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1994-2014 TSI: AdDept Client: Saks Fifth Avenue

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TSI had a long but bumpy association with SFA. Continue reading →

Saks Fifth Avenue (SFA) is more than just a store. For decades it has been a chain of high-end department stores throughout North America as well as numerous smaller affiliated stores. In the early nineties its headquarters was in its famous flagship store on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The first Saks store was opened in 1867, and for decades the enterprise was owned and operated by the Saks family. However, since 1923 Saks has been owned and controlled by outside organizations except for a two-year period beginning in 1996 when it was a public corporation. Even then 50 percent of the stock was retained by its previous owner, the Bahrain-based firm, Investcorp.

I, of course, was blissfully ignorant of most of this when, in the early nineties, TSI began pitching the AdDept system to the advertising department of Saks. In fact, my presentation to Saks may have been the first one that had a fairly serious chance of succeeding. I don’t remember the demo, but I surely gave one at the IBM office on Madison Avenue. I also definitely visited the office of the Saks’ advertising department, which at that time was on one of the upper floors of the store on Fifth Avenue to collect the requirements for the official proposal.

It did not take me long to realize that SFA was very different from Macy’s. The Senior VP at Saks was a woman, and her secretary was a man. I am embarrassed to report that I don’t remember either of their names. Theirs was an unusual setup in the early nineties. More surprising to me was the fact that around his desk were posted large glossy photographs of shirtless male models.

Saks’ advertising department was responsible for more than just the Fifth Avenue store. There were dozens of full-line stores that bore the SFA logo strategically positioned around the continent in locations with the requisite number of rich people. They also managed the little advertising done for even more Off Fifth outlet stores that sold the merchandise that had not been sold at the SFA stores. They also had responsibility for advertising for the Armani Exchange stores. I never quite understood why.

This was the OTS at 700 N. Michigan Ave. in Chicago.

For me the most surprising thing about Saks’ approach to advertising was its focus on New York City. Macy’s focus was somewhat similar, but their primary purpose in purchasing AdDept was to be able to hand additional markets. Saks divided their SFA stores into two groups: New York and OTS, which stood for “out-of-town stores.” Their newspaper advertising was heavily focused on the New York Times. They may have used Newsday for the Long Island store, but I don’t think that they used the other tabloids at all.

Saks also advertised very heavily in fashion magazines. In some ways the system could treat magazines as newspapers that only published one issue per month, but in other ways they were quite different. A fair amount of programming was required to handle Saks’ advertising in Vogue and other such periodicals.

Saks signed a contract with TSI in 1994, which was a banner year for the company. I made sure that all of the users of and prospects for the AdDept system knew that Saks was now on our client list by including the news in an issue of Sound Bytes, TSI’s short-lived newsletter.

At Saks Fifth Avenue, the national retailer based in Manhattan, the implementation of the AdDept system is scheduled for May 1. Advertising personnel will be connected to an AS/400 located at the company’s data center in Lawrenceville, NJ, through a Token Ring network. Both Mac and PC users in all areas of the department and the advertising business office will have access to the data. In addition to the wealth of standard features in AdDept, custom programming will provide the department with the ability to produce advertising schedules by store, to track advertising expenses (gross, vendor, and net) by merchandise vendor, and to produce change reports that conform with the way that the department is organized.

Reading this blurb again brought to mind a few unusual aspects concerning the installation.

  • I made at least one trip to Lawrenceville, which is closer to Philadelphia than to Fifth Avenue, probably at the time when the AS/400 was installed in 1994. Almost never did anyone from TSI deal with anyone from that facility, and they had never had a hardware problem. However, several years later we received a very strange phone call from someone there who requested that someone from our office dial into the system over the modem. They said that no one could remember where they had put it; they hoped that the noise produced by the modem—it never answered on the first ring—would lead them to it. Apparently it worked. In 1998 all of Saks’ computers were moved to the Proffitt’s Inc. facility in Jackson, MI. I installed a newer faster machine there.
  • My recollection is that Saks used very little of the custom programming that TSI had coded and implemented at the time of the installation until Tom Caputo arrived eight years later. They mainly used the AdDept system as an easier way to key in expenses for their accounts payable and general ledger systems, which AdDept was designed to feed.
  • The phrase “the way that the department is organized,” brought back memories of the difficulties that I encountered while training at SFA. The ROP (i.e., newspaper ads) manager, in particular, was quite uncooperative in helping me understand how she worked. She evidently considered ROP her own little fiefdom, and suspected that revealing the knowledge of how her area worked might affect her job security. This was by no means the last time that I was faced with this sort of heel-dragging.

