’s West. I imagine that they could benefit a great deal from a few days of our time.
Dan Stackhouse was our liaison in later years. He was in charge of the local network used in the department. He did not really know much about either the AS/400 or the AdDept system, but he was able to gather specs for new projects for us and address connectivity issues.
I remember that Dan was fired by Macy’s, and he sued them over this action. He asked me to submit an affidavit explaining our relationship. I did what he asked, but I doubt that it helped his cause much. I searched the Internet for references to his lawsuit. I did not find much.
AxN: Because of Gary’s close involvement with the project, almost all of the work that we did for Macy’s West was in the establishment of interfaces with their corporate accounting systems. We customized very few reports for them.
One very unusual project was the coding and installation a menu that could be used by people in the merchandise departments to look at information about their ads. They set up user IDs for each department or group that were restricted to the programs and queries available from this menu.
The only other project that I remember in much detail was involved with AxN, TSI’s system for sending and managing insertion orders for newspaper advertising space. Unlike Macy’s East1, the people in San Francisco were very enthusiastic about delivering insertion orders via the Internet.
TSI’s initial contact with the newspapers that would hopefully be subscribing to the service was a letter written by me and signed by someone at the advertising department. I remember vividly that the woman whom we asked to sign it had no additions or changes to the letter, and she definitely wanted us to send it. However, she did not want to take the time to sign the letters herself. She said, “You can just sign them.” So, for the first and only time in my career I added the role of forger to the long list of activities that I did for the company.
The AxN installation at Macy’s West provided TSI with a few far-flung clients. Macy’s purchased Liberty House, the chain of department stores and resort-wear stores based in Hawaii, in 2001. One of those stores was in Guam, and the Pacific Daily News subscribed for several years.
The last trip: My last trip to Macy’s West was for two days at the end of July 2007. I learned that Sheila Field was the Senior VP of marketing. She had in fact been there for several years and before that at Foley’s in Houston, where I spent a lot of time in the mid-nineties. I never had met her, and she was also not available on this occasion. I did meet with many other people. I did not do a great job of learning names. Here is the unedited list from my notes:
Sheila Field.
Sheila Field2 is the Senior VP. She is from Foley’s. I almost certainly know her, but I did not get to see her on this trip. Kedar Stanbury3 is in finance, which means planning at Macy’s West. So is Von Jones4. Their boss is Chuck Allen5. The business office manager is Gary Veran6. His assistant is Diane _______. Laurie Hamilton7 is the print media director. Jennifer Hung8, Kelly ____, and Terry _____ work for Laurie.
They reported quite a few anomalies that they had been living with. I made it clear that they should report these to TSI. We always fixed things promptly. They gave me a list of areas that they were interested in using AdDept for:
Contracts.
Work group limitations for purchase orders. Does this even work? They want to make sure that the direct mail people create nothing but direct mail purchase orders. Do we have a way to do this?
The plan was for me to return in “a few weeks”. I cannot overstate how psyched they were for using AdDept more productively. My notes stated that I thought that they would approve whatever programming was needed for every item on the list.
Alas, the plan never was carried out. In February of 2009 management of all advertising for all Macy’s divisions was consolidated in New York. Within a few years none of the people mentioned above were still working for Macy’s. I don’t think that any of them made the transition to New York.
This consolidation was a major blow to TSI. I knew that there was little or no chance of persuading the consolidated Macy’s to use AdDept. Macy’s West was a big client for both AdDept and AxN.
1. For some reason Macy’s East never used AdDept for insertion orders. They did not even use it to print copies. Instead they called each paper and described each ad that they wanted to run to the newspaper’s rep. It baffled me that they could not appreciate how much faster and easier it would be to use AdDept, which had all of the information on the order, to send orders to all papers at once. Everyone who used AxN—both newspapers and advertising departments—were very happy with it.
2. Sheila Field’s LinkedIn page can be found here.
Department store division of the May Co. with headquarters in Portland, OR. Continue reading →
Since 1932 M&F’s flagship store had occupied an entire block in downtown Portland.
