Marshall Field’s was most famous for its store in downtown Chicago and for Marshall Field himself, who was a driving force behind the Windy City’s recovery from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. By the time that I came into contact with the department store chain it was based in Minneapolis and was owned by the Target Corporation.1
The skyway entrance was on the 2nd floor.
In 2004 the May Co. purchased the Marshall Field’s stores from Target with the intention of administering them from Minneapolis in the Marketing Department’s headquarters in one of the high floors of the store that was previously the flagship store for Dayton’s. Its address was 700 Nicollet Mall. The plan was for all of the advertising to be scheduled, purchased, and paid for using TSI’s AdDept system on an AS/400 at the Midwest Data Center in St. Louis. A meeting was scheduled for September 16 at Hecht’s2 Advertising Department in Arlington, VA. I attended, as did representatives of the May Co. and the Marketing Department of Marshall Field’s. Dave Ostendorf from Famous-Barr3 may also have been there.
Richard Roark and most of Dave Ostendorf.
The meeting was unlike any that I had ever attended. The people from the May Co. announced that Marshall Field’s would use AdDept, and the May Co. would pay for any necessary revisions! They made it quite clear that they were being given a blank check. Throughout the rest of 2004 I worked on documenting in some detail the changes that needed to be done. This resulted in a fifty-page design document delivered in December and a fifty-nine page tome sent to them in April of 2005. I found Acrobat files of these two booklets. They are posted here and here.
It seems likely that I took more than two trips to Minneapolis in 2004 but I only found notes from one in November and one in December. Perhaps Dave Ostendorf or Richard Roark from Foley’s4 in Houston helped me gather the information needed for the design documents.
Working conditions: On my visits to Minneapolis I flew Northwest and took a taxi or the light rail from the airport to downtown. I never rented a car.
The top arrow is Marshall Field’s. The bottom is the Hilton. The skyway is 9.5 miles long.
I stayed at the Hilton that was a few blocks south of the Nicollet Mall store. I almost never stayed at a Hilton; I preferred one of the affiliated hotels that awarded Hilton Honors points4, especially Hampton Inns. I have two strong memories of this Hilton:
I could walk from the hotel to the second floor of Marshall Field’s via the skyway without ever setting foot outside. This was a valuable feature in the winter.
There was no free breakfast. However, because I had achieved Silver status in the Hilton Honors program I could go up to the top floor where they had an executive dining room for road warriors like myself. The food there was terrific and free.
Working with the people at Marshall Field’s was a very enjoyable experience. There were, however, a few peculiarities.
The skyway entrance was on the second floor of the store. When I arrived in the morning the store was not open. So, it was a little spooky.
To get to the Marketing (NOT advertising) Department I had to take a fairly large number of escalators. There were elevators, but they were not as convenient.
How many marketing departments posted a map to help its team members.
The people at Marshall Field’s used a different word for many of the concepts with which I was familiar. Customers were called guests, employees were team members, advertising was marketing, ads were called promos, and so on. I kept a list of these, but I no longer have it.
Every time that I went to the bathroom (or anywhere else) I had to call someone to let me back in to the Marketing area, which was restricted. I was very excited in April of 2005 when I was given a badge so that I could come and go as I pleased.
The toilet paper in the bathrooms was the flimsiest that I had ever seen. They must have imported it from another country. I cannot imagine that anyone would buy it in the U.S. Maybe they did it to save money, but they didn’t save any on me. I just used more of it—lots more. I once asked Chuck Hansen5, one of the people involved in the installation, if others did the same. He said, “Oh, yeah. Definitely.”
While I was there in February of 2005 the temperature dipped below -20 Fahrenheit: not wind chill, degrees. I had to go out in that frigid air to walk to the taxi stand to catch a cab to the airport. It was only a couple of blocks, but I was very relieved to see a few cabs lined up and ready to go.
Amy and Becky are seated. Dave has a mustache. The other guy is Chuck. I don’t remember the other two women.
The “team members”: Our main contact in the first few months was Amy Spears, who was the assistant to the Finance Manager, Becky. I cannot remember her last name. They were both very conscientious and amiable. When Becky left the company on short notice in 2005, Amy was in something of a panic. Mari Pittman6 was brought in from Foley’s to take on Becky’s role.
A woman named Thu Le worked on expense invoices. I vaguely remember her. Nate Jeppson7 also worked in the finance area. I helped him fine-tune the entry in the sub-account table. Two ladies named Kimber and Adrianne worked in accounting. Either or both of them might be in the photo.
Soni.
Beginning in April of 2005 David Harris8 assumed the function of liaison with TSI. His main job was managing the Mac network. My memories of him are not very distinct. I remember his replacement, Soni (pronounced like “sunny”, short for Sonja) Froyen9 a lot better. At the end of the project she sent me a tee shirt that had an ad release form with the box for “Released” checked.
Sheila Wilson came from Hecht’s in 2005. She was deeply involved in the AdDept product.
My notes from February of 2006, when the division was officially dubbed Macy’s North, disclosed the names of two new employees in the finance area: Shannon Feuerhelm and Megan Boie. Jackie Smith was hired to place newspaper ads, a job that formerly had been done by Target’s ad agency, Haworth.
The last set of notes were dated in December. They indicated that Chuck, who had been in another department for a few months, had returned to the Marketing Department. They also mention that Lynn Robinson had been placed in charge of Direct Mail.
The projects: Getting Marshall Field’s system up and running was the last gigantic project that TSI undertook. It was so big and so complicated that the individual details have tended to fade. Here are a few things that struck me as I read through the design documents and the month end checklist that I set up for Becky
The most striking thing was that so many changes were required to the file structure, including several new tables. It is a tribute to our system of change management that we were willing and able to implement these changes without disrupting our other installations.
I wrote all of this. I made a few mistakes, but on the whole the presentation was very thorough and professional.
It is hard to understand why PageMaker, which was used to create these documents originally, had so much trouble with non-proportional fonts like Courier. The vertical bars on the reports (e.g., page 9 of document 1) should all align, but they don’t.
So much of what is described is unique to Marshall Field’s. For example, no one had ever used the term “production credits” at any other installation.
I have a dim memory of Item #3. Becky had a gigantic number of general ledger accounts (called “internal” in the document) that did not match up well with the May Co.’s accounts. The cross-reference table was huge.
Any changes to the cost accounting algorithms were risky. These programs were so complicated that they were barely readable. TSI’s programmers were reluctant to touch them because the people who used them were always under severe time pressure. “Yesterday” was the deadline for addressing problems.
I had totally forgotten about the “buckets” and “metro markets”.
The use of “campaign” instead of “event’ must have come from an ad agency. No one talked about campaigns in a retail setting.
I wonder if they actually used all the work that we did on production schedules and the job jacket.
Over $7,000 in changes to the insertion orders are in document 2! I don’t remember if they ever used AxN. It is mentioned on p. 34; I guess that they must have. The NAA# was assigned by the Newspaper Association of America. Prior to becoming part of the May Co. Field’s Haworth bought the newspaper space.
Document 2 mentioned CAPS, which was the May Co. system for expenses and G/L.
I did not remember importing sales by department.
The closing process is lengthy, but it is very specific. I wonder if they actually used the three-page checklist.
Denouement: I am certain that we did exceptionally good work for Marshall Field’s. They always treated me royally when I visited them. It would be nice to be able to say that the department ran like clockwork for decades.
However, that is not what happened. By 2008 Marshall Field’s was no more. The stores that were allowed to remain open were rebranded as Macy’s. Worse news was that Macy’s North (the people with whom we worked in Minneapolis) was consolidated into Macy’s East. The wonderful people and environment that I found there vanished.
I did not think too much about that. We did good work, we got paid, I made some friends, and we made their lives a little better for a short period of time.
The downtown store in Minneapolis was closed for good in 2017. It is in the process of being repurposed for multiple uses.
1. Prior to 2000 the company was called the Dayton-Hudson Corporation. Its name reflected the logos of the Minnesota and Michigan chains that merged in 1969. The company was renamed in 2000 in recognition of the fact that the Target stores produced 80 percent of the revenue. One year later the department store division rebranded all of its stores as Marshall Field’s.
2. The story of the installation at Hecht’s can be read here.
3. Details of the Famous-Barr installation in St. Louis are posted here.
4. My card from those days calls them Hilton H Honors points. I never understood what the middle initial stood for.
5. Chuck Hansen stayed on and is working for Macy’s in 2023. His LinkedIn page is here.
7. Nate Jeppson’s LinkedIn page is available here.
8. David Harris’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.
9. I discovered on Soni’s LinkedIn page (found here) that she studied Latin and history in college. I was also surprised to learn from my notes that she knew how to code in php, which I did not yet know enough about to know that it never shown in caps. She was also the only one of my business associates who followed me on Twitter. In retrospect I feel as if we might have potentially been soulmates. Of course I was eighteen years older than she was.
An interesting, if spooky, place to exercise during the pandemic. Continue reading →
For decades the big attraction of living in Enfield has been the easy access to almost every variety of retail store and restaurant. The concentration of these establishments in Enfield began with the construction of the Enfield Square mall and eventually spread out a few blocks in every direction except east, where I-91 blocked further expansion. As far as I know, no one celebrated the the fiftieth anniversary of the mall in 2021. Frankly, there was not much left to celebrate.
History: The potential of the property occupied by the mall was first appreciated by the May Co., one of TSI’s biggest clients and the parent company of the Hartford-based chain of department stores, G. Fox. The area attracted the company’s attention because it was between two exits of I-91 and there was little retail competition in the area north of Hartford and south of Springfield, MA. Furthermore, although Enfield itself was not a particularly wealthy town, the towns bordering it to the east (Suffield), west (Somers), and north (Longmeadow, MA) were quite prosperous and lacking in retail.
The three original anchor stores are indicated in red: G=G. Fox; P=JC Penney; S=Steiger’s. All three extended well into the parking lot and had external entrances.
This view is from the west. I cannot explain where all these cars are going. There is no exit on the west.
The May Co. purchased the land and developed a mall with three anchor stores and a very large parking lot. G. Fox occupied the prize spot—the two-story space on the western side with its own entrances. Steiger’s, a much smaller department store based in Springfield, leased the large one-story area on the eastern end. The two-story space located in the south-central area was leased to JC Penney.
This arrangement persisted for more than two decades. In 1994 Steiger’s went out of business, and in 1997 its space was leased by Sears. In 1993, the May company folded the G. Fox division into its Boston-based division, Filene’s. In 2000 the JC Penney store closed. Filene’s eventually took over the lease and closed the second floor of both of its locations. In 2006 Macy’s purchased the May Co. and rebranded Filene’s. Both Macy’s stores closed in 2016 and were never again occupied. The Sears store also closed in 2016 and was never reoccupied.
The doors on the left lead to the mall’s corridor. The ones on the right lead to Target. Few Target shoppers go to the mall area.
A new Target store was constructed and opened in 20011, but for some reason it was not really integrated into the mall. It had only one entrance—on the north side. It was next to one of the mall’s three side corridors, but there was no way to enter Target from the center of the mall without walking almost all the way down that corridor. So, it did not serve to draw traffic to the rest of the mall. It also occupied a considerable amount of parking space. For years parking was abundant on three sides of the mall and difficult on the north side.
Preparation: In January of 2022 I had been searching for an indoor location in which to walk a few miles four or five days per week. I had no interest in joining a gym, but I did investigate using a treadmill at the Enfield Senior Center. Then I thought of the mall. My dad had walked there for a while when Enfield Square was still a hive of activity. I sometimes picked him up there when we ate lunch together at Friendly’s on Wednesdays. I never asked him what it was like; I did not consider what he was doing as serious exercise, and in those days I still was in possession of a working treadmill and ample cartilage in my knees.
It occurred to me one day that I could walk in Enfield Square. I made a reconnaissance trip to gauge how many laps I would need to walk to reach my goal of five miles. I was a little surprised at how empty the building was, and some of the changes disoriented me. I was pleased with my discovery that one complete lap—including the side corridors—would constitute a hike of about half a mile. I decided to start with five laps and add one additional lap each Monday until I reached ten.
There were a few false starts. On the first hike through the mall I remembered my Bose head phones, but I forgot to bring my MP3 player. The second time I remember both the player and the headphones, but I found that the headphones trapped in too much heat. By the end of the walk I was uncomfortably hot. After that I used earbuds instead of the headphones.
On both of those first two hikes I left my winter jacket and hat in the car. I parked as close as possible to the door to the western corridor, but I still faced a fairly substantial walk in the frigid winter air from my car to the door. The next time I decided to try parking on the other side of Target near the door to the north end of the western corridor. The only store in that corridor was GameStop. I correctly figured that I would easily be able to locate a good parking spot there. In fact, the only difficulty that I encountered was with the nearest light in the parking lot. It did not seem to work, or maybe the landlord2 had disconnected it.
On my way to the mall I drove past the huge two-story western anchor store that had last been occupied by Macy’s until 2016. I remembered that for a while Lia Honda, which is a block east of Enfield Square had parked dozens or even hundreds of brand new vehicles in the western parking lot. When I drove by the former Macy’s the entire parking lot was shockingly empty. I noticed a sign on the side of the building that indicated that the building was available for lease or purchase. I feel certain that the property managers would bend over backwards to get a tenant there, but who would want it?
Come on inside and take a lap with me. We will be walking counterclockwise, which means that we will keep to the right. Some of the shoppers walk on the left side of the corridor, but I have yet to see a walker do so.
I’ll point out the sights. I’ve never actually set foot in any of the establishments at Enfield Square except for Target and the cinemas, but I’ve done a little research on some of the obscure ones, and I have made mental notes while hiking the corridors.
The western corridors: On the immediate right (west) of the northwest entrance is the GameStop store. It has been open every time that I have walked by it. Seldom has there been a potential customer within, but I can always hear or see some kind of activity.
A full-length mirror with five diagonal grey stripes has been positioned between the entrance to the store and the door through which I always enter and exit. When one is walking in the corridor towards the door it appears for a second that someone is walking up a hallway from the left. Actually the grey stripes make it appear that they are ascending a staircase.
The rest of the northwest corridor is totally uninhabited. There still is a large sign for Liberty, the tax consultants.. Liberty, which is, of course, a seasonal business has another office nearby. I am pretty sure that they have abandoned this office and just left the sign. If they intended to resume operations in the mall, I think that there would be more activity there by February 6. I, for one, have already received most of my 1099s.
Liberty’s office was on the southwest corner of the corridor in which we entered. At this point we bear to the right toward what was formerly the grand semicircular entrance to the G. Fox/Filene’s/Macy’s store that served as the western anchor store. Some walkers walk right along the wall, but I usually follow the diagonal checkerboard pathway.
I was quite shocked to discover that the entrances to two of the three of the former anchor stores had been walled up and decorated with unimaginative art work. At left is a photo of the one on the west end of the mall. I think that the artists meant to depict things that one could purchase in the mall. Not so in 2022. If the hamburger makes you hungry, you must go outside to Wendy’s or Friendly’s or across the street to McDonald’s or Burger King to get one.
As we pass through this area we can see overhead a huge wreath that was, I assume, left over from Christmas.
