2001-2006 TSI: Weekly Partners’ Meetings

Posted on May 4, 2023 by Mike

Agendas for meetings. Continue reading →

Between January of 2001 and November of 2006 I met pretty often with Denise Bessette (introduced here), who was by then my partner and VP of Application Development. I found a folder of Microsoft Word files for the agendas that I wrote up for these strategy meetings. Starting in 2003 the meetings became more regular. They occurred on many if not most Wednesdays, the day that I was most likely not to be at a client’s.

We generally ate lunch together at an order-at-the-bar restaurant on the west side of the river. It had picnic tables near a small stream. I can’t remember the name of the place. I took a drive in the area that my memory associated with its location, but I could find no trace of it. I suspect that it closed, and the land was bought by a developer who put it to another use, perhaps condominiums.

The following summaries are mostly in chronological order. Almost every AdDept client is mentioned at some point. Separate blog entries with much more details have been posted for each of them. They can easily be found using the 1948 Project’s master index program, which is available here.

Many items on the agendas are repeated on subsequent agendas. A few of them persist over years. These were issues for which we never found solutions. The most obvious examples were the efforts to find additional uses for A^xN that would benefit newspapers and/or advertisers.

By 2001 the nature of and name for A^xN¹ had been decided. Our focus was on how to roll it out to the AdDept clients and what we could do to make it more attractive both to the advertisers and the newspapers. We also discussed potential support issues and how the new model 170 that TSI had recently purchased could handle the load of handling the traffic from AdDept clients and newspapers. Occasionally we talked about personnel and other business-related matters.

By 2002 the business environment for large department stores had changed dramatically. Before listing the agenda for one of the meetings I wrote, “We need to change our attitude 180 degrees. Previously we had excess demand and were struggling to increase our capacity to meet it. Now we have excess capacity, and our customers are frugal.”

I had used Net.Data² extensively for A^xN. At the time it was the only thing available on the AS/400 that could interact with the database. By 2002, however, IBM was telling people not to use it. However, it was several years before IBM provided an equivalent tool. Java³, which I had studied extensively and had concluded was not suitable for what we wanted to do, was IBM’s solution to everything.

I was surprised to read how uncertain we were about the willingness o AdDept clients to use A^xN. The meeting in March mentioned the need for a second installation. Before reading this I was pretty sure that Belk⁴ was the first, but maybe someone else had used it on a limited basis.

In 2003 Denise and talked a lot about what kind of programming was marketable to our clients. We investigated quite a few products that claimed to make it easier to make native AS/400 programs web-based . We also talked about what features could be added to A^xN so that it would be more valuable to advertisers or newspapers. Usually one of the last items on the list was whether we should spend time converting our code from BASIC to RPG or something else.

In May Sue and I took our first vacation in Italy. I wrote a journal about that adventure and posted it here.

The meeting of November 5 was the first mention of Bob Wroblewski, who has been introduced here. The next few agendas mostly consisted of the same items.

In January of 2004 Bob and I flew to California to visit Robinsons-May and Gottschalks. Bob then started enrolling Rob-May’s papers. After that the process of getting newspapers to subscribe to A^xN snowballed for several years. At about the same time our long courtship of Dick’s Sporting Goods finally paid off with a contract for AdDept. So, in only two years the outlook for TSI had improved greatly.

In February it occurred to me that there might be one dominant software company for the newspaper business. If we could create an interface with their system, it could advance the A^xN project tremendously. However, I later discovered that each paper, if it had anything at all, had developed its own software or paid someone to do it. There was no uniformity. Fortunately I discovered that this was a blind alley before I wasted a lot of time, money, and energy on it.

The agenda for the February 18 meeting made it clear that the A^xN project was about to take off. Most of the long-time AdDept users had at least been contacted. Stage Stores was enthusiastic, and they had just acquired another chain named Peebles. Finally, Dick’s Sporting Goods had finally signed the contract to purchase AdDept. To deal with the expected increase in use of the Internet by the newly subscribing newspapers Denise was arranging for installation of a T-1 line from AT&T with the Cox Cable connection as backup.

The March 3 agenda closed with a mention of the NAA, which was the abbreviation for the Newspaper Association of America (changed to News/Media Alliance in 2016). I eventually talked with someone at its headquarters, but I foresaw that it would take a lot of time and effort to build a productive relationship with the organization. It might have been a good project for Doug Pease (introduced here) or Jim Lowe (introduced here), but at that point they were in the rear-view mirror. I never thought that this would have been a good fit for Bob. Besides, he was busy talking to newspapers, or at least soon would be.

It took me a few minutes to decode this entry on the entry for March 24: “Robinsons: Lower price for LANG?” LANG was the Los Angeles Newspaper Group,^.5 a company that printed and distributed tabloids in Los Angeles and its suburbs. Advertising for all those papers was managed from one central location. TSI agreed to send them one bill. We treated them like one large paper with several editions.

In April we were waiting for Dick’s to begin the solicitation for A^xN before we approached Macy’s West and RadioShack. The April 21 entry contained positive news about Filene’s use of AdDept for accounting, including the monthly closing process. The next week Denise and I discussed the proposed trip to talk with Hecht’s main paper, the Washington Post. I ended up visiting them on May 14. It gave me quite a thrill, but I don’t think that they ever agreed to use A^xN. Apparently we also considered a press release about being in business for twenty-five years, but I am pretty sure that we never did it.

The agenda for May 26 poses this question about Filene’s: “Have they made a big mess?” Bon Ton agreed to send letters to its newspapers about A^xN.

In June we discussed various methods of emailing claims. I don’t recall that we ever took any action on this. There was ominous news from Federated that they put all quotes on hold. The total number of orders in A^xN exceeded 100,000. The June 30 agenda announced that Dick’s was moving into its new building over the subsequent weekend.

The first item on the July 21 agenda was “Denise’s three issues”. I wonder what they were. Item #10C talks about a follow-up meeting with the Washington Post that never happened. The next week’s agenda explained that they did not respond to my email. A second e-mail was sent on August 4. On August 25 (my dad’s eightieth birthday) I called the Director of Advertising Services.

Something distressing was evidently going on at Parisian, but I don’t remember what it was. That disclosure was somewhat offset by the following good news: “RadioShack: 34 active; 39 testing; 22 Macy’s West; 15 L&T; 4 Parisian; 56 other.” RadioShack did one of its four geographic divisions at a time. The last two entries brought up new subjects: “How can we make better use of my time and Lucia’s⁶?” and “5-year plan”.

The August 4 agenda was the first to mention SQL⁷. I used SQL for all of the A^xN programs, but the AdDept programs mostly created temporary indexed output files that were populated by one program and read by another using IBM’s recommended approach, ISAM (Indexed Sequential Access Method).

Marshall Field’s (introduced here), the last big installation of the May Co. version of the AdDept system, was first mentioned in the agenda for September 8. We were very excited about the meeting scheduled for September 16 at Hecht’s advertising department in Arlington VA. By this time the work for the Peebles installation at Stage Stores was operational enough that we were ready to solicit their newspapers for A^xN.

I was serious enough about contacting companies that sold software for ad agencies that I spent $35 to buy the booklet from the AAAA. I questioned whether we should write to each of them to propose an interface with their system and A^xN. I don’t remember ever doing so.