Meier & Frank was a chain of departments stores owned by the May Company. Its headquarters was in Portland, OR. TSI never pitched the AdDept system to the store’s advertising department. In 1998 the May Company decided to order AdDept systems for the three department store divisions that were not already using it—Robinsons-May, Meier & Frank, and Filene’s.
M&F was by far the smallest of the May Company’s department store divisions. At the time of the installation it had only seven stores, which made it barely a quarter the size of the next smallest division.
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. We were teaching them about the system design of AdDept, and they were informing us about their policies and expectations for the system.
The previous May Co. installations began 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 took place at the company’s location.
At some point in 1996 a group of people from M&F visited TSI’s office for orientation and training. Those sessions were also attended by people who would be involved with the installation at Rob-May. 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 took on the occasion of their visit as well as photos that I took in Portland. Since I was still using disposable cameras in those days, the quality of the prints is not great. I was lucky to have this much. On one trip I left a camera that was full of photos in my rental car. I called Avis on my next visit and learned that they had found the camera. They later mailed it to me.
The people: The photo at the left 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. Three representatives of M&F are on the left. I am pretty sure that the guy with glasses was Brent Stapleton1, who managed the departmental network and was our liaison for the first part of the project. I do not remember the name of the fellow on his left, but I am pretty sure that his hobby was making root beer at home. He might have been Steve Mulligan, the Co-op Coordinator who moved to Ireland the following summer. I don’t remember the woman’s name or function, and I don’t recognize the next fellow. He might have been from Robinsons-May. None of these people appear in any of the photos that I took on my trips to Portland.
The last person on the left side of the table was definitely Doug Pease, TSI’s Marketing Director, who sat in on some of the training sessions. The other two people were from Rob-May and are described here.
The system was not actually installed at M&F until March of 2000. I think that they postponed it because Kaufmann’s and Rob-May were higher priorities.
The next five photos were taken at the department’s office on the thirteenth floor of the flagship store in Portland. The building had fifteen floors.
In the photo on the right, the seated woman was Dori Tierney2, who was responsible for scheduling M&F’s ads in the newspapers. She also produced the weekly calendar that was the primary document that was used by many people inside the department and out. The other woman was her boss, Sheila Wilson3, the Newspaper Manager. She formerly had worked at Hecht’s.
In the first year of the installation I worked with Dori more than anyone else because producing that calendar was the department’s first objective for the AdDept system.
I am almost certain that the woman surrounded by papers in the photo on the left was Kathy Reed, the Business Office Manager. One of her primary responsibilities was to produce at the end of the month the report of expenses and co-op income by CCN in the May Company’s required format, the so-called 790. AdDept produced this at all of the other divisions. We never succeeded at completely automating that process at M&F for reasons that are explained in the section about AdDept projects below.
I have no recollection of the people in the photo at right. Maybe I took this shot because they were both so photogenic.
Many of the people in the advertising department at M&F did their work on clunky old IBM PC’s. They complained that all of their machines were hand-me-downs from their counterparts at Robinsons-May in California.
I took the two photos shown above at the M&F office in Portland, OR. I do not remember the name or function of the woman on the left. The guy on the right was Bryan Kipp, the Planning Manager.
From searches on LinkedIn I discovered that the Broadcast Manager at the time was Shauna Thompson, and the Direct Mail Manager was Linda Farrington. I probably worked with both of them.
The first visit: A month or so after the training session in Enfield Doug Pease and I flew out to Portland so that I could install the TSI software on the AS/400 that IBM had delivered. We also met with several executives to make sure that we understood and could address the department’s priorities.
I was surprised to see that the entirety of eastern Oregon was essentially desolate, and the coast was so rugged as to be almost uninhabitable. The majority of Oregonians were concentrated in the cities along the Willamette River.
Multnomah falls is about 30 miles east of Portland on the Columbia River.
In those days it was much cheaper to fly on Saturday than on Sunday, and Doug and I did that on the first trip. I found among my M&F photos several of Mt. Hood and Multnomah Falls. On Sunday we took our rental car on a spin around the very scenic areas east of Portland. Kate Behart and I had also visited these sites on a sales trip to Fred Meyer4, another retailer based in Portland, a few years earlier.