We haven’t encountered any humans in this area yet, but people are usually visible on the left in the main corridor. From this distance it is hard to say whether they are walkers or shoppers. All of the shoppers and most of the walkers wear at least a light jacket. I wear a sweatshirt over a tee shirt. I feel a little chilly during the first lap. After that I am happy that I left the coat behind in my Honda.
On the south side of the walled-over entrance is a large location that was for decades the location of a Waldenbooks store. I visited it often to purchase paperback books or calendars. This store was one of many that closed in January of 2007.
The space is now occupied—sort of—by the Lia car dealerships. I have walked past here at least thirty times, and I have never seen anyone. I don’t know if it was ever actually used by Lia. I doubt that anyone has been here during the pandemic. A sign in the window touts some Hyundai models from 2019.
Inside some tables and chairs are visible, as well as small displays of merchandise featuring the brands of the four Lia dealerships in Enfield The lights have never been on when I walked by, and I have never seen anyone inside of this office.
They don’t rent bowling shoes, and you need to bring your own ball.
I am fairly sure that at one time there were stores on both sides of the mall’s southwest corridor. In 2022 a couple of bowling lanes could be inserted here, and neither the retailers nor their customers would be disturbed much. There are no businesses at all on the north side of the corridor. In fact, there are not even doors or display windows. The impression given is that beyond Lia to the door at the end of the corridor is an outside wall. I am quite certain, however, that something is behind it.
We make the loop at the end of the hallway, but we are careful not to step on the carpet. Some kind of pressure sensor beneath it opens the door at the southwest ext. The first door on the right (east) after the turn was for many years a RadioShack that I frequented when I needed a particular type of cable, converter, or other piece of electronic gear. At Christmas time the store featured remote-controlled miniature cars. That spot is now empty.
In 2022 the only merchant on the entire corridor is one that I had never heard of: Rainbow. The store has been open only a few times when I walked by, but I have yet to see a customer or a salesperson.
The company’s official website states that they sell “water-based cleaning systems” for purifying the air and various surfaces. Somehow I have survived for seventy-three and a half years inhaling and exhaling dry dirty air,
There are some curious items concerning Home Helpers in the display windows on the right, but there are no active stores until we make the turn onto the main corridor.
South Side of the Main Corridor: Just around the corner is a very interesting store. The shelves are still clearly visible through the window, but they contain no merchandise. By stepping a few feet into the middle of the courtyard we can see the store’s sign. It says GNC. The G is lit up, but the NC is still dark. This must be a message of some kind, but what is it?
Perhaps it could be read as an admission that the users of GNC’s vitamins and supplements were unable to deal with the Covid-19 virus. Maybe, but perhaps the real message is that, like the G, a spark of hope remains, and soon people will be able to fortify their immune systems with over-the-counter nostrums, thereby avoiding the treacherous vaccines foisted on them by George Soros and Bill Gates.
The next store that is actually operational is the only one with its own entrance from the parking lot. It is also the brightest and largest of all of the stores except, of course, Target. All sides of the mall’s gigantic parking lot have signs with arrows indicating the direction to Party City.
The above picture was taken on a Saturday afternoon, the only time that I had ever seen anyone manning the cash register on the mall end of the store. Most customers enter and exit through the doors to the parking lot. I have, however, noticed a few people entering from the mall.
There is an empty store between Party City and the next retailer, Pelley’s Sports. Their Facebook page says that they “specialize in NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL clothing, merchandise, memorabilia, pictures, and other sports paraphernalia.” I have passed this store many times, but I have never seen anyone inside except on Saturday afternoon. They have a lot of stuff piled up near the entrance. I could easily have missed some shoppers.
Pelley’s has purchased some of the display space of the adjacent vacant store to the west. In it are displayed large photos of some local teams and famous players. The photos are on sale for upwards of $150. One framed photo of Tom Brady is offered for $2,699! They also sell jerseys that look very authentic.
The next occupied space is occupied—at least occasionally—by the North Central Connecticut Chamber of Commerce. I don’t know why the C of C maintains an office here. However, I once saw three people sitting at a table here discussing some papers. So, evidently it is occasionally used for meetings, at least.
The next space that is sometimes open is Claudette’s Consignments. I had seen people in this store only a few times. However, despite what the photo on the right shows, on Saturday there was quite a bit more activity there. I could not find any information on the Internet about this store. I am not sure whether it is associated with the shop in the Hamptons of the same name.
Claudette’s occupies a corner space. The next area is a large two-story structure that formerly was occupied by JC Penney and then part of Filene’s and Macy’s. It has been walled off and decorated with paintings. If the picture of a slice of pizza makes you hungry, you are out of luck, but you can probably buy a cappuccino at the Starbucks inside of Target.
I think that this area must have been used as Santaland during the Christmas season. The photo only shows two huge wreaths, but the first time that I walked by in January, oversized candy canes and fake snow were spread throughout the fenced-in area. It was actually a very depressing sight.
I walk along the edge of the small fence. Some walkers choose to walk straight across from Collette’s to the store on the other side of this alcove—Bath & Body Works. By the way, on Sundays numerous people bring their dogs with them on their strolls through the malls. I am pleased to report that I did not witness any canine misbehavior.
For me the most interesting thing about BB&W was that two employees were usually visible. They almost always outnumbered the customers. I think that this place sells smelly stuff that I would never consider purchasing.
Next door is one of the newest shops. It is called SSUPhoto Designs. I have only seen one person within, a short young man who seemed chained to his computer. On chilly days he wore a stocking cap. The store has a fairly impressive website, which you can visit here. I am still not quite sure what product or service is being offered, but apparently they have the equipment and the expertise to produce designs on the computer and transfer them to many different objects. They also sell “tumblers”, dozens of which are on display.
I also found a website for a website for SSUPhoto (without the Designs). You can visit it here. It explained that the SSU stands for Snapshots Unlimited. I suspect that the store is an effort by the proprietors to expand their reach in a period of lower demand for professional photographers.
After another unoccupied space the New Life Church appears on our right. Its services are at 10AM on Sundays. I have never been in the mall at that time, and so the few people whom I have seen in this location were setting something up for the service.
Across the corridor is another space that is apparently leased by the church. Its windows display biblical quotes, and the word “Annex” is in a sign over the door. A third space on the eastern corridor also apparently belongs to the church.
The church has a rather professional-looking website, which you can explore here. I need to dispute one portion of the website that states, “Most of all, we believe you’ll find people just like you …” I seriously doubt that anyone who attends regularly is even vaguely like me. In truth I found the approach described there as just this side of terrifying.
Pastor David and Lisa.
In total, a NEW LIFE service is about 90 minutes in length. Services begin with the NEW LIFE worship band leading the church in music – song lyrics are projected onto the screens so you can sing along and/or engage with worship however you feel most comfortable. After the music portion of service is complete, our pastor will come up to share both a challenging and encouraging, hope-filled message from the Bible.
I assume that the phrase “the pastor will come up” does not imply that he ascends from the basement. If he had a trap door with a small elevator, he surely would never mention it on the website.
Next to the church is Crystal’s Fun Spot, a large space filled with objects meant to attract the attention of youngsters. On my weekday walks I seldom saw anyone in here except for the woman sitting at the desk with a large roll of paper towels at the ready. I took notice of the towels because on one occasion I neglected to bring some of my own. If I had the sniffles or a sneezing fit, I planned to enter the Fun Spot and offer crisp dollar bill to the lady at the desk in exchange for one of the towels.
On Crystal’s website (here) I learned that she charges $7 per hour for infants and $15 per hour for kids who are two and older. On weekdays I had only seen a couple of kids in here with their parents, but on Saturday afternoon there was actually a line.
Next to Crystal’s were three window displays that feature mannequins dressed in clothes with patches that are oddly arranged. There is also a pile of suitcases. I had never actually seen anyone inside, but one day the light was on, and there was some equipment visible. One window is signed by Justin Haynes, and it prominently features the name of the place: Just10 H.
Looking at the website (here) solved the puzzle for me. It said that Justin Haynes was a fashion designer who was planning a big show for February 16. There was even a countdown clock. That was only two days ago, but the website’s home page has been totally revamped. It says that Jus10 H’s label is called ONYX (the luxury label). Don’t ask me what occurred in the interim. I never have been able to keep up with fashion.
Before the pandemic the Enfield 12 Cinemas were the spot to be in this sleepy town. The mall’s website even calls them an anchor store. In the last few months I have been there twice for Metropolitan Opera Live in HD performances. There was one other person attending the first showing, Boris Godunov. Ten of us showed up for the second, Rigaletto. That is not shockingly low for opera, but I saw practically no one at all anywhere in the theater either time.
Previously there was always a line for tickets. Several times when I passed by while walking I saw no one who was even selling tickets. They don’t even promote their shows. The sign that is visible from the corridor says that the schedule is posted on the Internet and at the one-user kiosk!
Next is a booth used by the company that provides security for the mall. The last two afternoons that I walked by this spot there were two men behind the counter. A guy with a shopping cart brought at least one of them supper in a styrofoam container. He took a seat on the civilian side of the counter and ate his own supper from a similar container.
I have seen this guy every time that I came to the mall to walk. On every occasion he wore black leather shoes, black pants, and a white undershirt with shoulder straps à la Clark Gable. He did not resemble Clark much in other ways. For one thing he was grotesquely obese. He also seemed to need to use his shopping cart as a walker.
The first afternoon that I walked in the mall he had parked himself and his cart at the abandoned kiosk that once was used by nearby Asnuntuck Community College. He had some kind of strange machine sitting on top of the counter. It was plugged into an outlet on the floor. I never have figured out what he was doing then or why he seemed to spend so much time in the mall.
One day I saw him entering from the narrow corridor leading to the restrooms, the mall’s offices, and an entrance. He was wearing a thick flannel shirt-jacked, which he doffed as soon as he was settled inside. He waved to me as I passed on that occasion and on several others. Since he does not wear a mask, I give him a wide berth.
The southeast corner of the mall is operated by Cindy’s Food for the Soul. I don’t know who Cindy is; I have never seen a female in this establishment.
I did not see anything that looked like a menu posted somewhere. I expected to find a menu somewhere on the Internet, but I was disappointed. Evidently this was formerly a stand-alone deli somewhere in Enfield. Cindy evidently specializes in soul food and Jamaican food. I don’t think that anything hot is available, but I could be wrong.
At the end of the corridor we turn left in front of the old Steiger’s/Sears store. For some reason it, unlike the other two anchors, has not been walled up. Since the lights are almost never on, it might as well be. However, on one magical afternoon the interior of the abandoned store was lit up, and I got to peek inside. I could see all the way to the exterior doors on the east side. There was absolutely no furniture or debris. I saw eight or ten columns that presumably held up the roof. The floor was clean and polished. The owners of the property must have been showing the space to a potential lessee or purchaser.
At the end of the alcove where we must turn left there is a bench on which I have often seen seated a young man in a reflective vest playing with his phone. I assume that he collects shopping carts from the Target parking lot, and rests there on his break.
Eastern Corridor: We then make a right turn up the eastern corridor, which is really dead since Panera moved east to a building constructed for them in the Home Depot parking lot across Freshwater St. We make a U-turn at the door, after which we pass the door to Ruby Tuesday, which closed in 2016. It seems strange.that two very nice windows—one with stained glass panes—have been sitting there for six years.
Next is an area belonging to the church. I have never seen it open, but occasionally a light is on. I saw a foosball table in there a couple of times.
On the corner is the Kebab House. Sue and I had been planning to go there until the owners decided to close the place until the middle of February. I am pretty sure that their signs and printed menus must hold the world record for misspellings. They even misspelled kebab once!
I still fear that the restaurant may never reopen. I have walked past it many times, and I have never seen more than one of its tables occupied. Since there are always at least three employees, it is hard to see how it could survive.
Over the years his site has housed many short-lived restaurant ventures, including a McDonald’s3 and at least two different pizza joints. Its spot across from the theater with its outrageously priced food items might seem ideal, but no one has been able to make it work. Obviously prospects are worse in 2022.
North Side of the Main Corridor: I consider the turn at the Kebab House to be the halfway point in the walk. If you are thirsty, there is a machine nearby that dispenses Coca Cola products and other beverages. Be prepared to shell out $2 or more for a 20-ounce bottle.
After the turn back onto the main east-west corridor we pass an amazing number of dark stores. There are four of them before we reach Relaxation, a place that features a “Chinese Massage” for $20. In the window is a television screen showing a silent (!) description and demonstration of the technique. The good news is that the video, which is on a looped, is captioned. Unfortunately the captions are in Chinese.
The inside of the store is very dimly lit. I thought that I saw someone getting a massage once, but I could not be sure.
The nest space to the west is the church’s annex. It has always been dark when I walked past.
Then there are three more empty locations before we come to our next turn to the right around Furnari Jewelers, which is always brightly lit and always has at least two employees within. Once or twice I saw other people between the counters. I could not gauge their interest. I noticed that a sign that assured passersby: “No Credit Required.” To me it said a lot about the current state of the mall.
We are now headed north up the central corridor toward an exit and the entrance to Target. On the right is another vacant storefront that once housed “Hair in the Square.” The other storefront was abandoned on January 31, 2022. A second video games store called Stateline Video Games had been there for a short time. It had a lot of interesting stuff in its display windows, including quite a few WWE action figures that were clearly marked as “Not for Sale”. A week after the posting of many signs explaining the closure there was still quite a bit of equipment in the store. The company still operates a store in the Holyoke Mall.
By the time that we had reached the exit, we passed two other places of note. They were both in the middle of the corridor. The first, which is called Playtown, was designed for kids and their exhausted parents. The latter can take advantage of the softest of the many benches in the mall. A goodly number of very sturdy and colorful objects are provided for the youngsters to climb on and slide down. The green caterpillar at the entrance indicates that everyone must be at least 42″ tall. I have seen about ten children in here. One was close to that height, but all the rest were much shorter.
The other active location was the kiosk devoted to CM Repairs and Accessories. According to a map that I discovered on the Internet, this kiosk was once located outside of Cindy’s Fun Spot. The new location would seem to be optimal, but I have only seen one or two potential customers here. The last few time that I walked by this location the booth was not manned. There were lots of phone accessories on display and signs for calling India for $19 per month and something called Lyca Mobile, a wireless network based in England.
I looked at the CM Facebook page for help in understanding what CM stood for and what the significance of the circle around the C was, but I found nothing. It sounded like a one-man show with a Massachusetts phone number.
The only open business in the central corridor is Tranquility Day Spa and Salon. I frankly have only the vaguest idea of what services and products are offered within this establishment. I don’t think that you can just wander in. The desk at the entrance is almost always manned by a guy in a lab coat. A sign warns that if you want a manicure you must wear a mask.
The most popular product appears to be nail polish. They have dozens of choices on display near the entrance. I have witnessed quite a few women checking out the selections there.
The Lyon and Bear is to the right of Claire’s.
The corner space is unoccupied, but after we are return to the main corridor we pass by four consecutive occupied (at least occasionally) stores. The first one is the most mysterious. Two 8½ by 11 signs taped to the window identify it as “The Lyon and Bear”. I don’t understand the name. A very large lion toy hangs from the ceiling, but no bear was visible. Its Facebook page mostly promoted beard oil and trimmers when I looked at it.
The C of C welcomed the store in October 2021 with an article that did little to explain its purpose. You can read it here.