The agenda for November 1 mentioned that Field’s used an ad agency for both broadcast and newspaper. My recollection was that they started using A^xN almost immediately and dropped Haworth, the agency that bought newspaper space. However, later entries seem to contradict this. The same agenda mentions that TSI was carrying $55,000 in questionable receivables in the last month of its fiscal year.

I never had to make an onsite visit to our A^xN client in Guam.

The November 10 agenda mentioned that—after months of foot-dragging—Federated Systems Group was finally going to “cut over” to their new AS/400 system. During this period we were worried about providing support for A^xN for Macy’s West’s newspapers in Hawaii and Guam. This was needless. The papers subscribed for years without any problems. This was also the last agenda that included a mention of a press release about TSI’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

A major issue early in the year was how to handle the process for installing changes that Dick’s had forced upon us. There were other issues, too. The first agenda of the year ends with the question: “How can we get this installation on the right track?”

Two minor enhancements to A^xN for the advertisers had been completed: custom emails and downloading of email addresses. However, I had apparently given up on the possibility of interfacing with computer systems used by the newspapers. There was also a process for reconciling the orders on A^xN with the schedule on AdDept.

By March 10 we had a big programming backlog because of the large number of difficult jobs for Marshall Field’s. Denise controlled this process. I simply asked, “How can I help?” In the same meeting we discussed for the first time what, if any thing, we should do to forestall Macy’s from replacing AdDept with the system known then known as FedAd that had been developed by Burdines. Our contact at Macy’s West stated that “it did not exist”.

At the March 25 meeting we talked about Macy’s East for the first time in many months. For the April 28 and May 4 meetings there is separate agenda for A^xN. For some reason I seemed worried about using it at Foley’s and Stage Stores.

The first item on the regular May 4 agenda was one word: “Lucia”. Lucia was able to handle much more challenging projects than our other administrative employees. The problem was trying to come up with things for her to do. Another issue on the same agenda posed some interesting questions:

We never mastered the trick of Cloud Computing.

How could we set ourselves up to manage systems for our small clients? Bon Ton, Gottschalks, Neiman Marcus
1. IBM (like Federated)?
2. TSI
  1. Dedicated high-speed line for each user?
  2. On the net?
    1. Telnet? How would they print? Pdf?
    2. VPN: AS/400 to AS/400?
    3. VPN: PC to AS/400?
  3. High availability?
  4. Disaster recovery?
3. A third party?

We did not spend a great deal of effort on trying to provide “cloud” computing for our customers. It would have involved a great deal of expense and risk. Just seeing that term “disaster recovery?” item gives me the chills.

Later in May Sue and I took our second Italian vacation with our friends Tom and Patti Corcoran. I wrote a journal again, but this time I had a camera. The results are posted here.

The agenda for June 2 began with the surprising news that Chuck Hansen at Marshall Field’s had asked me to back off on A^xN. It also mentioned the agenda for a meeting with Macy’s Marketing on 5/17. It probably intended to say “6/17”. The next agenda, dated July 8, only stated, “Follow up with …” I must have forgotten the name (Robin Creen) of the lady with whom I met at Macy’s Corporate Marketing. There is also a reference to Bloomingdale’s. I suspect that this was in response to information from Tom Caputo, who worked with AdDept at both Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue, that Bloomies had never taken the FedAd software out of the box.

The July 11 agenda has some detailed information about a proposed newsletter publicizing how AdDept handled inserts. Some of these enhancements were done for Dick’s.

The August 26 agenda has a new and somewhat mysterious major topic called “AdDept ideas”. The two subtopics are “SpooliT⁸ ($9K) or other Excel” and “Service Bureau”. I think that SpooliT made .csv files out of spooled output files. It may have had a few other features.

Throughout this period there were references to The Oregonian, the major paper in the Portland area that stopped paying invoices for A^xN without canceling and never responded to attempts to find out why.

The agenda for September 14 mentions the long letter that I sent to Robin Creen. Its contents are posted here.

The agenda for October 12 had several tantalizing references. It began by stating that IBM’s VPN⁹ product, which TSI used for communicating through the Internet, with clients’ AS/400s would be activated on the following Saturday. It also reported that a newsletter had been sent out.

Robin Creen topped the October 24 agenda, but there were no details. The second item referred to renewal of iSeries News, a magazine.that catered to the AS/400 community. It had undergone many name changes, and the content had also evolved. We kept all of the back copies in the shelves that in 2023 are in my office. When we closed down the company (details here), I threw all of them away.

The third item was “SBC Contract”. I don’t remember SBC, but I suspect that it was an IBM Business Partner that had sold more systems than we had or had somehow managed to deal directly with IBM. During this period TSI was not allowed to quote or sell any IBM products. We had to go through a Super-VAR.

The fourth item was “Lucia” with no details. The fifth was “AT&T Global: do we need it?”. I am pretty sure that this product allowed me to get my email when I was on the road. In the days before Wi-Fi I had an AT&T product installed on my laptop that allowed me to use a phone line in my hotel room to sign on to AT&T and look at my email.

We must have received an inquiry from Sport Chalet¹⁰ a chain of stores in California that was similar to Dick’s. Until I saw this entry again I had completely forgotten about them. Evidently I wrote them a letter and sent them a newsletter, but nothing came of it.

The last agenda for 2005 was dated December 6. The #1 item was the blitz to get an AdDept system for Macy’s South up and running in time for the season that started at the beginning of February. The second item was an inquiry from Circuit City¹¹. This was another dead end.

The “My disk recovery” entry brought back some really bad memories. I think that I recovered everything on my computer’s hard drive, but it was costly and painful. The best part was that I got an external hard drive¹² that made it very easy to back everything up.

There are no entries for 2006 until June. I remember being under extreme pressure to bring the two huge AdDept installations at Macy’s South and Marshal Field’s up to speed. Meanwhile we received the crushing news that Macy’s and the May Co. had merged, and Macy’s would be the dominant player.

The agenda for June 13 began with the word Corum. I am pretty sure that it referred to broadcast buying software. Based on the date it was probably associated with Macy’s South.

That agenda also contained a major item that simply stated “Modernizing and marketing AdDept”. We never did find a feasible way to transform the AdDept screens into something that looked modern. We made more marketing attempts after this, but they did not amount to much. This was the peak period for A^xN. More than four hundred papers had subscribed. TSI’s administrative person spent a good deal of time printing and mailing invoices and depositing checks from newspapers.

The agenda for October 11 was startlingly different. It mentioned two AS/400 models, a 170 and a 270. My recollection is that we did development and ran the business on the 170, and the 270 was devoted to A^xN. It also mentions recruitment. I am not sure whether that referred to the administrative position or programming. The agendas have gotten shorter and shorter.

This agenda also mentioned the C compiler for the 270. Denise was upset at me for even investigating the possibility of converting TSI’s code to C, which was widely used in the Unix world.

In the agenda for October 18 the scary term “Macy’s North” appeared several times. It referred to the company that was formerly called Marshall Field’s. Evidently the marketing (never called “advertising”) department there had never bought into using A^xN for insertion orders. They may have still been using Haworth.

“Maintenance” was often mentioned in the agenda for November 1. We probably never charged as much as we could have for the kind of service that we provided our clients. I was evidently still spending quite a bit of time at Belk.