I remember a few other details about that initial installation:

SFA on Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills.
  • I heard one interesting story related by an employee at Saks. The person at the headquarters who monitored sales by store had been very concerned because the Beverly Hills store in California had in the previous few months posted much lower sales than expected. A call to the store manager revealed a simple explanation: “The princess died.” Evidently a Saudi princess had been purchasing so much so regularly from the store that her untimely demise had dramatically deflated the the store’s total revenues.
  • Once or twice I spent consecutive days in Manhattan during the installation. Saks arranged for me to stay in a luxurious room at the nearby Sheraton. It was by far the nicest place in which I ever stayed for business.
  • I remember that on one occasion SFA had asked for a day of training, for which TSI charged $1,000. I discovered when I arrived in Manhattan that no one who actually used (or had any intention of using) the AdDept system was available to spend time with me. So, for several hours I “trained” three interns. For all of them English was a second language. One was named Oscar; I don’t remember the other names.

In subsequent years I was not a bit happy with the state of the installation at Saks. It made me realize that the success of our installations was largely dependent upon the strength of our liaison. The person needed to have the ability to grasp the intricacies of the system, a personality adaptable to working with both TSI and the users of the system, and the clout (direct or indirect) to deal with problems once they had been identified.

I very much wanted to use Saks as a reference account, but they used so little of the system that I was reluctant to mention them. I was frankly puzzled as to why it seemed so difficult to get anyone outside of the finance area interested in making the system work for them. The person with whom we worked the most was Jeanette Igesias1. She was conscientious enough, but she had neither the authority nor the inclination to involve any of the other areas more fully.

In 1998 the retail world was shocked to learn that Saks Holdings, Inc., the parent company, had been acquired by Proffitt’s Inc.2, a company that a few years earlier consisted of a set of stores in Tennessee that could have all fit easily inside the Saks store on Fifth Avenue. Almost immediately after the acquisition the parent company’s name was changed to Saks Inc.

Shortly thereafter I was in Birmingham, AL, to work with employees of the advertising department for the Parisian3, a chain of department stores that Proffitt’s Inc. had previously acquired. The corporate headquarters was also located in the same building. I happened to encounter the same Senior VP from Saks’ adverting department whom I had met in the early nineties. She was there to meet with people from what was then still called Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG). She knew that I had been frustrated with the pace of the installation at SFA. She even remarked that maybe under the new ownership they could get something done.

At about this time Ava John was hired by Saks. I think that she worked under Jeanette until Jeanette left SFA in 2002. Thereafter Ava was TSI’s principal contact for the part of the system used by the advertising business office, which included recording invoices that were uploaded to the corporate accounts payable system.

In 2008 Ava was arrested and charged with running an embezzlement scheme that netted her and her friends and relatives more than $680,000 over the course of five years. That may seem like a lot, but it was only a little over $10,000 per month, a tiny fraction of what Saks spent on advertising. I discovered a single mistake at another installation that was about as large as this.

At the time I did not hear about any of this, and, to the best of my knowledge, neither did any of TSI’s employees, but the scandal was reported in all three of New York’s major dailies. The Post‘s coverage can be read here. I was unable to discover anything posted on the Internet about the ultimate legal resolution. I also know nothing more about Ava.

In 2001 Tom Caputo, who had been TSI’s primary contact at Lord &Taylor5 for several years, was hired by Saks. He had a number of responsibilities in the advertising department, one of which was to oversee the AdDept installation. Tom’s office was not in the flagship store, but in an office building across the street. I met with him there several times. I cannot remember what projects we did for them, but I remember that Tom seemed frustrated with the situation there, or, more likely with what the world of retail had become in the twenty-first century.

Tom stayed at Saks until 2014, the same year that Denise Bessette and I decided to shut down TSI. I had one further contact with him. He asked me if I knew of any job openings that he would qualify for. I had to reply in the negative. By that time the demand for both people and software that was adept at administering the advertising for large national retailers was negligible. I felt sorry for my many acquaintances who were not able to disassociate themselves from this undertaking as smoothly as we did.