Claire’s, on the other hand, has been in the mall for decades. I seem to recall that it was formerly in the southeast corridor. I have never dared to enter. I have seen several moms with quite young girls who were apparently there to take advantage of the free ear-piercing. Apparently this is an accepted right of passage.
Next on the right is the brightly lit T-Mobile store. Although it is featuring “iPhone 13 on Us”, I have almost never seen a customer in this store. I remember that Jason Dean4, one of TSI’s programmers, told me that he and his wife had switched to T-Mobile to save a little money. Unfortunately, his new phone did not work at all inside his apartment. The signal was too week. He switched back to his previous carrier, but it involved a major hassle.
The cleanup hitter in this murderer’s row of retail is LensCrafters. It has been located in the mall for a very long time. Sue bought at least one pair of glasses there. It always seems to be busy when I passed by, which I found a little surprising. Target has its own fairly large optical department, and so LensCrafters is one of the few retailers in the mall that directly competes with the only real anchor store.
The last stretch of the walk is the most depressing. The last seven spaces on our right are unoccupied! A few, like Dollar ‘N’ Things and inField Research, still have signs, and the windows of others are decorated with advertising. One of the windows strangely promotes Dollar ‘N’ Things. Google thinks that inField Research is still in business in February 2022, but the office is empty.
Here is another map of the entire mall. I have enclosed in green the names of the entities open in February 2022. New ones I have identified with abbreviations in green and explained in the caption.
If you click on the image, a much larger and more readable version will be displayed. N is the location of the North Central CT Chamber of Commerce, CC is Collette’s Consignments, New Life is the New Life Church with the Annex across the hall., J10H is Justin Haynes, C is Cindy’s Food for the Soul, K is the Kebab House, and LB is the Lyon and Bear. The big arrow shows how CM’s Kiosk has moved.
Machines: The corridors also contain quite a few vending machines. The largest one, by far, dispenses acne products from Proactiv. I have never seen anyone within ten feet of this one. For one thing malls are no longer where teens hang out. I would think that if one suffered from really bad acne, one would not want to advertise one’s condition in the middle of the mall, but what do I know?
Numerous machines cater to the needs of hungry and thirsty denizens of Enfield square. Three machines sell ice cream products called Mini Melts. One is near Playtown. The other pair are back-to-back near the east end of the long corridor. I have never seen anyone buying or eating ice cream in the mall this winter. I did not get a photo because I did not really notice the machines while I was doing my photo lap.
There are six machines that dispense Coca Cola and Vitamin Water beverages. The placement is a little weird. Two are back-to-back near the southwest entrance. Two pairs are side-by-side on the western end of the main corridor and near the exit at the end of the north-central corridor. I have never seen anyone buy anything from either one, and I have noticed no one with a 20-ounce bottle of anything.
Two fairly large collections of gumball machines are on display in the long corridor. One is near Party City and Pelley’s Sports. The other is in front of Jus10H.I don’t know if any of the dispensers actually work. I have never seen anyone try to purchase anything from them. At least two of the glass globes were empty in both collections.
There are at least four ATM machines if you count the one just inside Tranquility. I have never seen anyone use one, and it is hard to imagine why they would. All of the machine—except perhaps the gumball machine—take credit cards. Cash is so pre-pandemic.
A machine near Party City takes three strips of photos. I had my doubts about whether such an old-fashioned machine actually functioned, but I once witnessed three people enter the machine and pull the curtain shut. I must assume that they had their photos. Since everyone in 2022 has a phone with a pretty good camera in it, I don’t think that this type of machine has much future.
Another area near LensCrafters features the twenty-first century’s answer to the mechanical horses that kids could rid for a quarter. This one contains a one-seat train that might be Thomas, a large red dog named Clifford with a seat on his back, and two fairly large ceramic cars. Each car has a figure sitting in it, but there is room for a child to act as driver—on the right side! One passenger (in a taxi) is Paddington Bear. The other car is labeled “Fetch the Vet”. Evidently the company who created this diorama is British.
I have seen kids climbing on these vehicle, but I have never seen any adults pony up the money to make them do anything. The train costs three quarters. I did not examine the other rides.
There are three sets of machines that to me seem out of place. A pair of machines are back-to-back in the main corridor. They sell stickers and tattoos. I did not examine them too closely.
The second weird collection is near the Mini Melts that is between Tranquility and Target. To the right of the Mini Melts machine are two adjacent machines labeled Prize Cube and Winners Cube. I don’t know any more about them. On the other side of Mini Melts is a set of machines that look like gumball machines, but they actually contain little plastic containers with prizes inside.
Closer to the exit by Target is the traditional machine that lets kids try—mostly in vain—to snatch attractive looking toys by manipulating a large claw-like implement.
Conclusion: I am glad that I had the opportunity to become familiar with the pandemic version of the mall. I don’t see how it can possibly last long. I therefore feel sympathy for the entrepreneurs who have bet on it. The owners of the mall want to split the site into thirteen parcels.
I expect that I will need to find a new place to hike in the winter of 2022-23.
Updates Throughout 2022
Celebrity spottings: I am pretty sure that I saw two of the mAll-Stars in person. On consecutive Fridays I have seen Pastor David getting things ready for the Sunday services at the New Life Church. On February 27 I saw Justin Haynes changing the window display for Jus10H, sweeping out his space, and chatting with the security guard. Later the lights were on in his space as he made a presentation to two ladies dressed in black.
March 3, 2022: Tranquility Day Spa and Salon, which enjoyed one of the very best locations in the mall, has closed. It has apparently merged with another salon in the strip mall south of Hazard Avenue that contains ShopRite.. Maybe it was purchased by the other company, which is called Modern Nails & Spa. The ATM remained in the old Tranquility location, but it was unplugged.
The Kebab House, which promised to reopen by mid-February, is also apparently closing. Two men were in the restaurant. I could not tell precisely what they were doing, but the older of the two left the building carrying a sign that was used to advertise the restaurant.
I noticed for the first time a third set of gumball machines near the Playtown. There are two racks of six machines. The other two locations have eighteen machines. I counted.
Fashion news: the guy with the grocery cart apparently has at least three colors of undershirts with shoulder straps and no sleeves—white, gray, and black.
March 4, 2022: There was quite a bit of activity in the mall. The Red Cross ran a blood drive in one of the vacant stores near the middle of the main corridor. In addition in the very middle of the mall (near Furnari) a couple had set up some tables where they sold jewelry. I think that they store their inventory in the space that is across the short corridor from Furnari. I have seen stuff in there.
The only remnant of Tranquility was a table outside of the barred entrance. On it were business cards for the new location in the Brookside Plaza shopping center. I picked one up. The back of the card keeps track of visits to Modern with this offer: “After 10 visits get one FREE Eyebrow or FREE Basic Manicure.” I am not sure where people would place the third eyebrow.
The big news was that people were working in the kitchen of the Kebab House. The sign that said that it would return in mid-February had been changed to promise a reopening on March 5. So, my previous assessment that it seemed to be closing was erroneous.
I have encountered two pairs of women who were walking clockwise laps. How could they not notice that everyone else was walking clockwise? I almost smashed into both of them several times. Maybe they were from Great Britain, Japan, or Australia.
For the first time I saw someone eating a bowl of Mini Melts with a spoon—like cereal. So, at least one of the machines must work. A bowl costs $4 or $4.50 if you use a credit card.
March 9, 2022: The Kebab House is definitely open. I noticed a few patrons.
The fenced off area in the center court where the entrance to Penney’s used to be5 has been removed. This must have been where Santaland was placed during December. Evidently the Easter Bunny will not be getting the same treatment.
Some of the window coverings at the space that housed Panera have been removed. For the first time I could see inside. Although it has been abandoned for months, the booths are still there.
On the other hand the mysterious corner space in center court has been curtained off on the east side. Two large stepladders were visible from the south side as well as the tables that contained all the unsold merchandise.
A couple of kids had skateboards, but the mall was empty enough that it was not obnoxious.
March 13, 2022: There was quite a bit of activity today. Almost every store had customers, and there was a line at the kiosk at the cinemas. I saw two sets of customers dining at the Kebab House, and the food looked delicious.
A stage was set up in front of the old entrance to Penney’s, but I could walk behind it. It must have been for the Girl Scouts’ event on the previous day. On one of my laps I observed two young ladies who appeared to be rehearsing putting one hand on a hip. Off to the side one of the doors was open. The opening was mostly obscured, but I caught a glimpse of a fully decorated Christmas tree. Evidently, the Christmas stuff is stored in a little room behind Collette’s Consignments.
For the first time ever I saw two people buy something from gumball machines. So, I guess that they actually work.
April 1: The guy in the CM phone repair booth is back. There is also a kiosk next to his booth that has at least 100 sunglasses on it and a sign that says that you can buy three for $10. No one is near the kiosk.. Maybe you pay the CM guy if you want to buy some. In my nine laps I saw no one who showed any interest in either sun glasses or phones.
A guy with a bag was standing outside of Rainbow on my first lap. On the next four or five (a lap takes me about ten minutes) he was busily demonstrating a vacuum cleaner of some kind to a lady with a mask. I assume that he was trying to persuade her to market the vacuum that he represented.
April 3: I did nine more laps, and I still saw no one show the slightest interest in CM or the sunglasses. Someone had apparently tried a few pairs on and left them on a shelf.
For the first time ever someone stopped me to ask me a question—three times! The first time it was a black guy whom I had seen walking laps quite a few times. He asked me how old I was and how many miles I walked. He then informed me that he was also seventy-three. A little later he stopped me again and asked me if I had gotten my second booster shot.
At the other end of the court on that same lap another guy asked me something while I was listening to Maria Callas singing an aria from from Il Pirata. I took out one earplug, and I heard him say “… how long …?” I answered, “An hour and a half.” He asked, “A half hour?” I repeated myself and went on. A few minutes later I realized that he was actually asking me how long an entire circuit of the mall was.
May 30: On Memorial day the mall was almost completely empty. The movie theater was doing a reasonable business. The Kebab House had at least two occupied tables every time I came around, and my circuit takes me an hour and a half in total.
I wore my Michigan Debate shirt while I was walking. Someone stopped me and asked me if I taught at Michigan. I explained that I had attended U-M twice. He then asked me that a friend of his was interested in vintage clothing—tee shirts and sweatshirts. He wondered if I had any. Although I actually do have a few items that are so disgusting not even I would wear them, I told him that I did not. This occurred on my last lap. If it had been earlier, I might have been more receptive to his request.
I moved my car over to the northeast side and stepped back in with my camera to take a photo of the huge two-person virtual-reality game that is parked just outside of the cinema. It looks really impressive, but I have yet to see someone try it out.
July 25: Another one bites the dust. Lens Crafters has moved to Enfield Commons. The store is between Starbucks and Jersey Mike’s, next to Olive Garden. This sounds to me like the death knell for the mall.
October 17: Bad news first: A sign has been posted that Collette’s, the store that specialized in “new and lightly used” clothing. was in the process of closing. I also saw a sign announcing that one of the two restaurants, Cindy’s,was “relocating”. It did not note the new location.
The most positive news was that Stateline, the store that sold video games and other things, has returned to the same location near Target that it had abandoned in February. I thought that it was peculiar that so much stuff had been left in the store when it closed the first time. In other areas of the mall there were also some new window displays that highlight Stateline’s products.
SSUPhoto was in the process of moving its operation across the main aisle of the mall. The new location appears to be somewhat larger. The store was not open when I walked by it, but I judged from what I could see through the windows that they seemed to have expanded the number of items that they are selling.
There were four new large massage chairs near the cinema. I did not inspect them closely, and I did not see anyone try them out.
For the fist time I saw someone purchase some gum or candy from one of the many gumball machines.
I should not that I did not see the fellow with the shopping cart/walker and the sleeveless shirts. However, on one of my outdoor walks I did see him in the parking lot of Holy Trinity Episcopal church on Hazard Avenue. I could not tell what he was doing.
This was the first time that I walked in the mall without a mask.
December 1: The mall was decorated for Christmas, but there were only a few shoppers, and the corner near the old Penney’s that was reserved for the absent Santa was a little pathetic. I have not seen the hefty gentleman with the Target shopping cart for several months.
The office across from GameStop is now occupied by Skyward Family Therapy, but it is not open yet. I noticed that one of the tiles close to its door is partly the wrong color. I had never paid much attention to the tiles, but after making that discovery I realized that in several other places broken tiles have been replaced with tiles of a different color. Near Target were two signs warning about tiles needing repair.
A new store named “Tree”-mendous has opened between Pelley’s Sports and the corridor that leads to the restroom. Three women were inside behind a long table surrounded by fully decorated artificial trees. According to the signage the are also having a drawing for a tree. More trees were visible in one of the empty stores.
Claudette’s has reopened. The store is offering all jeans in the store for only $5 per pair.
The Jurassic Park virtual reality game that arrived in May has been removed. For the first time I saw someone sitting in the massage chairs. For approximately thirty minutes a man sat in one and a woman in the other. When I passed them they were each busily working their smartphones.
Jus10H was open, and Justin was inside! He was putting the finishing touches on new window displays. The inside, which was fully lighted, was also rearranged, and there were displays of fabric. He must be about to make a presentation to someone.
For the first time I saw a woman sitting in the security office.
The business at the Kebab House seems to be picking up. Sue Rudd told me that she ate there, and the food was good.
I can still walk nine laps with no discomfort whatsoever.
December 14: On my first lap I noticed a woman who was leaning against the window of the old Liberty Tax store that is now used for blood drives. On the next lap—ten or fifteen minutes later—she had moved across to the corridor that led to the south exit that is west of Party City. She was now sitting down. During the next three laps she was still sitting, but she appeared to be sleeping with a cellphone in her hand. On the sixth lap she was standing up and leaning against the wall. He seemed to be attempting to make sure that she was all right. On the seventh lap she was seated on a bench near Game Stop with a different man who placed his hand on her shoulder—evidently to comfort her—as I walked by. Policemen entered as I passed the southwest door, but they turned toward the central court. On the eighth lap I saw the two policemen talking with the woman. She was still sitting on the bench and seemed about to cry. On my ninth and last lap none of the people mentioned in this paragraph was still around.
“Tree”-mendous was already closed.
December 18: Santa was in the mall! I am pretty sure that this Santa was told not to touch any children. They sat on little chairs next to Santa’s big one while someone photographed them.
December 19: Very strange. Santa was on duty again, but he had clearly gained thirty or forty pounds overnight. Also, he was wearing a different set of glasses. Someone must have told him to be more friendly with the kids. They still sat on the little chairs (as opposed to his lap), but he put his arms around them.
January 14, 2024: The 2023 Santa had a lonely job. There was never anything approaching a line. Sometimes he would go sit on the bench and wave at kids. He had two female helpers who had little to do. Santaland was finally disassembled in the middle of January.
Cinemark closed in early December of 2023. If you lived in Enfield om 2024 and you wanted to see a movie, you needed to drive twenty miles. Bath and Body Works moved to Enfield Commons on the north side of Hazard Avenue. On Friday, January 24, signs appeared outside of GameStop announcing that all of the employees had resigned. Another sign said, “Closed until further notice.” However, on Sunday the store was open. There were signs that solicited employees and another one announcing the hours as “Sun-Sat 12-6.” Claudette’s has been gone for several months.