I was surprised to see Circuit City mentioned again on the agenda for November 8. We must have received another phone call. The term “Foley’s project” also appeared. I am pretty sure that that was the code name for the long and frustrating effort that Denise and I undertook to sell the company.

The last agenda that I have was dated July 10, 2007. It contained only four items:

Trip to Macy’s West
515
Dick’s quotes
Foley’s

Denise and I continued to meet, but not on a formal basis. By then I had almost given up on selling more AdDept systems. There had been so much consolidation in retail that the number of good prospects for the system had shrunk to almost nothing. Nordstrom and Dillard’s would have looked nice on our client list, but it was hard to think of anyone else that was worth pursuing.

We still did quite a bit of custom programming during the next five or six years, but managing the list of open jobs did not require the juggling act that had characterized the previous decade.

The A^xN business decreased for a few reasons. The big stores no longer trusted newspaper ads to bring in customers as they once did. Newspaper readership was way down. Some of the AdDept clients outsourced their buying to agencies or media services. That always meant a drop in the number of papers.

I enjoyed those meetings immensely, and I miss them.

1. The history of the development of A^xN is posted here. The system design is outlined here. The description of the process by which it was brought to market begins here.

2. Net.Data was a scripting language written by IBM for the AS/400. It was quite popular, but IBM for some reason decided to drop it in favor of the open source scripting language php, which required implementation of the Zend php engine.

3. Java is an object-oriented language that was developed by people at Sun Microsystems. The company released an open-source version. Java was almost the only thing that IBM talked about at the PartnerWorld convention that Denise and I attended in 2000. It is described here. On the AS/400 applications written in Java required a lot more resources than programs written in the native languages. If run on the same box the Java programs were slower, a lot slower.

4. The history of the AdDept installation at Belk is posted here.

5. In 2016 LANG merged with the Orange County Register and a few other papers. The new organization was called the Southern California Newspaper Group. The third item under the Federated topic was “AxN letter to four divisions”. Since “Bloomingdale’s” was the second item it mus refer to Macy’s East, West, South, and Florida (Burdines).

6. Lucia Hagan was TSI’s administrative person during this period. She was introduced here.

7. SQL stands for Structured Query Language. It was invented by IBM, but the company did not endorse its use on the AS/400 until 2004.

8. SpooliT is still on the market in 2023! Its website is here.

9. VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. The Wikipedia entry is here.

10. Sport Chalet was sold to Vestis Retail Group in 2014 and was liquidated in 2016.

11. The sad story of Circuit City ended with its liquidation in 2009.

12. I still have that hard drive in 2023. However, I recently discovered that I no longer can find the cable that was used to attach it to a computer, and the company that made it was no longer in business.

1995-2009 TSI: AdDept Client: Macy’s West

Posted on September 27, 2022 by Mike

Department store chain based in San Francisco. Continue reading →

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 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.

A^xN: 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 A^xN, 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 A^xN 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 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?
Components.
Foley’s effectiveness (advertising productivity) reports.
Expense invoice upload.
Co-op upload.
Month end:
1. Media accruals.
2. Non-media accruals.
3. Prepaid to expense.
4. Prepaid reconciliation.
Run lists.
Stage’s Internet ads.

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 A^xN.

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 A^xN—both newspapers and advertising departments—were very happy with it.

2. Sheila Field’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

3. Kedar Stanbury’s LinkedIn page is here.

4. Von Jones’s LinkedIn page is here.

5. Chuck Allen’s page is here.

6. Gary Veran’s LinkedIn page is here.

7. Laurie Hamilton’s LinkedIn page is here.

8. Jennifer Hung’s LinkedIn page is here.

1991-2007 TSI: AdDept: Federated Department Stores/Macy’s Inc.

Posted on June 24, 2021 by Mike

TSI’s dealings with Federated and Macy’s Inc. Continue reading →

For more than a decade after TSI began marketing AdDept, its software system for retail advertisers, the chain of department stores now known as Macy’s Inc. was called Federated Department Stores (FDS). The company was acquired in the eighties by Robert Campeau, a Canadian real estate magnate. For a short time it was merged with Campeau’s other stores and called Federated and Allied Department Stores. In 1992 the company emerged from bankruptcy as FDS, the same year that Macy’s filed for Chapter 11 protection. In 1994 FDS found enough cash in the cushions of the sofas in the furniture departments of its stores to purchase Macy’s shortly after Santa’s favorite retailer emerged from its own bankruptcy. Details of the takeover can be read here.

In the early nineties I was just beginning to learn about retail in America. It shocked me that a bankrupt company could stiff all of its vendors and then have the wherewithal to buy another company of about the same size. A lot of craziness like this happened in the nineties. I never did figure it all out, and the two companies involved in this transaction were a thorn in the side of TSI for the rest of its existence.

I don’t know why Val used a photo that cut off her chin.

In 1992 FDS had eight regional divisions. Each division produced and placed its own advertising from the divisional headquarters. The first FDS division that contacted TSI about purchasing the AdDept system was the Bon Marché, which was based in Seattle. I was called by Val Walser¹, the Director of the Advertising Business Office there. She had received one of TSI’s mailings in late 1989 or early 1990, and she thought that the system might be what they needed. I talked with her in person twice, once at the Retail Advertising Convention in Chicago and once in Seattle. I gave Val a private demonstration in Chicago, and I showed the system to the rest of the team in Seattle. Those encounters have been described in some detail here.

I don’t think that I knew at the time that the Bon Marché was part of FDS. Even if I did, I don’t think that I realized then that the parent company was about to declare bankruptcy. I was inexperienced; I probably made some errors in judgment. Perhaps I made a mistake by proposing a system that would only be minimally sufficient for their existing operation. Maybe we did not follow up often enough or in the best way.

Although Val informed us that she had requested funding for the system, it was never approved, and after a while we did not hear any more from her. We continued to send materials to her periodically. Until I began the research for this entry I was unaware that she had any involvement in deploying a system that was initiated by the FDS division most distant from Washington, Burdines in Florida. Val apparently oversaw the development of the administrative part of the FedAd (or whatever it was called at that time) system. By then her division was known as Macy’s Northwest, which was folded into Macy’s West, a long-time AdDept user, in 2008.

TSI’s fruitless contacts with Burdines have been documented here.

From the beginning I thought that Jordan Marsh, the Boston-based department-store chain, would be a valuable customer for TSI. Like the Bon Marché, Jordan Marsh was actually part of the Allied group before Campeau acquired Federated and merged all the stores into one gigantic chain. At one time there were also Jordan Marsh stores in Florida and San Diego, but by 1991 all of those stores had closed or were no longer controlled from Boston.

Kate Behart, whose career at TSI is described here, arranged for me to do a demo for people from Jordan Marsh’s advertising department at an IBM office. I don’t remember any of the names of employees at Jordan Marsh. In fact, the only things that I remember about our meeting with them were that Kate was very upset that I had used the word “gals” at one point and that they informed us that they wanted our system.

I am sure that Kate must have followed up on the presentation. She was very conscientious. However, nothing came of it.