In 2007 Saks was spun off from the other department stores that were part of Saks Inc. The executive who had cobbled together this retail giant, R. Brad Martin, summarily abandoned the leadership of the rest of the stores to someone else and elected to run just SFA. His decision to remove the jewel from the crown was described in this New York Post. article.

In 2013 the company was purchased by the Hudson Bay Company, the oldest corporate enterprise in North America. The company had already purchased Tom Caputo’s previous employer, Lord & Taylor. One of the last projects that I worked on at TSI was helping with the migration of SFA’s AdDept system to the HBC computers located somewhere in Canada.

There are still many Saks Fifth Avenue stores. HBC opened a huge store in Toronto in 2014 and at least two other stores in Canada. Administration of all of the stores seems to be split between Toronto and New York.

1. Jeanette Iglesias’ LinkedIn page can be found here.

2. Much more about TSI’s relationship with Proffitt’s Inc./Saks Inc. is available here.

3. Details about the Parisian installation of the AdDept system are provided here.

4. You can read about this major boo-boo here.

5. The history of the AdDept installation at Lord & Taylor is documented here.

1999-2006 TSI: AdDept Client: Parisian

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Saks Inc. division based in Birmingham, AL. Continue reading →

Parisian, based in Birmingham, AL, was a little different from the other divisions of Proffitt’s Inc.1 (later renamed Saks Inc.). Its stores were somewhat upscale, but they seldom went head-to-head with Saks or Neiman Marcus in major markets. Parisian was acquired by Proffitt’s Inc. in 1996, and the corporate headquarters was immediately moved to the beautiful Parisian building at 750 Lakeshore Parkway on the north side of Birmingham. By that time Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG) had already decided to implement the AdDept system at all divisions. Therefore, I never made a presentation or demo for Parisian.

I flew to Birmingham and installed the AdDept system in January of 1999. After that day I never laid eyes on the AS/400 or the system console. They were kept in a closet somewhere in the headquarters building. Parisian’s advertising department was located, if memory serves, on the second floor. PMG was on the ground floor. The AdDept users signed on through the network. TSI had nothing to do with the connectivity.

This was a very strange installation. The personnel in the advertising department were not like those that I encountered anywhere else. Aside from the Senior VP, almost everyone else at every level was female. Moreover, every time that I went there, there seemed to be a large number of new people who needed to learn how to use AdDept. Finally, a very high percentage of these women were strikingly good-looking and blonde, and almost all of them dressed much more stylishly than I had seen at any other location, including Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.2 At those two locations the executives and the people who dealt with customers dressed to kill, but those standards were not imposed on clerical workers.

From left: Kimberly Weld, Sally Carter and Cheryl Sides. Josh Hill from PMG is behind them.

I have found quite a few photos of the people at Parisian, and the names of the employees are indicated on some of them. I also have some notes beginning in 1999 that included more names. I have very clear memories of only two people, Cheryl Sides1, who was the official liaison for the AdDept system, and Sally Carter, the manager of the business office. Cheryl was there from the time of the installation up to the demise of the chain. Sally was replaced by Barry Cleavelin in 2001.

For the first year or so the Divisional VP was Alan Seitel5. The Senior VP for most of the period in question was Bob Ferguson, who came over from Younkers6. He was succeeded by Gary Yiatchos7.

Renita Lewis on the left with her back to the camera. Next, in order, are Diane Vogel, Cheryl Side, Kim Wolff, Regaye Fulcher, Annissa Kennedy, Kimberly Weld, Josh Hill, and Angela Dawkins.
David Dollar.

The people: I could hardly believe how many names were recorded in my notes or beside my photographs. I have almost no memories of any of these people. If my notes included a description of their role at the Parisian, I have included it in their entry in this list:

Diane (Vogel) Worthington’s LinkedIn photo.
  • It seems incredible that I remember nothing about Diane Vogel, who was the Advertising Director at Parisian from 1996 on. I must have had several meetings with her. Her LinkedIn page can be found here.
  • Kimberly Weld would have won the national title if there had been a Miss ROP Coordinator contest. Her LinkedIn page is here.
  • David Dollar was the Co-op Coordinator. I seem to remember that he kept a lot of food in his desk.
  • I think that Dottie Collins might have handled Co-op advertising before David Dollar. Her LinkedIn page is here, but it contains no useful information.
  • I mostly remember Kim Woolf as the other Kim. She might have been involved with direct mail I found her LinkedIn page here.
  • Regaye Fulcher sat next to Kim Woolf in one photo. She may have worked with or for her. Her LinkedIn page is posted here
  • Ginger Brown worked in direct mail.
  • Colin Mitchell (a woman) was in charge of insertion orders for the newspapers.
  • Karen Kennedy worked in the production side of direct mail.
  • In 2000 Kelley Carter was in charge of co-op.
  • The next year it was taken over by Mollie Donohue. Her LinkedIn page is here.
  • I met two new people on my last trip to Parisian in 2005. The first was named Justin Walker. I wrote, “Justin Walker, whose title is director of eBusiness, is, I think, the resident techy for the Parisian division.” His LinkedIn page is here.
  • The other newcomer in 2005 was Luann Carter who came from Proffitt’s I think that she was in charge of trafficking production jobs. Her LinkedIn page is here.
  • I remember nothing about any of the following people whose name I recorded at some point: Annissa Kennedy, Angela Dawkins, Renita Lewis, and Kelly Denney.
I am completely stumped as to why I do not remember Mollie.

The installation: This was one of TSI’s most frustrating installations. The only difficult thing that they asked for was Bob Ferguson’s calendar. They printed it on a Canon color copier that used Postscript rather than a version of PCL, the Hewlett-Packer language. I said that I would look into it, but I don’t think that we ever even quoted doing it.

This should have been an easy installation, but it wasn’t. They seemed to have difficulty getting even basic programs to work for them. Some of the problems were just bizarre. In 2000 I reported, “CHKFAXSTS doesn’t work on Colin’s Mac. No matter what option you put in, the program interprets it as a 4. This is one of the more bizarre problems that I have encountered.” CHKFAXSTS is an IBM program; no other AdDept user ever had any problem with it.

Renita and Sally.

In April of 2000 I described some of the other difficulties.

Saks Inc. is putting pressure on Sally Carter to use AdDept to do closings. She told Sandy that she doesn’t want to use it because she doesn’t think that it works. We helped her through some problems today with the P.O. accrual program. I should have gone over the closing programs with her in more detail when I was there, but there was just no time. Wednesday I found a bug that threw off the journal entry by $1 million. I fixed it easily, but we looked bad.

This is another face of our usual problem. I have spent an inordinate amount of time at Parisian providing basic 5250 training to people that do not use the system at all and never will. I have also spent a lot of time writing custom programs (mostly their funky advertising schedule) and more than a little time twiddling my thumbs. I have spent no time with Sally to speak of before the last trip. Most of that was spent getting the store allocations to work.

I also reported that in November of 2000 I was asked to train a whole new group of employees in a classroom setting. It did not go well at all:

Barry Cleavelin.

The people in my class on Friday – who seemed reasonably intelligent to me – retained absolutely nothing. Either I am a much worse teacher than I think that I am or people in this type of setting do not think that they are expected to remember anything.

When Barry replaced Sally, I needed to spend several days with him to help him get up to speed on the AdDept processes. During that period we discovered several things that had been handled incorrectly in the past.

Life in Birmingham: I did not hate Birmingham as much as I hated Jackson, MS, the home of McRae’s. Jackson made me feel angry and frustrated. In Birmingham I just felt uncomfortable.

My records indicated that I ate a lot of lunches at Cia’s, which was inside the Parisian building. I have no vivid recollections of any of them

Most evenings I picked up a sandwich at Schlotzsky’s Deli. I remember that I ordered the same thing every time. It might have been a Reuben; that was my most common order at a deli.

I distinctly remember eating at a small Italian restaurant inside a mall. Ordering was done at the counter. I asked for spaghetti and meat sauce. The man at the counter mumbled something that I could not understand. I asked him to say it again. He did, but I still had no idea what he was asking me. I just said, “Yes.” Twenty years later I still have no idea what I agreed to.

At least once Steve VeZain of PMG took me out to his favorite restaurant, Joe’s Crab Shack.

La Quinta.

For most of my visits I stayed in the nearby La Quinta. It seemed to cater mostly to golfers who came to play the courses on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail. The thing that I noted the most about them was that many of them wore leather shoes with no socks. I had never seen this before, and it struck me as being both uncomfortable and unsanitary.

After work I usually jogged five or six miles on paths up and down the highway that ran between the hotel and Parisian. It was not the greatest place to run. Not only was it a little dangerous, but the noise was also disturbing. I had to wear my Bose headphones while I listened to operatic music or instructional tape.