New businesses in 2023 included:
Calm Panda Smartshop.
D Gym had irregular hours. It featured an assortment of exercise machines and mats upon which young people performed calisthenics while loud music and a trainer encouraged them. It occupied the spot formerly held by Tranquility.
Second Floor Games also had irregular hours. It appeared to be mostly a snack shop with a few tables. I thought at first that, because it was near the Cinemark, that they might be trying to undercut the outrageous prices at the concession stand there. However, it outlived the theaters by at least a month.
Haven Games and hobbies moved into the large site previously occupied by Jus10H. The store featured a dozen or so tables at which nerdy people dressed in black played games of some sort. A sign on the window claimed that they were open until midnight on most nights. Since the mall closed at 10, that seemed questionable.
Integrity Martial Arts seemed to cater to young kids. Their parents could often be seen in the chairs provided for them or loitering nearby. One day I saw a father dragging his son to the studio. The kid was literally kicking and screaming. That was on my last lap, and so I never found out who prevailed. Smart money was on the kid.
Calm Panda evidently sold marijuana and accoutrements. It was hardly ever open.
After Hours offered to set up, host, and photograph parties or other events. It was open only by appointment.
The Moon Crystal claimed to be a “metaphysical and spiritual shop.” It appeared to have two owners, both female. One occasionally gave tarot card readings. The other claimed to be psychic.
Da Money Pit sold shoes, tee shirts, and the like, but something about it seemed off. On my last walk the lights were on, but the front entrance was closed and locked. As I walked past someone exited by the back door and then carefully locked it. Later a woman entered by the same door. Who knows
A hangout near Target called Wukong Tea opened in December of 2023. It has proved popular with teenagers. They sold concoctions of tea, fruit, milk, and other things. The lowest-priced beverage cost an astounding $5.25. The drinks were made in a back room. Customers, almost always in groups of two or more, seemed content to wait and chat while seated at the modern tables.
Both the Kebab House, with its new Mosaic Cafe across the hall in the area formerly occupied by Panera Bread, and LA Subs seemed to be doing pretty well in 2024.
Jus10H moved to a larger location on the other side of the mall. The interior seemed considerably different on the few occasions in which someone was there.
The rumors that the entire mall would be closed down because of problems in the roof had not come true yet in early 2024.
1. I was astounded to learn that the Target store had been in Enfield for twenty years and that for fifteen of them it coexisted in Enfield Square with Filene’s/Macy’s and Sears.
2. In February of 2022 the property is owned by three Long Island-based companies — Namdar Realty Group, Ch. Hakimi Global Inc., and Mason Asset Management. KeyPoint Partners is currently handling the management and leasing of the properties. As of March 2021 the Target store was sold to Steven Dubler.
3. While that takeout location in the mall was operational, there was also a McD’s just south of the mall, and one just north of the mall. Another McD’s is on Hazard Ave. in the Scitico section of town several miles east of Enfield Square. All three of those restaurants were still operating in 2023.
5. In New England directions are often given in terms of landmarks, whether they are still there or not. New Englanders seem to have a much stronger sense of history than geography.
As soon as the AdDept system at Macy’s in New York (described here) was running reasonably well, the May Department Stores Company became the most attractive marketing target for the system. The largest advertiser (at least in newspapers) in central … Continue reading →
The G. Fox & Co. store in downtown Hartford.
As soon as the AdDept system at Macy’s in New York (described here) was running reasonably well, the May Department Stores Company became the most attractive marketing target for the system. The largest advertiser (at least in newspapers) in central Connecticut was—by far—G. Fox, a traditional department store similar to Macy’s that was based in Hartford. They even had a store that was within walking distance of our new house in Enfield.1 I was well aware that G.Fox was part of the May Company and that the May Company was largely responsible for the development of the mall.
I had purchased a book from somewhere that contained marketing information on large retailers. In it I learned that the May Company, which had been in business since 1877, operated the following divisions in 1989:
G. Fox & Co. based in Hartford.
The Hecht Company with headquarters in Arlington, VA.
Filene’s, a former Federated division based in Boston.
Foley’s, a former Federated division based in Houston.
Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh.
Famous-Barr in St. Louis
J. W. Robinson Co. in Los Angeles.
May California in Los Angeles.
May D&F in Denver.
May Ohio in Cleveland.
Lord & Taylor in New York.
Meier & Frank in Portland, OR.
Venture, a chain of discount stores based in O’Fallon, MO.
Payless, a chain of shoe stores based in Miami.
That’s fourteen independently run divisions that were, except for maybe the last one or two, good prospects for the AdDept system. I figured that if we could persuade the parent company to commit to using AdDept in all of its divisions, TSI would be set for life. Maybe they would even buy us! That was the way that small software companies thought (and dreamed) in the late eighties.
In fact, the May Company during that period was busy acquiring other department stores, and that attitude put a lot of stress on the advertising departments of the divisions that acquired the new stores. There is no doubt that the May Company’s acquisition of thirteen Thalhimer’s stores in 1992 was the impetus for Hecht’s to purchase the AdDept system that year.2 Hecht’s advertising department had been using a PC-based system for producing corporate reports. It was completely incapable of handling the extra load. Similarly, when May D&F was folded into Foley’s in 1993, the Houston division suddenly was facing a greatly increased workload. That caused them to call TSI for help, and we installed an AdDept system for them.3 Capacity was never an issue for AdDept; we always proposed hardware near the lowest end of the available AS/400 models. If a client outgrew its hardware, it could migrate to a more powerful model.
Filene’s store in Boston.
In 1993 G. Fox was absorbed by the Filene’s division. Having a pretty good idea of the problems that this would cause for the advertising department of Filene’s, we tried to interest them in using AdDept. However, for reasons that I have never completely understood, we were unable to get our foot in that door for many years. Filene’s advertising department never took advantage of a significant portion of the system productively enough that we were able to use them as a reference.4
Instead, our third May Company installation was at Lord & Taylor5, where I learned that L&T did not play by the same rules as the other divisions. In some ways that caused headaches; in other ways it was delightful.
Doug Pease: In 1993 Sue and I hired Doug Pease to handle our marketing. One of the primary reasons that we selected him was because he had formerly worked in G. Fox’s advertising department in Hartford. He was looking for a job because the G. Fox stores had been converted to the Filene’s logo, and the advertising for those stores was planned and purchased from the office in Boston. Doug was quite familiar with the work flow of an advertising department that was similar to the ones that TSI was targeting, and he also had some contacts in the industry. Our hope was that he could grab the brass ring of the May Company for us while I was busy trying to get the systems for the three divisions—and a few other retailers—that we had sold up and running.
This was a very important time for TSI. My image of those days resembles a hockey stick. Until that time TSI had experienced rather flat earnings. We were basically just getting by. By contrast, in the last seven years of the twentieth century we had as much work as we could handle, and our financial statements were much better.
Unfortunately, I have almost no notes for that entire period. I talked with Doug on a regular basis, but my focus was on the current installations. I depended on him to establish a relationship with prospective customers. As soon as we hired him we did a mailing to prospective customers, and Doug took to the phones. He talked with several people at the May Company.
The main liaison person between the May Company and the advertising departments of its divisions was named Fred Christen. I never heard anyone say a bad word about him. He had, of course, heard about our work at our three installations, and he seemed to be impressed.
I am pretty sure that we had another “guardian angel” at the corporate headquarters. I often seemed to be at an advertising department at a division at the same time as a corporate auditor whose first name was Linus. His job was to assess the way that divisions were reporting their advertising expenses and income from co-op programs for their vendors. He seemed to be impressed with the way that AdDept handled these things.
May D&F store in Denver.
Fred Christen left the May Company shortly after Doug arrived at TSI. I heard that Fred left to manage his family’s business. Doug established a relationship with Fred’s successor, Dennis Wallace. I am pretty sure that Doug made at least one trip to St. Louis, but I don’t remember the details. At any rate, at some point the May Company decided that AdDept should be installed in all of the department store divisions. At that point Robinsons and May California had merged, May D&F had been folded into Foley’s, Kaufmann’s had taken over the May Ohio stores6, and the May Company had divested the Venture stores. So, we learned about five new clients in one swell foop: Famous-Barr7, Filene’s, Meier & Frank, Robinsons-May, and Kaufmann’s.
In retrospect I find it rather incredible that I have so little recollection of the details of how or when this decision came about. It was definitely a momentous occasion for TSI, but I remember no fanfare or celebration at all. I don’t think that the deal was finalized until 1996 or 1997. In the interim I installed quite a few AdDept systems at other retailers.
Employees at the May Company treated us fairly from day one right up until the time that the company was purchased by Federated in 2006. Most of TSI’s dealings with the May Company were at the division level. The following is a summary of my notes of our dealings with the corporate entity after all of the systems had been installed.
Notes: The first note that I have is dated October 18, 1999. It makes reference to a “sales tax fiasco”. I think that this must be about whether it was necessary to charge sales tax on our software and services. Because all of our AdDept clients were in other states, we were generally able to avoid doing so. However, there is an Excel file with a similar date that lists three invoices for Robinsons-May, which was in California, and three for Filene’s, which was in Massachusetts. Massachusetts and Connecticut had an agreement by which each collected taxes for the other. So, we definitely needed to charge Filene’s tax.
We also had a problem with California. TSI’s second accountant, whose name I do not remember, was hired in the early days of the AdDept system. She advised us to register with every state in which we had clients. This was poor advice, and we changed accountants shortly after that. However, there is no way to take back a company’s registration.
I vaguely remember an issue from several years earlier that involved an arrangement that my partner (and later wife) Sue Comparetto had made with Gottschalks, another store in California. In this case, the invoices were probably sent to St. Louis and paid by the May Company. We had never registered in Missouri, and we never paid sales tax there.
On January 2 of 2000 I wrote the following email to my other partner, Denise Bessette:
I think that we need to get something established as soon as possible with the May Co. to get compensated for your time and mine. Do you have any suggestions? I also think that it might be time for one or both of us of us to go to St. Louis and talk turkey with them. I am serious about this. I really am tired of not knowing where we stand.
I found a six-page document dated February 7, 2001. It concerned the specs for a Planning System Interface. Evidently they had an application called WD that they wanted to feed. They provided me with a document describing the system that had at least sixty-seven pages. Evidently we had been talking about this for at least two years. The document lists my questions and their incredibly vague responses. No one could conceivably quote an interface based on the responses that we received. I only vaguely remember this whole process. “WD” sounds familiar, but I am pretty certain that we never quoted it, much less coded it.
Denise and I went to visit the May Company together, but I think that it was in 2002. I went to St. Louis in 2001 to install AdDept for use by Filene’s on an AS/400 in the Midwest Data Center. I stayed in the Adam’s Mark Hotel. I did not like where they told me to stay. This is what I wrote to Denise.
My hotel room in St. Louis is absurd. It is a huge suite. I located a microwave and refrigerator inside what looked like a chest of some kind. For some reason it is much easier to find these two features in places where it is impossible to buy food (because I am downtown). The bathroom is right by the door, about a quarter mile from the bed. There are two TV sets, but no Jacuzzi, at least not in the room. The thermostat is out of whack. You have to set it to nearly 80 to keep the room from being frigid. I fear that they may not offer free breakfast here. They did not mention anything when I checked in.
It is supposed to rain all day here. There may even be thunderstorms. I was too lazy to run on Sunday. I will probably regret it today.
I hope that the May Co. has a comfortable nap room. I have become quite accustomed to the two-hour post-breakfast naps.
I think that the guy on the phone is Dennis Wallace. I don’t recognize the other two.
I remember that room and the rain much better than I remember what I did at the May Company. On subsequent visits I stayed at a nearby Hampton Inn. Incidentally, more than two decades later I still take lots of naps.
I found an agenda for a meeting with the May Company dated August of 2002. This must be the trip that Denise and I took together. Here it is:
TSI
People
History
Founded in 1979.
Advertising in 1981
Retail in 1988.
First May division (Hecht’s) in 1991
Custom programming
Good at diagnosis.
Incredibly efficient system of delivering custom code using BASIC.
Two principles:
There should be one version of the truth;
Everyone should be able to take advantage of work done by others.
People capable of completing difficult projects within parameters.
AdDept
Intent
All administrative aspects.
All media.
Easily customizable.
Require a minimum of local support — AS/400.
Retail advertising is difficult.
All the difficulties of retail — stores, merchants, accounting, A/P, and co-op
All the difficulties of advertising
Multiple media, each with almost completely different structure
Media scheduling, production scheduling, estimating, loan room, etc.
System design
Scheduling:
Every media represented in the ad file.
Open on-line database works best when each person updates the system with information as soon as it is available.
One main program, many well-normalized files.
History of significant changes:
Production.
Financial.
Financial:
One main set of files (header and detail).
Many front ends with supporting detail files.
Two months, three amounts.
Interfaces
Cost accounting (data warehouse)
Detail at the department level using May Company rules.
Can also be used for other purposes:
Planning
Store-level analysis
Add-ons
Productivity
Competitors
Loan room inventory and transactions
Photo studio
May future plans
Filene’s
Uniformity
Best practices
Technology
Explain CFINT
Explain performance of 5250 v. browser-based
Why “web-facing” doesn’t help
Explain V5
BASIC compiler.
Should we convert to C?
Should we convert to Net.Data?
Should we convert to WAS/Java?
Should we look to Wintel?
Can’t save back very far.
InfoPrint server allows output as .pdf files.
Browser-based programming requires VPN or the equivalent for support.
Other things
AxN.
Peggy Southworth labels.
What else?
Some of this has fled my memory. I do remember that CFINT was a program that regulated performance. Prior to version 5 of the operating system the users could allocate priorities for jobs between “interactive” jobs (5250 sessions on terminals or PCs) and “batch” jobs (everything else, including jobs that relied on something between themselves and the operating system, such as a Java server). IBM wanted to show that the Java jobs had good performance. To do so it slowed down all jobs that were running as interactive. Nothing that IBM had previously done was as hated as this tactic.
I also remember the Peggy Southworth labels. Every division was required to create these labels for each print media job in a precisely specified format. We wrote a program for one of the divisions to do this for them.
The notes indicate that Denise and I met with Rob Cole and Mike Henry. I only vaguely remember them. I have a more vivid memory of Lew Allder, who was a Vice President in the IT department. He showed us around the machine room and assured us that the small size of our organization was not an issue with him or anyone else at the May Company. Everyone with whom we talked was very supportive of what we had done and what we were planning for the future.
Don’t take the bridge across the river.
I also remember one incident that occurred when we were driving either from or to Lambert, the St. Louis airport. I made a wrong turn, and we found ourselves on the bridge that goes across the river to East St. Louis, IL. I had no interest in taking a tour of that town. When there was a break in the traffic I jerked the rental car’s steering wheel to the left, made a clean U-turn and headed back to St. Louis. I think that this maneuver shocked Denise, at least a little.
I tried to find information on what became of the May Company employees mentioned in this entry. However, I was not able to find any information on the Internet about most of them. After a good bit of digging I found Dennis Wallace’s LinkedIn page, which is here. In 2022 he appeared to be working for a company in Houston that provides technical assistance to the hospitality industry.