Bloomingdale’s, the high-end department store with headquarters in New York City, contacted TSI several times. The last of these exchanges of telephone calls was handled by Doug Pease, whose successful marketing career at TSI is detailed here. We certainly sent them detailed materials about AdDept and the AS/400. I might have done a demo for them at the IBM office. I clearly recall that we went to their headquarters in Manhattan and gathered specs about their needs. I can still picture the Manager of the Business Office, who wore a three-piece suit and had a long pony tail. Guys with pony tails were not unusual in the creative and production areas of advertising departments, but he was the only one that I ever saw in the financial area.

Doug followed up on our visit with several telephone calls. At one point he became certain that Bloomies would buy the AdDept system. Nevertheless, not long after he had voiced his certainty, he got the telephone call that dashed his hopes. He never told me the details, but he was visibly upset about it.

One of the biggest disappointments in my career was not being able to land Liberty House, the department store in Hawaii and the Pacific, as a client. When Doug, Sue, and I flew out to Honolulu in December of 1995 to meet with Karen Anderson (detailed here), Liberty House was an independent chain of stores that included both department stores and much smaller stores in locations convenient to tourists. Those stores specialized in “resort ware”.

Our presentation went very well. Karen told Doug in a subsequent conversation that she had requested funding for AdDept, but there was a freeze on capital purchases. The freeze persisted until the company entered bankruptcy in 1998 and closed most of the resort stores. When it emerged from bankruptcy it was gobbled up by FDS. At that point the remaining stores were relabeled as Macy’s, and administrative functions were transferred to Macy’s West in San Francisco, one of TSI’s clients.

So, this was as close as we came to a victory in our dealings with FDS/Macy’s Inc.. Many of the newspapers that had been used by Liberty House still subscribed to A^xN in 2014.

AS/400s at FSG. I thought that I had a photo of Len, but I cannot find it.

At some point the AS/400 systems used by the three Macy’s divisions that used AdDept—Macy’s East, Macy’s South, and Macy’s West—were moved to the headquarters of Federated Systems Group (FSG) in Alpharetta, GA, a suburb of Atlanta. I flew down there to consult with Len Miller², who was in charge of all of the FSG’s AS/400s. I don’t remember exactly what the agenda for this meeting was, but I remember that Len said that long-range plan of FDS was to replace the AS/400 systems with home-grown software running on other platforms. However, he assured me that at that point—soon after the merger with the May Company—it was a very low priority. They would still be using the AS/400s for several years.

My other vivid memory of that day was when we passed a room that contained perhaps twenty desks. At each desk sat someone working on a computer. All of the people were IBM employees who were consultants for Federated.

Len’s predictions both turned out to be true. All of the divisions except Bloomingdale’s were eventually folded into one gigantic Macy’s run from the Herald Square Building in Manhattan. The plan was apparently to use the system built for Burdines and the Seattle division, but it did not have all of the features that the people in New York needed. For several years they maintained AdDept in order to run the Loan Room (merchandise loaned to photo studio for shoots) module that TSI wrote for Macy’s East in the early nineties.

In May or June of 2005 I received a telephone call from Robin Creen³, whose title was Senior Vice-president of Macy’s Corporate Marketing. She wanted me to come to New York to discuss the AdDept and A^xN systems. I made an appointment and took Amtrak to Penn Station. Robin instructed me to use the executive elevator at one of the 34th St. entrances rather than the employee’s entrance that I had always used on the other side of the building.

Robin’s office was not in the advertising department. It was on executive row. I don’t remember too much of the meeting, and I cannot locate my notes. I recall that I only got to meet with her once or maybe twice, and I never heard from her or about her again.

I did, however find a copy of a letter that I sent to her on October 7, 2005. Here is the text:

At our last meeting you told me that it was still too early to talk about the future of the existing May Company divisions. Since there have now been several definitive press releases about the makeup of the new Macy’s after the merger, I assume that those restrictions no longer apply.
Needless to say we are concerned about what effect the realignment will have on TSI. We have spent the last 17 years developing AdDept, the software product which has become the standard of the industry for administration of retail advertising departments. The May Company was our largest client.
We know that Federated Department Stores has been working with its Florida division for the last decade or so on a system which overlaps considerably with ours. I am sure that the company has by this time invested a considerable amount of time, money, and manpower in it. It may surprise you to know that I was supposed to be an integral part of the original plan. I met with Mike Rafferty and Gilbert Lorenzo in Huntsville, Alabama, back in the mid-nineties. Their plan at that time was to use AdDept for the accounting functions.
They wanted us to convert our system to run on a PC network using a home-grown relational data base and Microsoft Visual BASIC on each client. To me this seemed like a huge step backwards for us. Their approach would definitely have improved the appearance of AdDept’s front end and provided an integration with the production area, but no one could explain to me how we could possibly support such a system in many locations. The principal problem was that with their proposed architecture someone—presumably TSI—would be required to support both server software and client software. We have never had to support clients—the individual desktop PC’s and Macs. At the time networks were unreliable, Windows was not a mature product, and the Internet was in its infancy. TSI was already supporting a half dozen or more companies, including the two Macy’s divisions, which at the time were not affiliated with Federated. I honestly think that had we participated in the project at the level that they expected, TSI would not have survived as a company. Gilbert and Mike must not have liked my attitude, because we never heard from them again.
Since that time, as I wrote you earlier, most of the rest of the department stores in the country—as well as several other large retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods—have successfully implemented AdDept in their sales promotion departments. They were able to get affordable systems tailored to their requirements. AdDept is not a sexy system, but it gets the job done.
No one in the entire country—no one—has the experience that TSI has garnered over the last 17 years in understanding the intricacies of administration of advertising systems. We are offering that experience to Macy’s Marketing. Four of the seven newly aligned Macy’s divisions—East, West, Midwest, and whatever the Marshall Field’s division is called—are long-time AdDept users. Lord & Taylor also uses AdDept. Moreover, a large number of May Company employees have considerable experience using AdDept in many different areas. If I were in your shoes, I would consider this as a valuable asset.
TSI has a very strong relationship with its users—both at the corporate and division level. If you talk with the people at the May Company, I am sure that they will verify that we have always done what they asked, that we do an excellent job of supporting our product, and that we give them a lot of bang for the buck.
There is one big additional factor. We are not on their payroll. When they wanted to spend money to make the system do new things, they used us. When they were tightening their belts, they did not have to worry about paying the salaries of programmers, system architects, data base administrators, etc.
So far in our discussions TSI has done most of the talking. What we would really like now is to learn what you and the other people in Federated’s management need to get out of the system. A goal-oriented approach works best for us. We have moved mountains for other clients, and we would definitely appreciate the opportunity to tell you how we would attack your biggest problems. We have never shrunk from such a challenge in the past. Our track record in this regard is essentially flawless. If someone will tell us what they need, we will provide it.
Do you think that we could schedule a face-to-face meeting with you and whoever else is involved in this project about this challenge? We have always been straight-shooters, and we would be eager to listen to whatever you have to say.

My last two encounters with Macy’s were both about insertion orders for newspaper advertising. TSI had developed and successfully marketed an Internet-based system for insertion orders to newspapers. Macy’s West, Macy’s South, and most of the May Company divisions that FDS acquired in the merger used it, and they all loved it. We called it A^xN, which was pronounced “A cross N”.