Emily.
The Senior Vice-president of Marketing at M&F was Emily White5, whom Doug knew from when they both worked in the advertising department of the G. Fox department store chain in Hartford. She knew about TSI’s capabilities from her time at Macy’s West. The Advertising Director was Laura Rutenis6. I think that she had previously worked at Hecht’s.
On the first visit Doug and I spent quite a bit of time talking with Emily and Laura. They explained their difficulty as the smallest of the May Co. divisions. They had far fewer employees than the other divisions, but their stores had just as many selling departments, and they ran just as many ads (in fewer newspapers, of course), and they were expected to produce the same reports as all the other divisions.
The primary objective of the AdDept system would be to get the module for newspaper ads up and running as quickly as possible and to produce their weekly calendar in the format that they currently used. At the same time the quantitative and qualitative information for ads for all of the other media needed to be entered into the system so that all the expenses could be entered in AdDept (or imported from PC systems) and uploaded to the corporate accounting system. So, the remainder of the time on the first visit was spent familiarizing the employees with the programs for entering the data and showing them how to check their work.
The projects: I don’t remember much about most projects that we did for M&F. I am sure that the May Company wanted them to produce the 790 report using the AdDept system’s cost accounting programs. That would require them to enter (or upload from another source) all the expenses from every media. I am pretty sure that we reached the point at which all of the necessary data was in the system.
Nevertheless, AdDept never produced the 790 report at M&F because the department’s Business Office Manager had been fudging some of the allocations required by the May Co. The corporation’s internal auditor surely knew about this, but she had no assistants to help her in the Business Office, and it would not have been practical for her to implement all the required steps within the strict time restraints. I thought that it would be feasible for her to do it in AdDept, but I could understand why she did not want to commit to a process that she could never verify produced results that were consistent with her existing methods. Also, she was more confident that she could meet the deadline every month without using AdDept.
I definitely remember spending many hours working on the weekly advertising calendar, which was designed to be printed on a special Hewlett-Packard laser printer that the advertising department had purchased. It could handle very large forms. Printing from the AS/400 was ordinarily limited to text of at most 198 characters per line and a single non-proportional font, Courier New. So, it would not be easy to replicate what they were doing.
Every advertising department that we worked with produced a calendar that was the basis of communication with other departments and the brass. In every other case we had been able to convince them that what the AS/400 could produce in the usual way—with whatever changes they needed—would suffice. The alternative was for us to produce output files that could be downloaded to a PC and formatted for printing in Word, Excel, or other software, and a few chose that method. The people at M&F insisted that that was not good enough. They needed the calendar the way it currently looked and they did not want to take extra steps to provide it.
In order to produce the calendar that they required I decided to make use of research and coding involving PCL, the language that Hewlett-Packard’s printers used. Instead of creating “spooled files” that the AS/400 translated into PCL using its printer drivers, the program that I wrote for M&F created files of instructions that were sent directly to the printer. They bypassed the AS/400’s drivers because the files were already in the language that the printer understood.
This approach had the advantage of allowing the use of proportional fonts such as Ariel or Times Roman. It also allowed the use of simple graphics such as boxes, variable font weights and sizes, italics, bolding, etc. The end result was definitely more attractive, but the big advantage was that the format was already familiar to the executives from other departments to whom it was delivered. It could all fit on one page that included attractive fonts, boxes, and other things that no one ever saw on a computerized report in the nineties.
From TSI’s perspective there were, however, serious disadvantages to this kind of approach. None of the other people at TSI were even slightly familiar with PCL. On this project I wrote all of the code myself.
By 1998 I was generating only a fairly small percentage of the new code at TSI’s office. I spent the bulk of my time traveling to clients, installing new systems, training, writing up proposals for new systems, modules, and requests for custom programming. I also had important administrative obligations, including locating more appropriate offices for TSI.