1. All right, I never actually walked to G. Fox’s store in Enfield Square mall, but I could have.
3. The account of the installation for Foley’s is provided here.
4. The troubled AdDept installation at Filene’s has been documented here.
5. The Lord & Taylor installation is described here.
6. Doug and I made a strong pitch to Debra Edwards at May Ohio, but the division was eliminated before we could close the deal. That “whiff” is described here.
7. I think that Famous-Barr may have already committed to getting AdDept before Doug arrived on the scene, but their decision was probably made because of the May Company’s commitment to the project. The installation at Famous-Barr is described here.
By the time contract had been signed. and we had started the installation, Macy’s Inc. had officially renamed its division based in Atlanta from Macy’s South (MSO) to Macy’s Central. This was done to reflect the fact that that division was scheduled to absorb most of the stores from Hecht’s and Foley’s after the big acquisition of stores from the May Co. However, I never heard anyone at TSI or at Macy’s refer to the people in Atlanta as Macy’s Central. Only New Yorkers could think of Atlanta as being central.
I cannot prove it, but I am pretty sure that TSI won the MSO account because of the efforts of Beverly Ingraham and the other other employees in Foley’s advertising department (introduced here). I know for a fact that people from the advertising department at MSO had made a trip to Houston to investigate the AdDept system there. They came away very impressed with what the system had allowed them to accomplished. The strong relationship between the department’s employees and TSI over a period for more than a dozen years was a point of emphasis.
The advertising people at MSO had been struggling to use an outdated version of FedAd named Assets.1 It was no longer supported by the development team, and no one thought that it could handle the increased load of two new divisions. The FedAd developers also had warned the seven (!) advertising planners that they would not be able to produce software that would allow them to plan in the way that they did. Several areas of MSO’s advertising department had developed PC systems to handle their tasks. The one used for direct mail was quite sophisticated, but it was also unsupported and undocumented.
Aurore Murphy.
I learned about MSO’s interest in a phone call from Aurore Murphy2, the Advertising Director, in November of 2005. She told me that the decision to use AdDept had already been made and that the hardware was being arranged. She asked me to come to Atlanta to talk with them about what changes would be needed to make AdDept work for them.
I could hardly believe my ears. No sale was ever this easy, and this was a division of Federated/Macy’s! I asked Eileen Sheehan-Willett (introduced here), TSI’s administrative person, to book me on a Delta flight to Atlanta for November 29. Aurore advised me to take a MARTA train from the airport to the Buckhead area. She insisted that I stay at the Marriott Courtyard that was near their office. For three days I met with people in every area of the department. It was probably the most productive trip of my entire career. Everyone was prepared to talk with me.
Note: This blog entry contains much more detailed information about the installation than the entries for most other clients. I discovered a large number of very detailed and complete notes as well as many other documents. I thought that it would be a good idea to give a feel for the scope and difficulty of the work that TSI did for its clients during the installation of the AdDept system to assure that it performed to the client’s satisfaction.
The first trip: Here are excerpts from my notes:
Some things are done in a system named Aims. ROP (and maybe something else) is done in Assets. Many things are done on spreadsheets. They use one six-digit system of “ad numbers” for ROP. They use a different system of job numbers for other media. The latter start with a three digit event code. They said that they would not mind changing numbering systems.
The reassignment of stores will take place on a staggered basis over the next nine months. This will be very confusing.
The Home Division does not place any ads. However, they do handle the co-op and production of the pages for home merchandise. They then transfer these transactions to the retail divisions. The people at Macy’s South seemed to think that this is a mistake.
Federated determines their merchandise department numbers. All divisions use the same numbers.
My first meeting was with Cliff Webber3 and Beth Lane4, the pair who ran the Advertising Business Office. It lasted almost four hours. I reported that “They gave me every report that they use for closing. Nothing seemed insuperably difficult.” The list of issues that I brought back to Connecticut was too long to include here.
Steve Weinbaum.
My second stop was in planning:
Miriam Pechar.
I met with Steve Weinbaum5 for a couple of hours. He now works in another area, but he was the planning manager for years, and he is the one who knows how their system works. The person who does this job now is named Miriam Pechar6.
It is hard to believe, but they primarily use seven different spreadsheets, one for each GMM. Each ad is on each spreadsheet!
They want output files for all of their reports.
I think that they will work with status P ads. When the plan is approved, the ads will be changed to A and handed over to the appropriate media manager.
They supply data for database marketing. Lots of new fields.
I then spent a half hour with Laurie Stenwall7, the Database Marketing Manager. She said that she would like to be able to get the information that they need to schedule a piece from AdDept. Most of that information is from the ad planners.
Karla Schottle.
I likewise spent thirty minutes with Karla Schottle8, Advertising Effectiveness Manager. She and her group analyze the costs by event, merchant, and market. She would probably love it if she had access to DAPANDL, DACOMMD, DAACTST, and DACOMMST, the files created by the cost accounting programs. One troublesome issue popped up:
I think that we may finally have to address the polybag problem, namely how do we handle it when the project involves a polybag that contains a book with stitch-ins and blow-ins and several other pieces.
Jeanna Corley.
I met with Jeanna Corley9, the Production Manager, for about an hour. Nothing that she showed me seemed that difficult.
My meeting with Andrea Harrison10, the Traffic Manager, was a short one. She was not on the original schedule. She showed me how she kept track of the progress of production jobs. Nothing was out of the ordinary. Only two issues emerged:
They would like a project list for each team. Do we still have a way of specifying the creative/production team for each ad?
They sometimes have swing pages for merchandise, but it does not seem to be necessary to keep track of this in AdDept.
Karen Martin.
The two-hour meeting about newspaper advertising involved Karen Martin11, Vice President of Advertising, Annemarie Poterba12, the ROP Manager, and Bill McFadden13, a Media Planner. It lasted for a couple of hours. Here is what I wrote:
They are very backward in this area. They do not even send insertion orders; they just print a schedule and send it to all of the papers! They were overwhelmed by what we could do for them, especially with AXN. The only slightly challenging thing will be in the area of competitive lineage, which they enter in as a summary number for each competitor-newspaper combination.
Karen, Annemarie, and Bill.
Here were some of the issues in the newspaper area:
They need to show what markets the ads run in. Their schedules use a mishmash of methods – lists of market groups like Stage’s, checkmarks, and names of individual papers. I think that they might like something like Foley’s schedule.
They would like a method of getting a list of the papers that have actually received the inserts from their printers. Maybe we could give them a checkbox field in AXN so that they could confirm each one when it arrives. Then the unchecked ones could be reminded with the nightly update program.
We may need to do some work to provide them with a change report that is as easy to read as the one that they currently use.
They have a This Year-Last Year report by day that might be a little challenging. We will have to provide them with a substitute for the shading that they use to flag the sections for last year.
They use one ad per page for sections. Is this our recommended method?
They said that they might be interested in entering completed dates for ROP. They said that Foley’s told them that their creative people enter completion dates in ROP.
They have a separate ad number for each version, but they were amenable to using version codes instead.
“Stage’s” refers to Stage Stores, a large chain of stores that was also based in Houston. The AdDept installation there has been described here.
Gretchen Watkins.
My last major meeting, with Gretchen Watkins14, the Direct Mail Manager, was different from the others:
This was the only disconcerting part of the trip. She uses a very sophisticated FileMaker Pro system that was developed by her predecessor. It has an unbelievable number of functions in it. The guy who developed it used it for every single aspect of his job, including calculating postage and approving invoices. However, I don’t think that replacing this system needs to be part of phase 1 of this project.
Of course the developer mentioned above no longer supported the program that he used, and there was no documentation.
I flew back to Connecticut with a spiral notebook full of notes, a briefcase full of sample reports, and a list of telephone numbers of everyone in the department. It was late on Friday evening when I arrived, but I was back in the office on Saturday morning to work on the Design Document.
I found a copy of the original Design Document and a supplement that covered new planning projects. Unfortunately, they are in PageMaker format, and I no longer have any software that can open them.
December 12-14, 2005: Within two weeks I was back in Atlanta. This time—and on all subsequent trips—I stayed at a Hampton Inn in Buckhead. It was about a mile south of the MSO headquarters, but I was still in good shape in those days, and I did not mind the walk. The weather was much more pleasant than it would have been in New England.
What I did mind was the inconvenience when nature called while I was in the advertising department. The bathrooms in the building were in the elevator area. To get from the elevator area to the offices you needed a badge. I didn’t have one.
By this time the department was connected to an AS/400 owned by Federated that was located at an IBM installation in Raleigh, NC. It was managed by IBM employees in Raleigh. The first thing on my agenda was to give a data entry class to about ten people in a small theater set up for training classes. I gave each of them the book that explained how the screens worked, and the conventions used in AdDept.
I spent most of the rest of the day setting up the AdDept system for them. For the most part I used the settings from Macy’s West’s version, which was on the same box. Using data files that MSO provided I was able to populate a few of the tables in the MSO AdDept system: regions, pubs, rates, vendors, and G/L accounts.
The PC that I used was very slow, and every so often it would go into an interminable stall while a program on the company’s intranet scanned it for malware.
On Tuesday James Jordan, the network guy in MSO’s advertising department, and I sat in on a conference call with Dan Stackhouse from Macy’s West (introduced here) and several people from IBM. Fran Ponder managed Federated’s account. Harry Burnett was in charge of things from a sales angle. Anthony Berry was in charge of security. Steve Tesch and Richard Antle are the technical support people. I never met any of them, but at least the mystery of where the AS/400 resided was cleared up.
Amy Diehl. For the first time I had a tiny point-and-shoot digital camera made by Cascio. I had only a vague idea how to use it.
Amy Diehl, whose title is FedAd Manager and who was the liaison with TSI, told me that she planned to enter ads the following week. She would be on vacation the week between Christmas and New Year’s.
Amy could not believe how fast ads can be entered in AdDept. She told me that entry of one ad in Assets required 172 mouse clicks.
When I left to return to Connecticut the AdDept system was usable, but there were still major glitches that I could not address. For example, neither user profiles nor output queues had been created. So, one employee could use the training user ID to sign on, but there was no way even to print.
I am pretty sure that this is Aurore.
It was still unclear as to when they would be allowed them to create these. As always, there was a freeze on programming at this time of year. They were reluctant to do anything. Aurore said that she would address this.
I noticed that Macy’s West’s DAPANDL file had an enormous number of deleted records. I wrote to Denise that itshould be changed to reuse deleted records. The deleted records should be removed to recover disk space. Since there is a freeze on changes, we need to get the project of removing the deleted records approved by the change committee. I sent myself a reminder message to work with Dan on this when I got home.
A few small problems were discovered, but so far so good.
January 10-12, 2006 trip: I wanted to get the ROP portion of the system working. It was always important to show positive results quickly, and I could usually accomplish that in ROP. My notes reported that I addressed many little things, including some problems with the way that IBM had set up the system:
I had to start the batch subsystem.
We created a pub group with the first four pubs. We then ran the ROP schedule for the one day that Amy had entered.
We created day-of-the-week rates for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
I conducted a short query class with Amy and Jeanna.
I created three libraries for them: S_QRY, S_OUTFILE, and S_UPLOAD.
Bernice Bailey16, who works with Cliff, sent me the layouts for the upload to expense payables and to the general ledger.
There are two output queues, MCAP0314 and MCAP0315. They seem to work. However, Amy’s user profile was associated with an output queue in California. James got Fran Ponder from IBM to fix the existing profiles.
They have negotiated with several papers that a limited number of full color full page ads get a special rate. I showed Amy how to set up special rate codes for these, D/xx, S/xx, etc. I also showed the ROP people, but the planning people, whom I have yet to talk with, are the ones who actually do this.
Bernice Bailey sent me a file with the entire hierarchy. I wrote a program to create the five hierarchy file and the department file. They are using descriptions, not people’s names. I also created a 999 entry in all five files for Storewide, which is the default department.
I turned off the feature of change management for positions.
I set up their stores using codes that were identical to their market codes.
I ran contract reports using Macy’s West data, and I showed it to Annemarie and Bill. They thought that the reports would really be useful.
I showed the insertion order process to Annemarie and Bill. I also showed them how to create boilerplate for the special instructions.
I showed the AXN letter to Annemarie and Bill. I told them what we needed from them to get the process going. They were very interested, but it is nearly impossible to get them to commit to anything.
When I returned to Connecticut there were still a number of things that IBM had not addressed:
Only two user profiles have been created.
Someone needs to change the startup program to restart the S_BATCH and S_INTER subsystems.
They do not have their own job description, but I don’t know whether they actually need one.
Of course, there were also eleven action items for TSI, and the most stressful period was yet to come. January was the last month of the fiscal year, and I had been challenged to match their closing numbers for January in order to feel comfortable closing February, the first fiscal month.
February 13-16, 2006, Trip: Things were still rather shaky in Buckhead:
Cliff did not know his password for the AS/400. I reset it for him. I had to do this for one other user as well.
It took a long time, but we finally figured out the ROP accrual for January. They underaccrued by a staggering amount. I put all the ROP discrepancies in ad #052-1. They will probably need to split the items on this ad. I doubt that they will want to take all of this expense in one month.
I had a Vietnam flashback on Tuesday. The PC that I was using suddenly turned into a Mac. Seriously. Evidently the monitor and keyboard were connected to some kind of switching device which was connected to a Mac as well as the PC. If you pressed the right Ctrl key twice, you toggled over to the Mac.
Thursday afternoon was rushed, but I did manage to show Cliff and Amy how to record purchase orders both ways and how to record both media and production invoices. I thought that it would be easy to record the first media invoice from the Cincinnati Enquirer, but the ads for the first week in February had not been checked. So we had to bail out of it.
Jackie Foulds.
I need to explain the “underaccrued” paragraph above. I worked with Jackie Foulds17 to find the problem.
The “ROP accrual” was for ads that had run but for which no invoice had yet been received. Since nearly all newspapers billed by the month, the list included nearly all ads for January. Accrual accounting demanded that the expenses be incurred in January. On this occasion the list included all of the correct numbers for each newspaper, but it was in Excel, and the total as defined on the spreadsheet somehow did not include the Atlanta Journal-Inquirer, MSO’s largest paper. So, their accrual entry had been off by over $600,000, and no one had noticed! It took Jackie and me nearly an entire day to find this error because I expected the devil to be in the details.
I was gobsmacked when I found this. The fiscal year had been closed, at least in theory. The department had reported far less expenses than it had actually incurred. That meant that the expense would hit in the wrong fiscal year, which could be disastrous for the department’s budgeting. Since no one seemed to be too upset about this, there must have been a way to correct the accrual.
Only eight items were on the to-do list that I brought back to Connecticut.
March 13-16, 2006, trip: This trip focused on insertion orders, claims (charging co-op vendors), and reconciling the February closing. Here are notes:
Don Detelj.
I had to give Cliff a new password. He forgot the one that I gave him the last time that I was there. I had to do this for several other people, too.
Amy and I met with Bill and Marie. They have a sour attitude about the whole project. I am not sure why they are so in love with the system that they have. It is not very good.
I created a program DM220RMSX for them based on Foley’s insertion order program. I expanded the headline to 30 characters and made a few other small changes. I ran a sample to show Bill and Marie from the newspaper area. I can’t say that they were very impressed. They do not seem to be able to imagine how this will work.