The La Quinta had a pool and a small hot tub. Both of them were outdoors. The first time that I stayed I was able to use the hot tub after my run undisturbed. On all subsequent occasions the hot tub was occupied by golfers. On my last visit I gave up on La Quinta and stayed at a Hampton Inn.

I wrote the following on November 9, 2000:

When I was in Portland early in the year I had enough time to change my clothes before taking the red-eye back to the east. I changed in an extremely cramped stall in the men’s room. When I got home I realized that I was missing one of my wing-tips. I must have left it in the stall. I never threw the remaining shoe away because I thought that I might be able to find the missing one somewhere. After a while I forgot about it.

I went to the store to buy a new pair of dress shoes. I did not want another pair of wing-tips, but the only reasonable ones I could find were wing-tips, so that is what I bought.

This morning I was congratulating myself on forgetting nothing more important than a t-shirt to wear running. I started to put on my shoes. Both of them were right shoes. I evidently picked up the extra shoe by mistake.

I had to make an emergency run to Walmart. It was an unpleasant experience, but I managed to find one pair of shoes that are reasonably dressy (i.e., not hiking boots) in my size. They were on sale for $12.97.

They would not take my new American Express card at Walmart for some reason. I have used it twice.

This store in Pensacola was formerly a Parisian.

Epilogue: In August of 2006 Belk8 purchased the Parisian stores. The management of the advertising was immediately moved to Belk’s headquarters in Charlotte, NC. The five northern stores were sold by Belk to Bon Ton. Some southern stores were closed immediately. The signage on the remaining ones was changed to the Belk nameplate in 2007. Three northern stores continued to operate under their original name until 2013.

1. My experiences working with Proffitt’s Inc. and PMG are detailed here.

2. Most of my trips to Parisian were after the holding company had changed its name to Saks Inc. in 1998. My theory is that the women who applied for jobs in that building, which was the corporate headquarters for Saks Inc., thought that they were applying for a job at Saks Fifth Avenue. Thus, many of those attracted might have envisioned a career at the famous luxury store. After they learned about the other divisions and the pedestrian jobs involved in managing retail, they moved on. This is all just speculation, but I know that the guys in PMG spent as much time upstairs as they could.

3. Cheryl’s last name was, according to the designations on the photos, Sides. However, I also found Sipes and Sykes in the notes. I am not sure what Cheryl did at Parisian beside act as liaison with TSI; she definitely was good at that. I searched the Internet using all three last names but found nothing.

4. I found nothing on the Internet about Sally Carter, Barry Cleavelin’s LinkedIn page can be found here.

5. Alan Seitel’s LinkedIn page is here.

6. The history of the AdDept installation at Younkers is posted here.

7. I met Gary Yiatchos when I flew to Seattle for the presentation of the AdDept system to the advertising department of the Bon Marché. That adventure is described here.

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

1996-2003 TSI: AdDept Client: Younkers

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Saks Inc. division based in Des Moines merged into Carson’s. Continue reading →

I am pretty sure that Younkers contacted TSI about AdDept before the company was absorbed into Proffitt’s Inc. I have a rather vivid memory—not to mention a photograph—of a presentation that I did for them at the IBM office in Des Moines. Since Proffitt’s purchased the company in December of 1996, the starting date in the title is probably accurate. It might have been in late 1995.

The downtown Younkers store was connected by skyways to other downtown buildings in two directions.

Doug Pease accompanied me on the first trip to Des Moines for the demo. We stayed at a Holiday Inn that was just north of the downtown area near Mercy Hospital.

I remember that we went to a basketball game at the Knapp Center on the evening of January 27, 1996. The Drake Bulldogs came into the game with a 6-2 record in the Missouri Valley Conference. However, they were defeated by the Tulsa Golden Hurricane1 79-73. Drake seemed to be a little better overall, but they had only one guy who could dribble through a press, and in the second half when the starter had to be benched because of foul trouble. The freshman (Cory Petzenhauser) whom they inserted at point guard was just humiliated. It was painful to watch.

That defeat started a tailspin for Drake, which ended up with a 12-15 record. The coach resigned in March

The only photo that I have of the people from Younkers was taken at the IBM office. The only person whom I recognize is Roger. He is the guy in glasses in the back row near one of the enormous members of his staff.