I suppose that I could have asked Denise Bessette, TSI’s VP of Product Development to learn PCL 5 from the handbook that I had found somewhere, but there was no guarantee that we would ever use this technique again. Besides, time was of the essence, and she already had a lot on her plate. By far the fastest way to deliver the code was for me to do it. There definitely was too little time for me to teach her in a formal setting how it worked.
Also, as will become obvious, the logistics would not have worked if the programming “team” had more than one member. Denise did not want to travel more than necessary.
Another big disadvantage was that it took much longer to write code for the printer than to write reports that could be sent to the printer driver for translation. We had been using the AS/400 long enough that we had that process down pat.
Furthermore, because TSI did not have a printer that could handle the oversized form, there was no way to test the finished product in the office in Enfield. I had to write little programs that produced segments of the calendar, test them on an HP printer that we did have, and then write the code that stitched them together. Also, I could not even look at the output on the screen. I ended up delivering the code to M&F in person and testing it at their site with real data.
I should mention that Denise did not like this kind of cowboy coding at all. She thought that everything should go through the tried-and-true process.
Finally, if M&F had run into problems with the calendar when I was on the road—which I often was during that period—Denise and the programmers might have trouble isolating the cause.
In retrospect it might have made sense for me to decline this project. Someone from the May Company would probably have stepped in to help them find a reasonable substitute. However, I wanted a happy client, and I was quite sure that the people at M&F would not have been happy with anything less than what I did.
I did get the calendar program to work, and I do not remember them reporting problems with it after the first few days. I might have needed to make small changes to handle situations that they forgot to tell me about. That almost always happened.
According to my notes by February 25, 2000, things were going reasonably well:
So far I have not picked up specs for a lot of custom programming. I spent much of yesterday working on the calendar and the insertion orders. I finally got the calendar so that it is exactly the way they wanted it. The first faxed insertion order cut off the top ten lines of the page. I fixed it by rotating 270 degrees instead of 90. I can’t understand why that would make a difference. We also had a query class for the people who have some experience in working with AdDept.
Life in the M&F advertising department: In general the people in the department, like nearly everyone that I met from the May Co., were hard-working and enthusiastic about their jobs. They did feel that they were the parent company’s ugly step-child, and there were many things besides the outdated electronic equipment to bolster that feeling. For example, there were no restrooms on the thirteenth floor that the department occupied. The store’s selling floors certainly had very nice restrooms, and the employees were allowed to use them. However, that involved taking an elevator down from the thirteenth floor and back, which could add several minutes to the project.
The alternative was to climb the stairs up to the fourteenth floor. That floor must have had a purpose at one time, but by 1998 it was just a relatively empty area with plumbing. I found it sort of exciting to go up there. It was like being in someone else’s attic. You never could predict what had been put up there just to be out of the way.
I used the men’s room up there whenever I felt adventurous. It was quicker, and I had very low standards in those days. The picture on the right is surely worth a thousand words. There was only one stall in the men’s room, but it was almost never occupied even though, as you can see, the one urinal was permanently out of order. The sign on it helpfully advised “DON’T PEE HERE.” Someone had added a “K” to the verb.
I seem to recall that there was also a ladies’ room up there, but it did not get used much. At any rate I did not try to persuade anyone of the fair sex to take photos for me.
This was not the only unusual sight at M&F. Here is what I wrote on February 25, 2000:
Meier& Frank is a strange place. They have by far the worst facilities of any department store I have been in. I will try to take some photos today. One guy’s office is so small he can easily touch both walls at the same time. Several people are sitting in a former conference room. There is a pile of discarded computers in one hallway. Many places are dirty. One corner in the main part of the office had huge dust bunnies. It could not have been cleaned in months. Nevertheless, everyone seems in good spirits.
Most of my time in the the first few trips was spent with Dori. She had a small desk in a fairly large office that also held a lot of records and that big printer. Dori had one very peculiar trait, that she did not try to hide. She would verbally accompany her work with a softly spoken play-by-play: “I am walking over to the printer to get the schedule. Now I am getting last week’s schedule out of the file. Now I am taking them to …”
At the time I found it incredible that they would put up with this annoying behavior. In retrospect I think that I was too judgmental. She did her job, and they kept her isolated enough that she did not drive anyone else crazy.