I knew that, compared to our other AdDept clients, Macy’s East used a small fraction of the programs that comprised AdDept. Still, they were entering the ads, and, therefore, they were a good candidate to use A^xN. I wrote to the Media Director, whom I had never met, and requested a meeting about A^xN. He seemed very interested. We scheduled a meeting, I made a dozen or so copies of our sales materials for A^xN, I packed them in my briefcase, and I boarded the 6:30 train again. I was alone because TSI had no marketing/sales person at the time.

The meeting was not what I expected. It was conducted by a man named Roman from the IT area, not the advertising department. My presentation was very well received. Roman said that it was very impressive.

He pressed me on whether TSI planned to provide a way to send the layouts for ads over the Internet. This surprised me. I thought that this was a problem that had been addressed years earlier. The market leader was the Associated Press’s AdSend service, but I also knew of several competitors. I said that TSI had no plans to enter that market. I explained that we had neither the infrastructure nor the expertise necessary to compete in that arena. Besides, none of our clients had asked for it, and they were not shy about requesting our services.

He said that we should consider it. Macy’s was looking for someone who could enable them to use the Internet for both insertion orders and the delivery of ads, “because, you know, one-stop shopping is better.”

I had three hours on the train to mull this over. I had made a mistake by letting this remark go unchallenged. It seemed like such a silly thing to say. I thought that they would want expertise and experience, not fewer phone numbers.

If one-stop shopping really was the objective, then I had no chance of ever persuading them to use A^xN. Therefore, nothing could be lost by asking for proof of any real value associated with having one vendor doing both tasks. I knew very well that the people who placed orders for newspaper ads were completely separate from the employees who created the actual layouts and sent them to the papers. This was true at Macy’s in New York and at every other large retailer that I had met with.

We never heard from them after that.

I learned later that Macy’s East’s advertising department had never used AdDept for insertion orders, even though they could have easily faxed the orders from the AS/400. Instead, each coordinator had developed ways to communicate with the reps at the paper. It sounded chaotic.

My last frustrating encounter with FDS (by then known as Macy’s Inc.) occurred in, I think, 2007. This one revolved around Dave Ostendorf, whom I had known quite well when he had been the liaison between TSI and the advertising department at Famous Barr, the May Company division based in St. Louis. Much more about my relationship with Dave and the installation at Famous Barr is posted here.

This is the only picture I could find of Dave Ostendorf. He is on the far left side of the table in the white shirt.

Dave called me about the use of A^xN. He said that the people for whom he worked in Macy’s Corporate Advertising department asked him to find out how much we would charge for an interface between A^xN and the system that had been developed internally. Dave was a very straight arrow. I trusted him (unlike everyone else mentioned in this entry) implicitly.

Of course, I asked for more details, but Dave would not provide them. He was rather sheepish about this. He advised me just to write up a proposal in our usual format with as many disclaimers as I wanted to include. He also specifically warned me not to low-ball it. So, I wrote up a quote for $20,000 that may have set a world’s record for use of phrases like “assuming that”.

A short time after I talked with him Dave resigned his job at Macy’s and moved back to his home town of Indianapolis. Needless to say, no one ever called about the quote. I have always suspected that it had been used as a justification for further investment in the corporate system.

So, my interactions with FDS and its successor Macy’s Inc. were completely fruitless. If FDS/Macy’s Inc. was the Brass Ring of our field of software, it was in sight quite a few times, but we were never able to snatch it.

My only real regret is that I do not completely understand why we continually failed. Our success with every other department store chain was close to universal, and the employees in the advertising departments at FDS and Macy’s divisions seemed enthusiastic about what TSI had to offer. However, in these situations we were up against an amorphous alternative, the system developed for Burdines and the Bon Marché, about which I knew very little.

One thing that struck me when rereading the letter that I had written to Robin Creen. I seemed to be asking for an opportunity to see the alternative. As a debater and a debate coach I was much better on the negative. I seemed to feel confident that if they just told me what they were using or planning to use, I could demonstrate what was wrong with it. Even if our software was lacking in some areas, I felt confident that we knew how to change AdDept to make it better.

Fortunately TSI found plenty of work outside of FDS/Macy’s up until the time that Denise and I were ready to dispose of the business. If some of these opportunities had gone the other way, it seems likely that we would have missed out on some of our other achievements.

1. Val Walser worked int the advertising department in Seattle until Macy’s brought all of her division’s administrative functions to San Francisco in 2008. Her LinkedIn page, which is here, says that she “directed development of a sophisticated, integrated software product, which was Macy’s premier marketing/advertising system managing all departmental functions.” I presume that this refers to the system once known as FedAd that was begun by Burdines.

2. Len Miller apparently still works for Macy’s in 2022. His LinkedIn page is here.

3. Robin Creen left Macy’s in 2008. Her LinkedIn page is here.

4. Dave Ostendorf’s LinkedIn page is here.

1995 December: Hawaii Trip Part 1

Posted on June 22, 2021 by Mike

Doug, Mike and Sue in Oahu. Continue reading →

In the second half of 1995 Doug Pease, TSI’s Director of Marketing, had been in fairly constant communication with Karen Anderson, the Advertising Director at Liberty House, a chain of department stores in Hawaii. One day he came into the equipment room, which also served as my office, and told me that Karen asked for someone from TSI to fly to Honolulu to show the AdDept system (described here) to them. We arranged to meet with them on two days in the first week of December.

I was very excited about this opportunity, not so much for the potential business as for the chance to go to Hawaii. Sue and I had been through a very rough period (as described here), but the one thing that we really both liked to do was to travel to new places. Moreover, the weather would be starting to get nasty in New England, and it was almost never nasty in Hawaii.¹ I decided to extend our stay in Hawaii to allow enough time to sample all the islands.

I went to Barnes & Noble on the way home the evening that I learned about the trip and purchased two books: The Maverick Guide to Hawaii and Kauai Trails, written by Kathy Morey. I had determined from previous trips that the more that I planned a trip the more that I enjoyed it. Sue and I did a really good job of planning this one.

Doug was not very happy that Sue was coming along. He worried that her presence would be a distraction to the main purpose, which was to land another AdDept client. I listened to his concerns, but I was not about to tell Sue that she had to stay home.

I tried to persuade Doug to take some time at the end and make a vacation out of it as we were doing, but he said that he needed to get back to his family. So, Doug scheduled a separate flight back to Connecticut by himself.

On the morning of our scheduled departure, neither Sue nor her car were around. I called her at her business in Springfield, MA, that she called Dance Space. She said that she had been working on the wiring all night. I told her that it was almost time to leave. She had no idea what time it was.

I later came to understand that Sue’s approach to long-distance travel was to leave exhausted, sleep fitfully on the airplane, and totally crash upon landing. Needless to say, this was not my approach. I did not want to waste one second of daylight in Hawaii.

The three of us flew together from Bradley to Honolulu. It was a very long trip, but we gained five hours, and so, despite the time lost in the layover in Los Angeles, it was still daylight when we landed. I fell in love with Hawaii the instant that we landed. There were palm trees on the airport grounds, the terminal was, for the most part, defiantly open to the elements, and the weather was perfect—sunny, dry, and around 80°.

The Honolulu airport was noteworthy for many things. One that I remember clearly was the ubiquitous stands that contained booklets and leaflets describing things to do in Oahu. I later discovered that similar stands at the airports on the “neighbor islands”. We soon learned not to put too much stock in the recommendations in the booklets, which seemed mostly limited to the heaviest advertisers.