Des Moines is legendary as a sleepy town, but I remember that Doug and I actually discovered a bit of night life in an assortment of restaurants and bars that were in a redeveloped area between the river and Younkers’ downtown store at 713 Walnut Street.

The system was not actually installed at Younkers until April of 1998.

The primary players in the AdDept installation at Younkers were the Advertising Director, whose name I think was Joe, and Roger Wolf, who was in charge of the advertising business office.

The Tea Room at Younkers.

My recollections of the details of the installation are few. The headquarters was on an upper floor of the flagship store. The Senior VP of Advertising treated us to lunch in the store’s famous tea room. It was quite elegant.

I think that Younkers bought the AS/400 directly from IBM. I don’t remember where it was kept, and I don’t think that I was required to install it. TSI wasn’t involved in connecting the various devices either.

Roger and Joe came to Enfield for training. I remember that practically everyone in the department except for Roger’s group used Macs. We had to research the availability of terminal emulation software for them. Joe had some very specific ideas about tracking the progress of production jobs. TSI was asked to do quite a bit of customizing of the trafficking programs to realize them.

Long after I posted this entry I discovered this photo of a meeting at PMG in Birmingham. Roger is the second from the left in the shirt with vertical stripes. Steve VeZain of PMG is waving on the right. Beside him is someone named Chris from Younkers. He must have been in charge of the Mac network.

I was not there for the flooding of the Raccoon River in 2003, but some of its effects were still visible years later.

Roger’s group of four or five accounting people was tucked away in a small area that was like a mezzanine up some stairs from the rest of the department. The ceiling was low. Everyone sat in a single row facing the wall. It was very cramped and felt rickety.

Roger was as almost as skinny as I was, but two enormous women also worked up there. I could not help wondering if the support beams for their floor were up to the task. For me it was a hellish place to work. Two people had radios on all day long. One played heavy metal rock; the other was tuned to the rantings of Rush Limbaugh.

My notes from 1999 indicated a peculiarity in the way that Younkers did its accounting:

They have implemented a great many things that have the result of increasing the budget for storewide ads. Some of this is at the expense of merchants, some at the expense of vendors. Roger understands this, but he is not good at articulating it.

Some of these “great many things” were quite difficult to program. Several years after the beginning of the installation Roger’s group was still not using the system to the satisfaction of the corporate people at Saks Inc.2

The rest of Saks Inc. thinks that Roger is a fuddy-duddy and an obstructionist. The PMG3 approach to solving problems is to put pressure on people to solve their own problems. I think this is why Joe quit. They have put a lot of pressure on Roger to give up his overly intricate accounting procedures and get with the program.

At first I too thought Roger was an obstructionist. The last two trips he has made a strong effort to use AdDept. However, he won’t give up his calendar until he is confident that every single number in AdDept’s calendar can be defended. They now have the worst of both worlds. Roger does the calendar in AdDept. He checks every number by hand. Then he gets frustrated and goes back to his manual calendar.

Steve’s4 idea was to send Ivy5 to show Roger how McRae’s does thing. Roger, who is at least as intelligent as Ivy, understands how McRae’s does things. Ivy has no clue how Younkers does things. Another problem is that Ivy is even less articulate than Roger.

I don’t know what the solution is, but it has to come from someone above Roger. Most people think that they are going to fire him. This won’t solve the problem.

They did not fire Roger, but they did try to make him quit. Liz Ewing6 replaced him as manager of the business office, and Roger was demoted to accounting clerk.

On most of my visits I stayed at a hotel that was within walking distance of the Younkers building. My recollection is that it was a Radisson.7 It was very nice, and Younkers had a discount rate. The thing that I liked best about it was that it had a Jacuzzi that was seldom used by the other guests. I found a good park in which to run, and afterwards twenty minutes in the Jacuzzi felt fantastic.

I had several adventures traveling to and from Des Moines. On one afternoon I was flying from Chicago to Des Moines on United. A tornado that was passing through the area forced us to land in Cedar Rapids. The entire story is recounted here.

I made it to the scheduled meetings on time and worked with the users according to the original schedule. Just another day at the office.

The other adventure involved a stop in Kansas City to play golf with my dad. The details have been posted here.

I have two startling memories from Des Moines. The first came when I was working up in the advertising business office. One of the overweight ladies was regaling the rest of us with a tale of an acquaintance of hers who had a foot fetish. He offered to pay her to allow him to suck her toes.