I remember that for one visit they assigned me to work in a very small two-person office. I swear that it was so narrow that I could touch two parallel walls at the same time. I was put there because one of the occupants was on vacation. I found my temporary officemate quite funny. I remember that he had posted on the wall a cartoon of Beavis and Butthead talking about the newly elected team of Bush and Cheney. The balloons read “He said ‘Bush’, heh heh,” and “He said ‘Dick’, hee hee.”
In those days I drank a lot of Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi. I couldn’t tell the difference, but I could definitely tell if someone served me an off-brand. I happened to mention that I once tried to mix them. The guy with the cartoon solemnly warned me that that might not be legal.
I had completely forgotten about the following until I read it in my notes from February 23, 2000:
Brent got a call from someone from the May Company. Evidently they are considering getting new AS/400’s for both Meier & Frank and Filene’s because Dave Ostendorf told them that IBM is withdrawing support for the CISC systems.
Robinsons-May and Filene’s definitely got much faster systems, but I don’t think that M&F ever got an upgrade.
Life in and around Portland: I think that on our first visit Doug and I stayed in a Holiday Inn on the other side of the Willamette River. On later visits I think that I must have stayed somewhere closer to downtown. I ran nearly every day in those years, and I have a vivid recollection of running both through the streets of downtown Portland and in a large park along the Willamette River. I considered it very cool that the city allowed its citizens easy access to the riverfront. By contrast it was almost impossible to get from downtown Hartford to the banks of the Connecticut River on foot.
My memories of running in Portland are vivid and diverse, but I cannot remember being in a single restaurant or any other kind of store there. I think that I might have purchased lunch from a food truck or from a kiosk in the beautiful Pioneer Square, which was right across the street from M&F. I often saw a human statue there—a guy with silver clothes and makeup who posed in the square. In the above photo he is taking a break. I could not imagine a worse job than his.
Here are some tidbits that I wrote on June 12, 2000:
I often see strange things on the streets of Portland. Tuesday a pit bull was chained to a parking meter. It had a stick in its mouth. A guy was playing the “Lone Ranger” part of the overture from Rossini’s Guillaume Tell on a mandolin.
Someone from Salem Oregon stole over 300 lawn ornaments and decorated her lawn with them. She had hit houses in five counties.
I could park my rental car all day at a surface parking lot near the M&F store for a reasonable price if I arrived before the stores opened, which I always did. I also remember a building that had a huge octopus atop its front door, but I do not remember what was inside.
On the last few trips to M&F I stayed at a Homewood Suites hotel in Vancouver, WA. I selected it because it served free breakfasts and because it was fun to run along the mighty Columbia River.
The drive from the Homewood Suites to the M&F building, which was less than ten miles, was mostly on I5 and ordinarily took me only about fifteen minutes. If there was heavy traffic or an accident it might take twenty minutes, but I am pretty certain that I never spent as much as a half hour on the trip.
I remember that one of those evening runs was shortly after my tendinitis of the IT band had been diagnosed, and I had begun the prescribed exercise regimen. This outing was the first time that I had really tested how my knee had responded to the therapy.
I had to stop a couple of times because of the pain, but a thirty-second stretch allowed me to resume running. This was very encouraging to me because it indicated that the doctor’s diagnosis was accurate.
Homewood Suites.
My jogging path.
Sailboats on the Columbia.
Epilogue: The M&F advertising department used AdDept up until 2002, at which time the division was folded into the Robinsons-May division of the May Co. The stores still carried the M&F logo until 2006.
The flagship store in Portland, which at the time carried the Macy’s logo, was closed in 2017. The structure is still relatively intact in 2022. The developers have posted a web page that describes its current state. You can view it here.
The principal occupant is a luxury hotel called The Nines, but several other businesses are located.there including a Japanese store called Muji.
2. Dori Tierney’s Facebook page is here. When I looked she had three times as many friends as I had.
3. Sheila Wilson returned to Hecht’s after M&F was folded into Rob-May and then worked at Marshall Fields/Macy’s in Minneapolis. Her LinkedIn page is here.