I gave a class on entering claims. The ladies entered all of the claims for February. I ran one of the programs on SSIMONTH so that they could have a list of what they keyed in. If there is a better program for this, we should put it on the MSABO menu.
We reconciled the accruals for almost all of the papers. There were a lot of mistakes, but the discrepancy was not as large as last month. When Jackie ran the reports, she accidentally ran them from January 30 through February 26. February 26 is in March. Someone also keyed in 255 instead of 225, so they over-accrued in Pittsburgh by $30K. The business office is very eager to use AdDept for accruals.
I need to call Don Detelj18 to find out what he needs to replace the “data dump” from Aims.
Can AdDept generate the next claim number? They want to use the numbers generated by Aims for now, but they would like AdDept to assume this role in the near future.
The IBM people assigned an output queue from Macy’s West to all of the new users from Macy’s South. I talked with James Jordan about this, and he said that he would bring it up with Fran Ponder.
Annemarie is insistent that they get faxing capability for their insertion orders. Aurore says that they are trying to get them to do this. They will have to get a modem and a phone line. This could be a hassle.
It was unclear who “them” was in the last paragraph. Aurore presumably knew. It might be some combination of IBM, FSG, and someone in accounting to approve it.
The list of action items for TSI was much longer this month. That was, in some ways, a good sign. It meant that the department had enough confidence in the system that they were using it in different areas.
April 10-13, 2006 trip: Another large new wrinkle had been added to the installation: getting historical data from Foley’s and Hecht’s (introduced here).
Kristal Brown.
New players: Wendy Ellis works in the newspaper area. She will probably be maintaining the newspaper ads once they have been activated. Andrea Harrison also works in the newspaper area. Kristal Brown19 is the planner for the home division. Linda Ashe20 is the planner for storewide, cosmetics, and ready-to-wear.
They want to include Foley’s ads in AdDept for 052 and 061. Since people at Foley’s are available for data entry, I recommended that people from Foley’s key them in. They will set up a series of ad numbers for Foley’s to use. Someone is going to have to translate the ad types, pub codes, and cost codes. There may be other things involved, too.
I was able to sign on to Foley’s with no trouble.
The machine in Raleigh will soon have faxing capability.
The business office did their March accruals in AdDept by themselves without any evident difficulty.
Amy held a class to show people how to sign on to Foley’s and Hecht’s. I don’t agree with the way that she did it, but it would have been overreaching for me to criticize her. I suspect that she does not realize how dangerous that iSeries Navigator is. I would never tell any user about it if I were she.
I set up a menu named MACYREPTS on the Macy’s South, Foley’s, and Hecht’s systems so that they can sign on to the Foley’s system to run reports. It is currently identical to the SRADV menu. I later had to change the one on Macy’s South so that the Foley’s options did not show up.
I told Jackie and Cliff about the reports which I added to the MSABO menu. I had previously e-mailed them about this, but evidently they needed to hear it personally.
I created an output file for Cliff.
I had to reset quite a few passwords.
Cliff’s user ID was set up with the wrong library for the output queue. I fixed it.
I uploaded about 1,000 vendor addresses. There were actually more than this, but they did not have usable vendor ID’s on their records, so I had to program in some guesswork into the program that wrote out the records.
Jackie does not want to use multi-part forms for claims. They want to dump the impact printer. She prefers that we print three copies. The first should have the word “Original” on it somewhere. The second should say “Vendor Copy.” The third should say “Merchant Copy.”
They like the latest version of the newspaper calendar!
I don’t think that Cliff ever used AdDept except when I was there forcing him to do it. He was a weird guy.
Amy must have learned about iSeries Navigator in classes at IBM. It was (and is under its new name of Navigator for i) an incredibly powerful tool. I was definitely right to feel nervous about her talking about it with users. I probably should have at least warned her about it after the class that she taught.
The list of open items that I brought back to TSI contained one for the Roadmap produced by the planners. That one item contained at least a dozen sub-items.
Randy Reeves.
June 6-8, 2006, trip: Amy had several meetings lined up for me: The first meeting was scheduled for 8:30 on Monday. Randy Reeves21, the new Divisional VP, was in a meeting and could not attend. Here are my notes.
We started with the ROP people. They now have three coordinators – Bill, Andrea, and April Dunn. Each is in charge of groups of markets. We signed on to the web site. I walked them through setting up their own contact information using the Default Contacts page and claiming their own pubs using the Individual Contacts page. We went through the entire process of ordering ads several times to make sure that everyone had it.
Bill was worried about the Lima, OH, newspaper. I called Eileen at TSI and asked her to call them to make sure that they were with the program.
They told me that they did not want to show costs. I had Eileen suppress costs for advertiser M055. I created a printer file named IO and associated it with M220 and M230 (insertion orders for ROP and inserts, respectively). I had to make some changes in DM220RSX. The pagination did not work right, and it did not show the header comments. I had to make some changes in DM220RSX. The pagination did not work right, and it did not show the header comments. I copied DM230RBTX to DM230RMSX. I made some changes to suppress the costs and to show blank lines of header comments. I also removed the “Authorized by” line.
We ran the insertion orders on Wednesday. They all went to AXN without error. We discovered that there was a problem with the special instructions. I had to add a statement to line 72000 to initialize the SI$ variable each time. This problem was inherited from Foley’s. Faxing is not yet in place.
The second meeting was with the people who record expense invoices. My notes stated:
We went through the entire process of creating an invoice upload file. It all seemed to work smoothly. They know that they have to key in the addresses if they want them to appear on the aprons. If they have a kickback, they will fix it on the .csv file and then fix it on AdDept. They do not plan to upload invoices a second time.
I also met with the people from the Business Office.
Cliff and Jackie attended a training class on co-op commitments. The only problem that they saw with the way that we did it was in regards to leased departments.
We talked about how they will enter leased.22 I was given a copy of the roadmap for Leased. It is not that different from the others. They will enter the actual media costs and, for books, the non-home cost from Gretchen. They will enter the marked-up amount as co-op with contra type LD.
The meeting with the people in direct mail did not go as well:
I showed them how to paginate books. They were extremely discouraged. I tried to convince them that the work that they had done in option 4 (number of pages by merchant) was not wasted, but I am not sure that I succeeded.
I set the default for the GRFLAG to G. I could swear that I did this the last time that I was here. They never enter departments except for co-op.
A fair number of new problems were encountered, but most of the system was operating smoothly by the time that I left Atlanta.
One of the MSO meeting rooms. I carried my oversized laptop and business materials in the large bag. The little one was for my camera.
July 9-13, 2006 trip: This was an important visit. July is the last month of the spring season. I wrote a lot of notes.
New players: Brigitte Billingslea23 processes expense invoices in the business office; Deonne (Dee) Wolters also works in the business office; Kristyn Page24 from Foley’s works on multi-cultural ads in the planning area.
We had a meeting to set up a strategy for the soft closing. Cliff, Jackie, Beth, Aurore, Amy, and Randy attended. Most newspaper invoices for June were keyed in. However, no other invoices and no purchase orders were entered. Active ads were created for ads from Foley’s and Hecht’s. We needed to come up with a way of excluding them from all financials.
The notes listed eight steps that were taken to isolate the ads from Foley’s and Hecht’s. Note was then made of an unexpected and unwanted situation:
Aaaaarrrgh! The transition from Foley’s occurs in the middle of July between week 2 and week 3. This will make closing July extremely difficult. So the above process applied only to ads running in weeks 1-24. The last two weeks of the season must use a different process.
I included at this point an outline of a comprehensive plan to close June and then July. It took up most of a page single-spaced. Most of it concerned how to get all the data entered for June, but the short items for July and August were interesting.
Mary Wiseman.
Mary Wiseman25 will accrue Foley’s expenses and send them to Cliff, who will enter them as a manual journal entry. Aims will be used for Macy’s South expenses. We will go through this whole process again next month. For August they will use AdDept somehow. There is no choice.
Then I listed what had been done on this trip to implement the plan:
I found three ads that had illegal values for the “Ad Type for Pages.” I fixed these and made sure that there were no others.
I twice scheduled the cost accounting to run in the evening, and I ran the actual version of the roadmap. It seemed OK to me, but there was nothing to compare it with.
For the purpose of catching up on entering expense invoices I recommended that they enter them in batches that were sorted by the month that the items were paid. Their natural inclination is to enter them by the month in which they were expensed. The business office people keyed in production invoices all week.
Cliff wanted a way to be able to see an audit trail of all of his manual journal entries. So, I planned to show him DA201, but I never got around to it.
The TSI user ID’s for both Dee and Brigitte had been set up so that they could not upload invoices. I changed both of them.
Amy told me that they do not exclude discounts when calculating percentage leased charges. I therefore changed that value in the specs. I also took out the default markup. She adds the markup to the percentage. I did not change the setting for co-op calculations. Amy was not in the office on Thursday. She had an emergency with her daughter.
I showed Cliff and Dee (who handles them) how to key in broadcast invoices. [Specific instructions for six tricky steps were listed.] I had to fix all of their existing broadcast invoices: All the DAMEDVD and DATRNSD records were off by 11.11%. I divided the amounts by .9. They pay gross at the market level! I created indirect sub-accounts AGCF5 (television) and AGCF6 (radio) to hold the credit for 10% of the gross. I added the credits to the invoices using DA282. When I fixed the broadcast invoices, it left the transactions out of balance. I needed to fix the OFFST entries.
Amy said that she thought that the process that I wrote up (suggested by Miriam) is too complicated. However, she did not have an alternative.
I brought back a list of problems. It was not overwhelming, but several items were gnarly.
This was the training room. It is also where they often let me work.
July 24-25, 2006 trip: There was a lot of tension. We were running out of time, and the game plan was to no one’s liking.
Amy, Beth, Cliff, and I spent Monday reconciling expenses for June. The newspaper accrual that they submitted included expenses for the last four days of May. This was a mistake. I wrote a query named MAY3DAYS in S_QRY to isolate these expenses for them. They eventually were able to tie it out. The broadcast accrual that I manipulated two weeks ago tied out. The P.O. accruals eventually tied out, too.
Beth got me a file of the invoices paid in June (except for prepaids). I made a database file name MSGL/AP0606 out of it. I then wrote a query named ALLAP in S_QRY to try to match it with invoices in AdDept. I created a second query named APTRNSMO to list the invoices with transaction month of June to try to get these to match up. By comparing the two we were able to find invoices with a posting month of June that were actually paid in earlier months. Amy moved them to the proper months using DA282. There were still unmatched invoices on the list of invoices for June, but they were for jobs in future months.
While we were doing all of this, the people in the business office were working on July.
On Tuesday Amy came in late because she had a flat tire. Beth worked on the ROF for July in the morning and had to leave about noon. We only got a few minutes of her time. I ran the open co-op report. It was much shorter than I expected. I soon learned that none o the co-op commitments for direct mail or preprints had been entered. I ran the Co-op Status by FOB report for June. I was able to match up the ROP pretty well. However, I could not use this to match up the actual co-op because the report from Aims included claims from July.
I created a few purchase orders for accruals that Cliff made in June.
I think they have given up on reconciling AdDept with Aims and the G/L for June and July. They just can’t seem to get the data entry done. However, they must use AdDept in August. That is now the highest priority. They will call me on Friday with their decision about when next I should come to Atlanta.
I explained to Amy how to key in the fax numbers for newspapers that do not subscribe to AXN. Amy asked me for the umpteenth time about faxing, and I gave her the same answer as before. She called IBM in Raleigh. They said that there was no need for a prefix in dialing out. They also said that everything was configured, but I could see no fax jobs running.
A lot had been accomplished, but many difficult items still needed to be addressed.
August 21-24 trip: I wrote a very long report about this trip.
Cliff showed me an invoice upload that did not work. There were no DUNS numbers on the vendor records. I wrote a query named NODUNS in S_QRY to find these for them.
They finally balanced their gross expense for June.
I wrote a process for Cliff to check the expenses in the G/L against AdDept. It consists of a program named RMV40, a command with the same name, and four queries: GLSUM, GLMATCH, GLNOMATCH1, and GLNOMATCH2. The queries are all in S_QRY. I documented the process in the document named GLMATCH, which I will put in the Macy’s South client folder. GLSUM must be run after the program and before the other queries. Later we discovered that the invoice upload process was stripping off starting 0’s and converting to upper case. I wrote a program to replicate this. I ran it after GLSUM.
They had had trouble faxing to Hampton. I added some more delays before the 4, and it seemed to work. Later April got a new fax number from Hampton. The faxing works with the new number. I don’t understand how Hecht’s was able to use the old number.
They had a pep rally at the Ravinia Crown Plaza on Tuesday. No kidding.
They decided that they want to use real PO’s with real vendors for Spring 2007. They will create blanket PO’s for accrual purposes for the fall. Randy said that they want to use 061 actual costs for direct mail for Hecht’s, Foley’s, and Macy’s South. I ran the DM647 to get actual costs for each direct mail book on Hecht’s system and Foley’s system. I ran DM489 for each book in the month for February for Hecht’s to see if that was what he wanted.
I gave a little P.O. class to Amy – DP260 and DP261 – so that she could help the other people learn about P.O.’s. I deleted USEDP271. This was a vestige from Macy’s West.
We discovered on Tuesday that no estimates had been entered for preprints. Then we discovered that all changes to estimates had been entered in Aims rather than AdDept. Evidently the people in that area did not understand that Aims was no longer being used.
I wrote off all open purchase orders. They did not close July in AdDept, so all of the P.O.’s were left over from June or earlier. That meant that somehow we needed to get the P.O. accrual for July into AdDept in order for the cost accounting not to consider 100% of the late invoices as August expense.
I entered the radio, television, direct mail, and insert accruals for July. Cliff decided that he did not want to reaccrue any of these. I therefore entered two zero invoices to write them off in August. I ran the accrual for July. The items showed up. I ran it for August. They were not there. Cliff has been carrying a short-rate accrual for ROP. I entered it as an indirect P.O. that hit the ROP account. He wanted to continue carrying it in August.
I wrote a process for Cliff to check the prepaid invoices in the G/L against AdDept. It consists of a program named RMV40PPD, a command with the same name, and four queries: PPDSUM, PPDMATCH, PPDNO1, and PPDNO2. The queries are all in S_QRY. I documented the process in the document named PPDMATCH, which I will put in the Macy’s South client folder. PPDSUM must be run after the program and before the other queries. Later we discovered that the invoice upload process was stripping off starting 0’s and converting to upper case. I wrote a program to replicate this. I ran it after PPDSUM.
I do not think that the programs to strip zeroes (STRIPGL and STRIPPPD) will be needed in September. The invoice upload will have been changed so that the 0’s do not get stripped off, and they no longer can use lower case.
I created TSIFAXOUTQ in QGPL. I then associate this output queue with TSIFAXPRTF and TSIFAXPRTI in TSIDATAS.
I checked the results of the ROF worksheet (which Cliff said is now obsolete because of management changes) against the accounting. It seemed to balance for everything except for ROP and magazines.
I set the earliest month for co-op accruals to be 062-1. If there were accruals from 061, they are not compatible with the way that we do it. I then ran the report and gave it to Cliff.
They asked me to change the specs so that they could pay any ad, no matter the status.
Needless to say, I did not attend the pep rally.
I brought back nine issues. Most of them were problems, not requests for new programming.