We rented a car and drive to our hotel. The “Interstates” in Hawaii start with the letter H rather than I. It is a safe bet that the two systems will not connect any time soon. I don’t remember the name of the hotel, but I am pretty certain that it had free parking and was near the canal ,only a few blocks north of Waikiki. It was not luxurious, but it seemed nice enough to us. I remember that our room had a balcony, which in Hawaii is called a lanai (lah NIE).

The business visit: I think that we did the demo at IBM’s office before we talked with the people at Liberty House. I much preferred to arrange the visit in the other order. Perhaps we could only get time at IBM on the first day. Karen was extremely positive about the system after my presentation. She also told us that we did not need to wear suits at the Liberty House office. She said that most people there wore “aloha-wear”. We wore suits.

We learned the next day at the Liberty House headquarters in downtown Honolulu that the chain had two types of stores: large department stores that were equivalent to the regional department stores on the mainland, and much smaller boutique stores that catered to tourists. The newest department stores was actually on Guam.

At the end of our meetings we told Karen that it had been snowing when we left Connecticut. She said that she would really like to see it. I told her that she could have it. She insisted, “But it’s so beautiful.”

I replied, “Well, it’s white, if that is what you like, but that’s only for the first day or two, and it sometimes stays around for weeks or even months turning dirtier and uglier by any standard.”

A ;arge Liberty House store was in the Ala Moana shopping center on the southern side of Honolulu. This shopping center was essentially just like a mall on the mainland except that this one has no roof over the interior courtyard. People in Hawaii are not afraid of “Liquid Sunshine” even when shopping. Bloomingdale’s, Neiman Marcus, and Nordstrom have stores there, and there are innumerable boutique stores.

While Doug and I were in meetings, Sue explored Honolulu. At the time she was really into ballroom dancing. She walked to a place near the hotel that had a famous dance floor. I can’t say that I was sorry to miss that visit.

The pitch to Liberty House went as well as could be expected. When we got back to New England, we sent them a proposal, and Karen put in a request for funding. I had every hope for a second trip to paradise to install, train, and investigate a few things that Sue and I had missed. Unfortunately, Liberty House’s corporate management imposed a freeze on capital spending. In fact, Liberty House declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1998, and when it emerged from bankruptcy in 2001, it was acquired by Federated Department Stores and merged into Macy’s West, an enthusiastic AdDept client.

So, the return trip to Hawaii was delayed for twenty-three years. That adventure is described here.

Fun on Oahu: We knew that we needed to get our Luau Cards punched. No one is allowed to leave Hawaii without attending one. I think that we asked Karen and her staff which of the luaus we should was the best. They all recommended Germaine’s, and insisted that it was worth the drive.

Sue, Doug, and I attended, and we all had a good time. The entertainment was pretty good. The food was plentiful if not spectacular, and, best of all, we learned that we had not missed anything by never eating poi. I am sure that Sue took many photos, but I could not find them. Germaine’s website contains an abundance of photos. They can be viewed here.

ABC stores could be found on almost every block of the touristy parts of Honolulu. I spent some time buying postcards to make acquaintances back in New England envious. It occurred to me that people in Hawaii probably never receive postcards. So, I bought one and sent it to Karen.

Notes on the images displayed here: I am virtually certain that somewhere within the house at 41 North St. in Enfield, CT, are hundreds of stunning photographs of this trip. I have only located two of them, and those two have been on display in a collage on the wall of my office for at least ten years. They have faded badly, to the point that their only real use now is to prove that I am not making all of this up.

So, I have been forced to use images copied from the Internet. If anyone objects to the use of any of the images, I will remove the objectionable ones.

Sue, Doug and I drove to the memorial in Pearl Harbor. It was OK, but I did not feel like tearing up or anything. I enjoyed the drive past Aloha stadium better.

Doug and I climbed to the top of Diamond Head one morning. At the time I was in pretty good shape from running, and Doug did a lot of riding on his mountain bike. So, neither of us held up the other. The view from the top was easily worth the effort.

After Doug flew back to New England, Sue and I stayed on the heavily populated island of Oahu. That adventure is described here.

1. Hurricane Iniki had struck the islands (especially Kauai) very hard in 1992. Otherwise you could count on periods of rain every day in the rain forests in the center of every island and clear and warm weather everywhere else.

1998 TSI: The Third Crisis

Posted on May 24, 2021 by Mike

Keeping Denise in the fold. Continue reading →

My recollection of many of the events portrayed below was fuzzy. I was not even certain of the year (1998) or the time of year (autumn) until I found a dated document. Lacking a good way of pinning down the details, I needed to guess at or be vague about some things.

Background: For me the period from 1995 through 1999 was the busiest, most exciting, and most stressful of any that I spent working for TSI. It was also the most potentially terrifying period. Our marketing director, Doug Pease_¹, had hit the mother lode and put us in a position to dominate the market on which I had decided to focus our attention back in the late eighties.

Most large retailers, especially department stores, were organized into divisions, and each division was responsible for its own advertising. So, when a large retail organization decided to name AdDept as the preferred system for advertising, we would usually install a system at each division. In 1998 the May Company,² which at the time had seven department store divisions, had already endorsed AdDept. Doug had also negotiated installations for the three divisions of the Tandy Corporation³ and he convinced the people at Proffitt’s⁴ Marketing Group (PMG) to purchase systems for six of their divisions. In addition to these, Doug had also made headway at several other potential clients such as Elde- Beerman, Gottschalks, and Macy’s West.

In short, TSI’s business was finally booming. The challenge was no longer whether the company could generate enough income to meet the next payroll. The question—and it was a very serious one—was whether we could meet our commitments to all of these new installations, almost all of which required significant custom programming.

There were a few other issues as well. The twenty-first century was approaching. AdDept had been made Y2K-compliant from the outset. We also had produced a version of the GrandAd system for the AS/400 that would work in the twenty-first century. We needed to convert all of the software that we used in TSI’s office as well. These undertakings were labor-intensive and required extensive testing. The details of those efforts are described here.

The company therefore faced tremendous challenges in providing the software and support for commitments that I had already made and for the prospective contracts that were almost certainly imminent. Furthermore, the person who had at that point done most of the AdDept programming, myself, would undoubtedly be devoting much less time to coding in the next few years.

I would be doing all the installations and on-site training. I also accompanied Doug on many sales trips. I gathered all of the requirements for new code and wrote the design documents and programming requests. I wrote all the marketing materials and anything else that needed to be written, as well. I also ran the business and extinguished the most serious fires. Last but not least, I did the great majority of the research on new hardware offerings and new software techniques. I still did quite a bit of coding, but I now relied on the programmers for most of it.

Fortunately, I had a team of all-stars to help. Sandy Sant’Angelo handled the support line, which during the late nineties was nearly always busy. She was quite good at documenting problems and making the customers feel comfortable. The programmers were Steve Shaw, Harry Burt, and Denise Bessette. Steve and Harry were both good programmers, and they were both familiar and comfortable with TSI’s programming standards. However, they had little knowledge of details of the AdDept system or the way that retail advertisers worked and thought. Early in 1998 Steve Shaw surprised me by leaving TSI to take a programming job at the Phoenix Life in Hartford.