November 9-13, 2006 trip: Things had settled down a bit according to my report;
I put together makeshift processes for them to use to print the detail of their non-media expense by G/L account. I documented both of these processes. Basically they create output files from their accruals. Then they do a query for their actuals. Then they combine the results into one file and query that file.
Their accrued co-op was way off because they had not relieved any commitments for ad load. I showed them how to do this with claims for $0.
I wrote a query S_QRY/ACTVBYFOB for Jackie to get a list of actual co-op by FOB. She will use this until DB522 is fixed. This query creates an output file. I also gave one to Cliff named ACTVBYFOBP that prints. There were some authority problems, but they were both working when I quit.
I wrote a query S_QRY/INDIRECTS to get actual expenses for indirects for a season. They need this for the “Macy’s West Report.” The directs will come from DD #27.
I wrote a query named S_QRY/LINATLBU to provide a backup for the contract status report (DM767). The query S_QRY/INVADJ06 must be run first.
I changed the definition of the FILTER condition in the SLSXFR menu so that the filter program would appear.
Cliff gave me a file of sales by department for a month. A separate tab shows the sales by store for a month. Unfortunately the stores in DASTORE are actually markets. We tried to determine whether there actually is a requirement for either sales by store by month or sales by market by month. Cliff did not think so. Karla does not need the sales by month, but she would definitely like the sales by day. Miriam was not available.
I went over the prerequisites for running the store cost accounting with Amy. Basically she needs to run the BOOKQ query and option 7 on menu DAYEND.
I changed the default printing for DA102 so that the default is to put the printout on hold.
A few problems were discovered, and a few requests were made.
January 2-4, 2007: Both the notes and the list of issues were shorter than usual.
I had previously provided them with a query to find the amounts to charge their leased departments. They had three problems with it: One department was overcharged for an ad that was only 50% leased. I gave them a query named NOT100LEAS in S_QRY to find these. On two ads the amount that she charged them did not match the query. Cliff thought that the query was wrong, but he was off by one ad when he tried to match up a report with a query.
Cliff uses DB653 to do his journal entries for “accrued co-op.” He “accrues” the difference between season-to-date actuals and season-to-date committed. He and I have a different idea about what accruing means.
I had to increase the record length of DASLSTSI from 30 to 35.
I made a couple of changes to DA168U to make it match the file that Cliff can easily deliver. It also multiplies the amounts by 1,000. I checked individual entries and the totals for the November file that Cliff provided me. Everything seemed to work.
I wrote up instructions on the sales upload process. I e-mailed the instructions to Cliff and Amy.
I met with Gretchen Watkins and the two ladies who work for her in production. I showed them how to create purchase orders using option 26 of WRKADS.
They wanted to split freight between printer freight and mailer freight. I created a new sub-account FRML3 based on FRGT3 and a new cost code 705. They also wanted to split the computer charges to estimate the cost for “tracking and tracing” separately. I created a new sub-account TR&T3 for tracing and tracing based on COMP3. I also created a new cost category 515. I checked a direct mail ad. The new cost categories both showed up in option 28.
They are in the process of installing a new workflow system called Work Horse. Amy wanted to know if we could create a .csv file to feed it. She said that she would have to find out what would be in the file.
This was the last trip to Macy’s South. Since it occurred in the last month of the fiscal year, I suspect that the department’s budget for the next year included no provision for paying for my presence.
My life in Buckhead: I never rented a car in Atlanta. I always took MARTA from the airport to Bulkhead. On the first trip the hotel was within walking distance from the train station. On subsequent trips I took taxis from the train station to the Hampton Inn. I usually walked to Macy’s headquarters. One time when it was raining I asked the hotel to call a cab for me. They got me a ride, but it was not in a licensed cab. I did not complain.
I remember a lot about working at Macy’s, but little about anything else. The MARTA rides to Buckhead were usually late at night. The airport is south of the city, and Buckhead is far to the north. Sometimes it was a little creepy. The route went through downtown Atlanta. Often groups of young people who had been clubbing boarded there. At one point my car was occupied by myself, a group of young black women, and a group of young white men. The women were talking, and the guys overheard them. A discussion about the wisdom of the invasion of Iraq ensued. I was happy when that trip ended.
I cannot remember ever socializing with anyone from Macy’s. I ate lunch by myself in the cafeteria. I sometimes ate supper in the food court at a neighboring mall. Most of the time, however, I stopped at Arby’s on the walk back to the hotel and picked up a Reuben or a roast beef sandwich and ate in my hotel room.
I have quite a few memories of the Atlanta airport. My flights usually departed from Terminal F, but after I cleared security I usually took the tram to Terminal E. The elevator ended in a food court that contained a pretty large Chili’s restaurant. I would usually eat supper there, and, if I did, I would order the Baby Back Ribs with broccoli instead of French fries.
That restaurant was the only part of the airport that I liked. It always seemed very loud to me, even though I almost always spent the waiting time listening to operas or Italian tapes on my Bose headphones.
Epilogue: TSI maintained a good productive relationship with Macy’s Central until 2009, when the headquarters in Buckhead was closed, and all advertising was scheduled, produced, and ordered from New York.
1. FedAd and Assets were software systems written by a group that had been organized by Gilbert Lorenzo of the Burdines division. The system was supposed to be one integrated system that covered all aspects of advertising. It was used by Burdines and Bon Marché. After the integration of all of the divisions into New York some version of it was used in the advertising department there. The attempts to entice me to involve TSI in this multi-milllion dollar undertaking are described here and here.
2. Like almost everyone in the department, Aurore worked at Macy’s until 2009, when the advertising operations were consolidated in Manhattan. Her LinkedIn page is here.
3. Cliff looked like Santa Claus. I spent quite a bit of time with him over the course of the years. He revealed to me that he had a fairly substantial business on the side selling things on eBay. On one of my trips he told me about his plan to sell programs from some sort of Martin Luther King event being held in Atlanta. He also told me that some of his goods came from dumpsters. His LinkedIn page is posted here.
4. Beth Lane was a CPA who worked part-time in the Business Office. I remember very little about her. Her LinkedIn page is here.
5. Steve Weinbaum was astounded that I was willing to try to replicate the MSO planning process. I explained that I had done a lot of AdDept installations. No one had anything like this process, but several of them had other aspects that were equally challenging. His attitude impressed me. I wished that I had been able to work with him more. His LinkedIn page can be found here.
21. The LinkedIn page for Randy Reeves can be found here.
22. Most department stores have at least one department that is operated by another company that leases the space. Those companies must pay for the advertising that is run for them.
23. Brigitte Billingslea’s LinkedIn page is located here.
24. Kristyn Page’s LinkedIn page can be viewed here.
We had a very good record of closing AdDept sales. Most of the whiffs fell into one of two categories:
Divisions of Federated Department Stores. Our relationships with various Federated divisions are described in detail here. They are not included in this entry.
Companies that did not advertise enough to justify a high-quality multi-user centralized database. We actually sold the AdDept system to a couple of these anyway.
TSI’s first efforts to market AdDept were concentrated around New York and New England. I figured that there were not very many retailers who could afford the system to keep track of advertising, but, then again, I did not really expect to justify the cost of the system at Macy’s in the very first module that we activated—ad measurement.
The strip mall in which the Enfield store was located was named after Caldor.
Our first attempt was a quintessential whiff. Kate Behart (much more about her here) had been in contact with someone in the advertising department at Caldor, a discount department store based in Norwalk, CT. Kate arranged for me to give a presentation to them at the IBM office in Norwalk. Of course, we had to make sure that the office had the BASIC program, and I had to install both the AdDept programs and some data that I had dummied up from Macy’s real data.
My presentation was flawless. The only problem that I encountered that day was the lack of an audience. No one from Caldor showed up. We never did find out why not. Kate called them repeatedly, but no one returned her calls. It may have had something to do with the fact that in 1989, the year that we installed the first AdDept system at Macy’s, the May Company sold Caldor to a group of investment houses.
Caldor went out of business in 1999.
I also paid a visit to another local retailer, Davidson and Leventhal, commonly known as D&L. Theirs were not exactly department stores, but they had fairly large stores that sold both men’s and women’s clothing. So, they had quite a few departments. The stores had a good reputation locally. The headquarters was in New Britain, CT.
This D&L ad was on the back cover of the issue of Northeast that featured my story (described here).
The advertising department only employed three or four employees. They wanted to know if they could use the computer for both D&L ads and ads for Weathervane, another store that they owned, as well. That seemed vaguely feasible to me, and so I said they could. In fact, we later did this for Stage Stores and for the Tandy Corporation, but both of those companies were much larger, and I had a much better understanding by then of what it entailed.
I didn’t even write up a proposal for D&L. The person with whom I spoke made it clear that what we were offering was way out of their price range.
D&L went out of business in 1994, only a few years after our meeting. Weathervane lasted until 2005.
I have only a vague recollection of doing a demonstration at IBM’s big facility in Waltham, MA, for a chain of auto parts retailers from Phoenix. The name of the chain at the time was Northern Automotive. My recollection is that I spoke with a man and a woman. If they told me how they heard about AdDept, I don’t remember it. After a very short time it was clear that AdDept was much more than the company needed. Although Northern Automotive had a lot of stores with four different logos, it only ran one ad per week. So there was really not much to keep track of. I had the distinct impression that the demo was just an excuse for the couple to take a vacation in New England on the company’s dime.
I don’t remember either of their names, but the experience list on LinkedIn for a guy named Paul Thompson (posted here) makes him a strong candidate. Northern Automotive changed its name to CSK Auto, Inc. not long after our meeting. In 2008 CSK was purchased by O’Reilly Auto Parts.
Won’t Paul be surprised to be busted thirty years later in an obscure blog?
Tom Moran (more details here) set up an appointment with employees of Genovese Drugs at its headquarters in Melville, NY. The two of us drove to Long Island to meet with them.
I probably should have talked to someone there over the phone before we left. The only impression that I remember getting from the meeting was that they were not at all serious about getting a system. We had a great deal of trouble getting them to describe what the advertising department did at the time and what they wanted to do. I was frustrated because I had considered this a relatively cheap opportunity to learn how chains of pharmacies handled their advertising. It was actually a waste of time and energy.
Tom tried to follow up, but he got nowhere. We did not submit a proposal.
J.C. Penney bought the company in 1998 and rebranded all the stores as Eckerd pharmacies.
Woodies’ flagship store in downtown Washington.
While I was working on the software installation at Hecht’s in 1991, Tom Moran coordinated our attempt to land the other big department store in the Washington, DC, area, Woodward & Lothrop, locally known as Woodies. I found a folder that contains references to correspondence with them. Tom worked with an IBM rep named Allison Volpert1. Our contacts at Woodies were Joel Nichols, the Divisional VP, and Ella Kaszubski, the Production Manager.
As I browsed through the file, I detected a few warning signs. The advertising department was reportedly in the process of asking for capital for digital photography, which was in its (very expensive) infancy in 1991. Tom was told that they hoped to “slip in” AdDept as part of the photography project. Furthermore, the fact that we were not dealing with anyone in the financial area did not bode well.
Someone wrote this book about Woodies.
Finally, we had no choice other than to let IBM propose the hardware. Their method of doing this always led to vastly higher hardware and system software costs than we considered necessary. I found a copy of IBM’s configuration. The bottom line was over $147,000 and another $48,600 for IBM software. This dwarfed what Hecht’s had spent. If the cost of AdDept was added in, they probably were facing a purchase price of over a quarter of a million dollars! That is an awful lot to “slip in”.
I don’t recall the details, but I remember having an elegant lunch during this period with someone from Woodies in the restaurant of the main store. It may have been Joel Nichols. It seemed like a very positive experience to me. He seemed eager to automate the department.
We lost contact with Woodies after early 1992. I seriously doubt that the advertising department even purchased the photography equipment that they had coveted. The early nineties were very bad for retailers. By 1994 the owner of Woodies and the John Wanamaker chain based in Philadelphia declared bankruptcy and then sold the stores to JC Penney and the May Company. Many of the stores were rebranded as Hecht’s or Lord and Taylor.
In some ways Fred Meyer, a chain of department stores based in Portland, OR, seemed like a perfect match for TSI. At the time they were almost unique, and we usually excelled at programming unusual ideas. Their approach to retail included what are now called “hypermarket” (department store plus groceries) stores, although they definitely had some much smaller stores as well. The one in downtown Portland was very small. I really thought that we had a good shot at getting this account, largely due to the fact that the IT department already had one or two AS/400’s. So, the hardware cost would probably be minimal.
She would be lucky to make it in nine hours; there were no direct flights.
I was asked to work with a consultant who, believe it or not, commuted from Buffalo, NY, to Portland, OR. I can’t remember her name. She knew computer systems but virtually nothing about what the advertising department did. She wanted me to tell her what AdDept could do, and she would determine whether the system would work for them. I have always hated it when a “gatekeeper” was placed between me and the users. I understand that they do not trust the users to make a good decision, but advertising is very complicated, and almost no IT consultants know much about it. I would not have minded if the consultant sat in on interviews that I conducted with people in advertising.
If I was allowed to meet with anyone from the scheduling or financial areas of the department, I do not remember it at all. I do remember spending an afternoon with the head of the company’s photography studio. AdDept had a module (that no one used) for managing shoots and another (used by Macy’s East) for managing the merchandise that is loaned to the studio for a shoot.
I remember the photo studio guy mentioning that they also did billable work for outside clients. He mentioned Eddie Bauer by name. He could not believe that I had never heard of it/him.
I probably botched this opportunity. Before agreeing to come out the second time, I should have insisted on meeting with whoever placed their newspaper ads and the person in charge of advertising finance. I did not want to step on the toes of the lady from Buffalo, but I probably should have been more aggressive.
Kate accompanied me on one of these trips. We probably flew on Saturday to save on air fare. On Sunday we drove out to Mt. Hood, where we saw the lodge and the glacier, and visited Multnomah Falls on the way back.
Freddie’s was acquired by Kroger in 1998, but the logos on the stores were maintained. There still is a headquarters in Portland, but I don’t know if ads are still created and/or placed there.
Aside from our dealings with Federated divisions2 TSI had very few whiffs during the period that Doug Pease (described here) worked for us. After one of our mailings Doug received a call from Debra Edwards3, the advertising director at May Ohio, a May Company division that had its headquarters in Cleveland. Doug and I flew Continental non-stop to Cleveland and took the train into downtown. My recollection was that we were able to enter the store from the underground train terminal.
The presentation and the demo went very well. I am quite certain that we would have gotten this account were it not for the fact that in early 1993 the May Company merged the Ohio division with Kaufmann’s in Pittsburgh. Management of the stores was transferred to Pittsburgh. Debra was hired as advertising director at Elder-Beerman Stores.
We stayed overnight in Cleveland and had time to visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which was right down the street from the huge May Co. building. I cannot say that I was greatly impressed with the exhibits.
A few years later Doug and I undertook a second trip to Cleveland to visit the headquarters of Sherwin Williams. Doug had talked extensively with the lady who was the advertising director there. He was very enthusiastic about the prospect of making this sale. By that time Doug had already closed a few big deals for us, and so I trusted his judgment. However, I could not understand how a company that really only sold one product could possibly need AdDept. Yes, they have thousands of stores, but how many ads do they run?