Denise was extremely dependable. She was also very meticulous in her work habits and thoroughly familiar with both TSI’s standards and most of the basics of advertising. She told me that she did not want to travel, however. Therefore, I could not use her for any of the trips that I made to clients.

The Known Problem: I always tried to keep the employees—especially the programmers—happy. The work at TSI environment was, I think, generally positive. The company had very few rules. There was no dress code at all, although I expected the employees to spruce up a little when customers came to our office for training. I wrote up a short document that listed what we expected of employees. My door was literally always open.

TSI paid the programmers pretty well, and by the mid-1990’s we had implemented good programs of health and disability insurance and a 401K with matching contributions. Although I felt a great deal of stress during this period, I tried to avoid putting pressure on the coders.

I understood that there was one problem that was inherent to TSI and other small businesses: there was little or no room for advancement. I could reward people for good work, and I could try to make their work challenging and enjoyable. However, it they were ambitious and wanted to climb the corporate ladder, there was not much that I could do. I suspect that this is why Steve quit. Similarly, if they were interested in a position with more responsibility, my options were likewise limited.

I tolerated—and even encouraged—a certain amount of creativity, but after Sue left the office (described here) in 1994. I made all the important decisions. It wasn’t that I liked exercising power. I just reckoned that none of the programmers were interested in managing the business. I would have been happy just to code all day.

As good as the staff was, our upcoming workload was so massive that there was very little room for error. I knew, for example, that Sue and I could not consider another big trip until all the installations were stable, which might take years. I also understood that I had to keep the entire programming team intact if possible. As I have explained in other blog entries, I figured that every time that a programmer quit I lost at least six months of my own productivity between the time spent looking for a replacement, training him or her, and correcting all the mistakes. Furthermore, there was never a good time to look for coders, but 1997—just months before Y2K raised its ugly head—was one of the worst.

Harry and Steve were good programmers, but I knew very well that the key member of the team for the next few years was Denise. Losing her would be a catastrophe that I did not want to contemplate. I probably should have worried more than I did.

TSI’s Telephone System: Each desk at TSI had a unit like the one shown at the left. The company had many phone lines, but no one, not even Doug or I, had a direct line. TSI had two phone numbers that outsiders knew about. One line was dedicated to customers reporting problems or asking questions. That line was answered by Sandy.

The other number was in the phone book and on our letterhead and business cards. We disclosed it to prospects, vendors, and a few others. That line was answered by the administrative person.

There were also two rollover lines. If a caller called either the main number or the support number, and that line was busy, the phone would still ring, but someone at TSI would need to press the flashing button for a rollover line to answer it.

TSI relied on this phone system until the business shut down in 2014. Doug and a few others pressed me to get a more modern system in which each person had her/his own line. A couple of times I priced out these options, but I could see no advantage that was worth spending thousands of dollars. Besides, I liked our phones. In my assessment, they had one overarching advantage. They made it much more difficult for employees to initiate or receive calls from the outside. There was also a fairly strong incentive to keep non-business calls short.

Harry and Denise dressed up for a TSI Christmas party.

Denise Bessette: Denise was the first programmer that Sue and I hired in 1984. The details are posted here. She worked full-time for a couple of years and then part-time for quite a few years while she finished her undergraduate degree at Smith College and then earned a masters degree at Trinity College. In 1993 she became a full-time employee again. We let her use Sue’s office, which was better than her previous location, but it was still less than optimal because Sue never removed all of her junk after she stopped coming to the office in 1994. We also gave Denise a substantial raise. I tried to keep her in the loop on what direction the company was going, but I did not set up any kind of a formal process for doing so. I should have, but I didn’t. My excuse was that I was away on trips a lot, and when I was in the office I was exceptionally busy.

I should emphasize that, even though we had worked together for many years, Denise and I did not have much of a personal relationship. She invited Sue and me to her house in Stafford, CT, for supper once in the eighties. We never reciprocated, presumably because our house was always a mess. I doubt that in all of those years Denise and I had talked about anything besides work more than a handful of times.

During the time that Denise had worked at TSI she had occasionally received phone calls from her husband, her mother, or one of her sisters. She might have received one or two calls from other people. In the fall of 1998, however, even I, who would ordinarily pay little or no attention to such a thing, noticed that she was receiving numerous phone calls from a “friend” named Jackie.

Herberger’s: My most vivid memories of this period were when I was in St. Cloud, MN, the home base for Herberger’s a chain of eleven department stores, 1300 miles away from TSI’s office. At the time I was installing TSI’s AdDept system on a small AS/400 in the advertising department there. A more detailed description of the installation is posted here.

The offices were on an upper floor of this store.

I only visited Herberger’s a few times. The occasion that I remember the most clearly was certainly not my first trip there. It might have been the second or third. I remember that it was rather cold, but the weather did not approach the frigid levels for which nearby Frostbite Falls is famous.

In those days the only way to reach St. Cloud was through the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. Northwest Airlines sponsored a shuttle service to the St. Cloud Regional Airport⁵. I can’t remember whether on this occasion I took that flight or rented a car and drove. I am pretty sure that I stayed at a hotel that was within easy walking distance of Herberger’s headquarters, which was on St. Cloud’s main drag, St. Gernaine St. I am pretty sure that I stayed two nights and then flew back to Connecticut on the third evening.

The main thing that I remember about my first day there was that I called the office several times to see if everything was all right. This was beyond unusual for me. On most trips, unless I needed help about some problem that I had encountered, I seldom called more than once. I have always hated talking on the phone, even if it was to people I liked. I liked all of TSI’s employees.

I don’t think that I spoke with Denise on any of those calls. However, I got the distinct impression that something was amiss. Although there was nothing particular that provoked alarm, the feeling of impending dread almost nearly overwhelmed me. I desperately wanted to get back to TSI’s office to discover the details so that I could deal with the situation. Of course, this was not possible. I had made a commitment to get the system up and running at Herberger’s, and I could not abandon the project because of a nebulous feeling.

After my first day at Herberger’s I ate supper by myself as usual. I don’t remember where I dined or what I did afterwards. I might have taken a walk. I might have read a book. I might have watched television. I do remember worrying.

I always got very tired after dinner. Every night I took a shower around 9:30 or 10:00 and then went to bed. I sat in bed for a few minutes reading a book. I almost never got through more than one chapter before the letters would begin to swim around on the page. I would then turn out the lights. Normally I was sound asleep within a few seconds.

St. Cloud in 1997 had newer cars, but otherwise it looked just like this.

Not this night. For a few hours I emulated Bobby Lewis—“Tossin’ and turnin'”⁶. I decided to make myself physically tired. There were not many choices available for nocturnal exercise. I dressed and put on my coat and hat. I then walked around St. Cloud for at least an hour. I did not go far. I just walked up and down the streets. None of the buildings seemed to have more than three stories. The only other thing that I remember noticing was a Maytag or Whirlpool store that sold appliances. I had thought that these stores—mainstays of my youth—had gone the way of the dodo, but they evidently still persisted in St. Cloud in 1998.

I eventually drifted back to the hotel and tried to sleep. I probably dozed off for a while before it was time to prepare for work. I remember that I ironed my shirt while I listened to Vivaldi on my CD player through my Bose headphones.