I don’t honestly remember anything about our discussion with them. Needless to say, Doug did not close this one, although he never stopped trying to revive it.
I don’t really count it as a whiff, but Doug was unable to close the deal with Liberty House in Honolulu after our epic trip to Hawaii in December of 1995. The details are recounted here.
I drove past two of the stores in Texas, but I never went inside.
Just as Marvin Elbaum had backed out of his contract with TSI for a GrandAd system in 1986 (as described here), so also one company signed an agreement for TSI’s AdDept system and, before we had installed the system, changed its mind. There was one big difference in the two situations. The second company was the Tandy Corporation, which had actually ordered installations of AdDept for all three of its retail divisions. At the last minute the company decided to close down Incredible Universe, one of the three divisions. The other two companies became TSI clients in 1997, as is described here.
It was not a big loss for TSI. IU was one of a kind. Its stores were gigantic multi-story combinations of electronics and theater. There were only seventeen stores, and only six were ever profitable. Those six were sold to Fry’s Electronics. The other eleven were sold to real estate developers at pennies on the dollar.
I did a demo for Mervyn’s California, a department store based in Hayward, CA. I think that I must have done the demo after finishing a training/consulting trip at Macy’s West in San Francisco. I cannot imagine that I would have flown out to the west coast to do a demo without spending a day or two gathering specs.
The IBM office nearest to Hayward was in Oakland. I took BART in the late afternoon from San Francisco to Oakland. There was quite a bit of excitement at the Holiday Inn at which I was staying. Someone had been murdered on the street in front of the hotel the previous night. There was one other very peculiar thing about this stay. I checked into a Holiday Inn with no difficulty, but I checked out of a different hotel (maybe a Ramada?). The hotel had been sold, and its ownership had changed while I was asleep.
The demo went fine. The guy who had contacted me—his name was Thiery or something like that—liked what he saw. However, the sale never advanced any further. This was almost always what happened whenever I got talked into doing a demo without taking at least a day to interview the potential users. At the time that I did the demo Mervyn’s was, unbeknownst to me, owned by Target. This might have explained the lack of progress. Target may have been restricting or rejecting any capital purchases at the time.
Mervyn’s was sold to some vulture capitalists in 2004. A much smaller version of the chain went out of business in 2009.
For some reason Doug and I once had a very short meeting with the president of Gottschalks, a chain of department stores based in Fresno, CA. He told Doug and me that he would get all of the other members of the Frederick Atkins Group to install AdDept. This organization (absolutely never abbreviated by its initials) somehow enabled its members to shop for foreign and domestic merchandise as a group. Nearly every department store that was not owned by the May Company or Federated belonged to it.
A few years after he made this promise he (or someone else at Gottschalks) arranged for me to speak before the members at one of their conventions in Naples, FL. I flew to Fort Meyers and rented a car from there. Naples was beautiful and reeked of new money. I gave my little spiel, but I did not have an opportunity to interact with any of the members of the audience. So, I did not get any direct feedback.
We eventually did sign up a few members of the group—notably the Bon-Ton (described here) and Elder-Beerman (described here). I don’t know whether my speech had any effect.
I think that the Frederick Atkins Group is defunct in 2021. The references to it that I could find on the Internet were all from decades past.
In (I think) 1999 Doug Pease and I made an unproductive trip to Columbus, OH, to talk with the IT director of of Value City about the possibility of installing the AdDept system for use by the advertising department. That adventure is described here.
First stop: Norfolk.
TSI got a phone call from a chain of furniture stores in coastal Virginia, Norfolk4, as I recall. As part of my crazy automotive support trip, I stopped by to talk with the advertising director at this company on my journey from Home Quarters Warehouse in Virginia Beach to Hecht’s in Arlington. I spent a couple of hours with him. When I discovered that the company had only three stores, I knew that this was a mistake. I told him that our software could address his problems, but the cost and effort would not be worth it for either of us. I advised him to hire someone who was a wiz with spreadsheets.
I think that I got a free cup of coffee out of it.
I can’t tell you what happened to the company thereafter because I don’t even remember its name.
We had two reasonably hot leads in 2000. I had to handle both of them myself. The first was at Bealls department store, which has its headquarters in Bradenton, FL. This was another situation is which I had to deal with the IT department rather than the advertising department. I am pretty sure that the company already had at least one AS/400. I have a few notes from this trip, but it is not clear whether I intended to do the demo on their system or on one at a nearby IBM office.
In any case I think that there was a technical problem that prevented a successful installation of the software needed for the demo. So, I had to improvise, and I did not get to spend much time with the people who would have benefited from the system. The whole thing made me very depressed.
I had some free time, and so I went to the beach. I stopped at a Jacobson’s store to buy a tee shirt to wear at the beach. The cheapest tee shirts in the store cost $100!
The beach was lovely, and it was unbelievably empty. The weather was pretty nice. A beach in Connecticut would have been packed in this type of weather.
All of these stores are gone.
We did not get the account, but the tale has an interesting coda. Bealls is still in business today. For years Bealls could not expand outside of the state of Florida because a different store with exactly the same name was already using it in other states. These Bealls stores were run by Stage Stores, a long-time AdDept client that was based in Houston. Stage Stores was still using AdDept when TSI went out of business in 2014.
In 2019 Stage announced that it was changing all of its stores into Gordmans, its off-price logo (which did not exist while I was working with them). When the company declared bankruptcy Bealls purchased, among other things, the right to use the Bealls name nationwide.
I remember going to Barneys New York in late 2000 to talk with someone in advertising. I also have discovered three emails that I sent to Christine Carter, who was, I think, either in charge of the advertising department or in charge of the financial side. Barneys only had twenty-two stores, and that included some off-price outlets. I don’t know how much they actually advertised.
Flagship store on 60th Street.
We never heard from them after my last email, which emphasized how easily AdDept could be adapted to differing needs even for companies the size of Barneys. By this time the very affordable AS/400 model 150 had been introduced. It would have been perfect for them.
I think that Barneys is dead or nearly so in 2021. All of the stores in the U.S have been closed, and even the “Barneys New York” brand was sold to Saks Fifth Avenue. However, the company also had a Japan division, which is evidently still operational.
I received a very unexpected phone some time in 2001 or 2002. It came from a man who had formerly worked at Saks Fifth Avenue and had taken a job as a Vice President at Sears. He knew that the advertising department at Saks had been doing things with its AdDept system that Sears’ advertising department seemed utterly incapable of. He invited me to the Sears headquarters in Hoffman Estates, IL, to investigate the possibility of installing AdDept at Sears.
At about the same time I had been in contact with the agency in a nearby town that Sears used for buying newspaper space and negotiating newspaper contracts. They wanted to talk with me about the possibility of working together. The agency’s name was three initials. I think that one was an N, but I am not sure.5
I arranged to spend consecutive days at the two places. It was cold on the day that I visited the agency. I learned that it recruited new clients by claiming that they could negotiate better rates for them because they also represented Sears. I suspected that this was baloney. Sears was a bid dog nationwide, but the amount of newspaper ads that they bought in any individual market was not that impressive. They were just in a lot of markets.
After the people explained the services that they offered to clients, I remarked that about 10 percent of what they did overlapped with about 10 percent of what we did. Privately I could not imagine that any of our clients who would benefit from their services.
I told them about AxN, our Internet product. They informed me that the papers did not want to sign on to their website for insertion orders. Of course, they wouldn’t, and they had nothing to hold over the papers.
We ended the meeting with the usual agreement to stay in touch and look for synergies, but privately I considered them the enemy.
I did not see a parking structure. Maybe I entered on the wrong side of the pond.
The next day was bitterly cold, and there was a strong wind. I located the sprawling Sears complex and parked my rented car in a lot that was already nearly full. I had to walk a long way to the main building, and I have never felt as cold as I did on that walk.
I could hardly believe it when I walked into the building. The ground floor was billed with retail establishments—a drug store, a coffee shop, a barber shop, and many more. I had to take the escalator up to get to Sears. I was met there by the woman with whom I had been in contact. She was from the IT department.
OK, now I get it. Our problem was that we did not have enough architects.
She took me up to meet the “advertising team”. Six or eight people were assembled in the room, and they all had assigned roles. I remember that one was the “system architect”, and one was the “database manager”. I almost could not suppress my amusement. What did all these people do? There was no system, and there certainly was no database. At TSI I handled essentially all the roles that everyone at the table described.
They asked me some questions about the AdDept system. When I told them that it ran on the AS/400, the system architect asked me if that system was not considered obsolete. I scoffed at this notion and explained that IBM had introduced in the AS/400 64-bit RISC processors that were state-of-the-art. I also said that, as far as I knew, the AS/400 was the only system that was build on top of a relational database. That made it perfect for what AdDept did.
I wonder how many “OS/2 shops” there were in the world.
They informed me that Sears was an OS/26 shop. I did not know that there was such a thing. In the real world Windows had already left OS/2 in its dust by that time. In all my time dealing with retailers I never heard anyone else even mention OS/2. It might have been a great idea, but IBM never did a good job of positioning it against Windows.
Besides, just because the corporation endorsed OS/2 should not eliminate consideration of multi-user relational databases where appropriate. The devices with OS/2 could serve as clients.
They explained to me that Sears’ advertising department had hundreds of employees, most of whom served as liaisons with the merchandise managers. Most of the ads were placed by agencies. I presume that the newspaper ads were produced in-house. No one whom I talked with seemed to know. The people on the committee did not seem to know anything about how the department did budgeting or planning.
The competition.
Someone talked about Sears’ competitors. The example cited was Home Depot. I don’t know why this surprised me. I must have been taken in by the “softer side of Sears” campaign a few years earlier.
After the meeting my escort took me to a remarkable room that was dedicated to the advertising project. It was a small theater that had ten or so posters on the wall with big Roman numerals at the top: I, II, III, IV, etc. There were no statues, but otherwise I was immediately struck by the resemblance to the Stations of the Cross that can be found in almost any Catholic church in the world. I asked what the posters represented. The answer was that they were the “phases of the project”. I was stunned by the assumption that the project required “a team” and that it was or indefinite duration. No one ever allowed us more than a month or two to have at least portions of the system up and running.
At some point I was allowed to give my presentation. The man who had worked at Saks attended along with a fairly large number of people. Maybe some were from advertising. I was never allowed to speak with them individually.
I never got to read the advertising department’s Wish Book.
My talk explained that AdDept was a relational database that was specifically designed for retail advertising departments. I described a few of the things for which it had been used by other retailers. I could not do much more than that. I had not been able to talk with any of the people in the department, and the IT people were clearly clueless.
When I returned to Connecticut I wrote to both my escort and the man from Saks. I told both of them that I did not know what the next step might be. I had not been given enough access to the advertising department to make a proposal. The whole experience was surreal. If someone had asked me to return, I would only have done it if I were granted unfettered access to potential users.
No one ever contacted us. I told Doug not to bother following up.
One puzzling whiff occurred during the very short period in which Jim Lowe worked for us. The strange case of Wherehouse Music is explored here.
Perhaps the strangest telephone call from a genuine prospect that I ever received was from Albertsons, a very large retailer with is its headquarters in Boise Idaho. The person who called was (or at least claimed to be) the advertising director there.
I had heard of Albertsons, but I did not know very much about the company. All I knew was that they were a chain of grocery stores in the west. Since advertising for grocery stores is basically limited to one insert/polybag7 per week, they had never seemed to be great prospects for AdDept. However, I never hung up on someone who expressed interest in the system.
The problem was that this lady insisted that I fly out to Boise to meet with her and her crew the next day. I tried to get her to explain what the situation was, but she said that she had no time to talk. She needed to know if I would make the trip. It was a little tempting for a peculiar reason. Idaho was one of the few states8 that I had never visited. Still, this sounded awfully fishy. I passed.
The incredibly bumpy road that Albertsons has traveled is documented on its Wikipedia page, which is available here. I don’t remember when the call from the advertising director came. I therefore have no way of knowing whether she was in charge of advertising for a region, a division, all of the grocery stores, or none of those. I might well have passed up an opportunity that might have extended the life of the company. Who knows? It looked like a goose, and it honked like a goose, but maybe going to Boise would not have been a wild goose chase.
Jeff Netzer, with whom I had worked in the nineties at Neiman Marcus (recounted here), called me one day in 2010. He asked me if I remembered him. I said that I did; he was the Aggie who worked at Neiman’s.
He informed me that he was now working at Sewell Automotive, the largest Cadillac dealership in the Dallas area. He said that they were looking for help in automating their marketing. I was not sure how well AdDept would work in that environment, but I agreed to visit them. His boss promised to buy me a steak dinner.
I flew Southwest to Dallas, and for the first time my plane landed at Love Field. It was much closer to Sewell than DFW would have been.
I found a great deal out about their operation. I doubted that we could do much for the agency for a reasonable amount of money. On my computer I recently found a three-page document dated September 23, 2010, in which I had listed all of the issues that I learned about at Sewell. A woman named Tucker Pressly entered all of their expense invoices into a SQL Server database. It was inefficient, and there were no programs to help them compare with budgets.
The main objective of the marketing department was to make sure that they were taking advantage of all available co-op dollars from Cadillac and other vendors. We could not help with this unless we wrote a new module. I described my reactions to their issues in a letter to Jeff.
I never heard back from Jeff, who left Sewell in 2012. Nobody ever bought me a steak dinner.
Sewell Automotive is still thriving in 2021.
In 2011 or 2012 I received a phone call from a lady from the advertising department at Shopko, a chain of department stores based in Green Bay, WI. I don’t recall her name. She said that she worked for Jack Mullen, whom I knew very well from both Elder-Beerman and Kaufmann’s. Before Doug Pease came to TSI, he had worked for Jack at G. Fox in Hartford.
I flew out to Packer Land to meet with her. They had a very small advertising department. They basically ran circulars in local newspapers on a weekly basis. As I remember, she and one other person ran the business office.
I worked up a proposal for the most minimal AdDept system that I could come up with and sent it to her. When I had not heard from her after a few weeks I called her. She said that the company was downsizing and, in fact, her position was being eliminated.
Jack also left the company in July of 2012. His LinkedIn page is here. Shopko went out of business in 2019.
1. Allison Volpert apparently still works for IBM in 2021. Her LinkedIn page is here.
2. As I write this I can easily visualize Doug stabbing a box with a pencil after a frustrating telephone conversation with someone from a Federated division.
3. I worked fairly closely with Debra Edwards when I installed the AdDept system at Elder-Beerman stores in Dayton, OH. That installation is described here. She was the Advertising Director there. Her LinkedIn page is here.
4. The “l” in Norfolk is silent, and the “ol” sounds much more like a short u.
5. I later learned that there were actually two affiliated agencies across the street from one another. I encountered the other one, SPM, in my dealings with Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc., which are detailed here. The agency was still around in 2023. Its webpage is here.
6. In fact IBM stopped updating OS/2 in 2001 and stopped supporting the operating system in 2006. I cannot imagine how Sears dealt with this. I pity their employees with nothing OS/2 experience at Sears on their résumés.
7. Polybags are the plastic bags that hold a group of flyers from diverse retailers. they are ordinarily distributed to people willy-nilly.
8. The others are Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska. I am not certain of Arkansas. I might have gone there with my grandparents when I was a youngster. The only place that I have been in Utah is the Salt Lake City airport.