I was running on fumes that day. I chain-drank black coffee to try to remain alert. I took notes on all of the things that the Herberger’s employees said that they needed AdDept to do. I knew very well that Steve VeZain at PMG had already made it clear to me that no custom code would be provided for Herberger’s. Steve said that they needed to adapt to the system that worked for everyone else. I called in to TSI’s office several times on that second day, as well.

I flew back to Connecticut that night in an even worse mood than the foul outlook that these exhausting trips usually produced. On the one hand I was frustrated because the AdDept system did not work the way that the Herberger’s employees wanted it to, and there was nothing much that I could do to help them. They had no clout with PMG. They were, after all, by far the smallest division, and they were on the wrong side of the Mason-Dixon line. On the other hand I was also very apprehensive about what I would find out when I went into the office the next day.

The Denouement: On my first day back in the office Denise confided that she had been offered a job as IT director at a fairly small company that used an AS/400. I am not sure whether she would have any employees under her or not. Truth to tell, I did not care much what kind of job it was. My sole objective was to take whatever steps were necessary to persuade her to stay at TSI. I also learned that Jackie, as I expected, was a corporate headhunter for an employment agency.

I tried to talk Denise out of accepting the job. I emphasized how important I thought that she was to TSI. She asserted that she was mostly looking for something new. She had been doing mostly the same job for thirteen years.The best that I could get out of her was that she would think about it overnight.

Denise usually arrived at TSI’s office at about 9:00⁷. The morning following our conversation I went outside to meet her in the parking lot. I was extremely nervous when her car finally pulled into the lot. She got out and immediately informed me that she had decided to accept the other job.

I cannot say that I was surprised, but I was still crushed. I couldn’t face going back into the office. So I went and sat in my car and moped. I felt as bad or at least nearly as bad as when Bill Davey and I just missed qualifying for the National Debate Tournament in 1970 (described here) or when Sue abandoned me to go to Alaska in 1973 (described here). No situation in the intervening twenty-three years came close to evoking this feeling.

I had no idea how to deal with this situation. We had mountains of work. I was in no position to take on more of it myself, and I could only squeeze a little more out of Harry. I had made commitments to several clients. I could not select one or two to work on and dismiss the others. They all had deadlines, and they had given us deposits or were long-time clients that I was not prepared to disappoint.

Sitting in the car was not helping. I drove to the Enfield Square Mall, parked my Saturn, went inside, and walked around. At that time there were some benches inside. I rested on one of them every so often. Eventually a plan coalesced in my mind. It seemed like a good idea; I just wish that I had thought of it earlier so that it would not appear that I was being extorted.

That evening I discussed my idea with Sue. I honestly thought that it would be as difficult to persuade her to agree as it would be to convince Denise. I was wrong. She understood the important role that Denise played, and she agreed in principle with everything that I proposed. She also knew that I was miserable.

I located the original written proposal that I presented to Denise. It was somewhat different from what I remembered. Here is what it said:

Denise as Principal:

Denise will have 25% share⁸ in TSI. The three principals will have monthly meetings to go over the results of the previous month vis-à-vis the business plan and discuss other issues. The 25% share will entitled her to a presumptive bonus of 25% of the profits after employee bonuses and SARSEP contributions. Denise will give up her commissions.
Denise will be given a budget of $125,000 for fiscal 1999. She will have six objectives:
1. Do what it takes to bring our staff up to strength.
2. Work with Doug to come up with a profitable and sustainable business plan for current products: fee schedules for programming and support, etc. The deadline for this is April 1, 1999.
3. Come up with a concrete plan for TSI’s next software (or whatever) product. The plan should include recommendations about whether it should be done inside of TSI-AdDept or in another milieu. The deadline for this is September 1, 1999. TSI will pay for necessary travel. Mike has several frequent flier round-trips to use.
4. Come up with suggestions to ease tension and make work fun for everyone. This involves removing the “Wag the Dog” orientation we now have.
5. Implement remote dial-in support and a LAN (TSI will pay for the hardware).
6. Get someone AS/400 certified or figure a way around it.
Suggestion: Use part of the budget to hire Steve back in a new position. I would like to get five man-days of programming/support from the two of you, but this won’t work if there is not a firm system in place to guarantee freedom from support calls. The easiest way to accomplish this would be to work from some other location (which requires remote dial-in support).

I met privately with Denise on the following day. She was stunned by the offer and very impressed. However, she had already made a commitment to the other company. Moreover, there was another employee at the other company whose fate was somehow linked to Denise getting hired. I don’t remember the details. In any event Denise accepted my offer, I got our lawyers to make it legal, and she called the other company and Jackie. Neither was pleased.

This the first page of TSI’s revised stockholders agreement.

When I spoke with Denise, I made it clear that the monthly meetings would actually include Sue only if Sue insisted on attending, which I doubted would happen often. When we actually distributed annual bonuses, we gave Sue a minimal one and split the profits 50-50. The “concrete plan” became A^xN. I do not recognize the “Wag the Dog” reference, but within a year the company moved into a new office in East Windsor with a remarkably different atmosphere (as described here). The “someone” who became AS/400-certified⁹ was myself (as described here). Denise did not hire Steve Shaw back. Instead she hired Brian Rollet, who was something of a disappointment to her.

Denise and I worked together amicably and productively for another sixteen years. If she had not agreed to my plan, those years would have been been much less pleasant for me. I don’t know if I could have achieved half of what we accomplished together.

1. Much more about Doug Pease can be read here and in many of the blog entries about clients that he persuaded to purchase AdDept in the nineties.

2. TSI’s involvement with the May Company at the corporate level is posted here.

3. TSI’s dealings with Tandy Corporation are detailed here.

4. In the nineties Proffitt’s Inc. purchased all of those chains and turned them into divisions. After it purchased Saks Fifth Avenue, which already used AdDept, it changed its name to Saks Inc. TSI’s relationship with this company is described here. Separate blogs describe the individual divisions.

5. In 2021 this shuttle is no longer in operation. The only commercial flights from STC are on Allegiant Airlines. There are only two potential destinations—Fort Meyers/Punta Gorda and Phoenix/Mesa. Residents who want to fly anywhere else must somehow get to Minneapolis. Northwest Airlines filed for bankruptcy in 2005 and was acquired by Delta in 2008.

6. You can listen to the number 1 single on the Billboard chart for all of 1961 here.

7. Denise asked for this allowance when her son was young. It gave her time to get him off to school or wherever else he was headed. She also had a fairly long drive to Enfield and even longer to East Windsor. She often stayed late.

8. When TSI incorporated in 1994, Sue was given 45 percent of the stock, and I got 55 percent. The revised agreement left me with 40, Sue with 35, and Denise with 25.

9. IBM had implemented a new requirement for business partners. Not only did the software need to be certified, but also someone at each company must be certified by passing a test that was sales-oriented and a test that was more technical. I took both of these tests, as is described here.

Wavablog

Memoirs, bridge, popes, travel, and other stuff

Tag Archives: Macy's West

2001-2006 TSI: Weekly Partners’ Meetings

1995-2009 TSI: AdDept Client: Macy’s West

1991-2007 TSI: AdDept: Federated Department Stores/Macy’s Inc.

1995 December: Hawaii Trip Part 1

1998 TSI: The Third Crisis