The other one came from Joe, the original Advertising Director who resigned and then was replaced in 2000 by Kristen Gray8. A group of us was having lunch at a restaurant. The topic of conversation was the difficulty of handling teen-aged offspring. I, of course, offered nothing. Joe mentioned that he had once received a telephone call from the police when his daughter had driven a car into a mall. Evidently no one was hurt.

In 2003 Saks Inc. made Younkers part of its Northern division. The offices in Des Moines were closed, and all administrative functions were transferred to Milwaukee. The stores continued to operate with the Younkers name. In March of 2006 the entire division was sold to the Bon Ton.

The downtown Des Moines store was closed in 2005. In 2014 a huge fire consumed the empty building that I knew as the downtown Younkers store.

Any remaining Younkers stores were closed as part of the Bon Ton’s liquidation in 2018.

1. Evidently the coach in 1922 wanted to name the team the Golden Tornadoes, but he discovered that it was already taken by Georgia Tech. So, he changed it to Hurricanes. At lest that’s what it says here. Of course, hurricanes seldom, if ever, bother Tulsa. I don’t know why or when it was made singular.

2. As is explained here, after Proffitt’s Inc. purchased Saks Fifth Avenue, it changed its name to Saks Inc.

3. PMG stands for Proffitt’s Marketing Group, the people at the corporate headquarters in Birmingham who oversaw the advertising departments.

4. Steve VeZain was the person at PMG charged with monitoring the progress of the installations in the various advertising departments.

5. Ivy Klaras worked at McRae’s in the business office. The AdDept installation at McRae’s is described here.

6. Liz Ewing’s puzzling LinkedIn page can be viewed here.

7. There are no Radissons in downtown Des Moines in 2023, The hotel that I stayed in was either sold or destroyed.

8. Kristen Gray’s LinkedIn page is posted here.

1996-2000 TSI: AdDept Client: McRae’s

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Saks Inc. division merged into Proffitt’s. Continue reading →

McRae’s was a chain of department stores based in Jackson, MS. In 1994 the stores were acquired as a division of Proffitt’s,but the stores retained the original logo and were administrative from the headquarters in Jackson. Either the Senior VP, whose name was Oscar, or Marianne Jonas, the Advertising Director, got in touch with Doug Pease1, TSI’s Marketing Director. They were interested in TSI’s AdDept software system. Doug made the arrangements for a two-day visit.

Doug and I flew to Jackson, rented a car, and met with Oscar, Marianne, and a few other people in McRae’s advertising department. It was located not on a high floor of one of their stores but in a very large single-story structure immediately off of Highway (NOT “Route”) 80 on the southeast side of Jackson. It had a very large elegant lobby and a curious lack of open space anywhere else. There were a large number of walled-in areas. The corridors between them all ran north-south or east-west. It reminded me of a maze created for rodents.

Oscar advised us to drive west to I-220 and to approach IBM from the north.

At the end of the day spent gathering information about how they did business I asked Oscar for advice on how we should drive to the IBM office on the following morning. We were staying at a Holiday Inn or Hampton Inn in Pearl, which is just south of the airport. He outlined a route that, by my offhand calculation, would take us at least ten miles out of our way on a journey that was scarcely more than that in total. I asked him why we could not just go up I-55. He depicted that route as being “too congested”.

I was doing the driving. I informed Doug that we were going to ignore Oscar’s advice. I used the map that Avis provided to plan a simple route that took us north on I-55 until we came to the exit. To our surprise IBM’s office building was actually right on the exit ramp. It would have been almost impossible for us to find it if we had been coming from the north as Oscar suggested. Yes, there was a modicum of “congestion”. I had to brake a couple of times, but, believe me, driving in Jackson was much easier than navigating Boston’s snake nest of roads.

On the first visit Doug and I somehow had a free day after the presentation. We drove down to Jefferson Davis’s home, which is in Biloxi (pronounced BLUX ee locally) and is called Beauvoir. The drive down to Biloxi was stunning. I could not believe all of the rundown trailers and shacks that were visible from the highway.

The mansion itself was nothing special. There was an incredibly large tree in the yard that impressed me much more than anything inside,

So, the takeaway from this little journey was that the leader of the rebellion was allowed to spend the rest of his days living in luxury while the people whom he and his fellow plantation owners had enslaved and their descendants were still living in deplorable conditions. This was our welcome to Mississippi.

Oscar and Marianne liked our proposal and signed the contract. When I returned to Jackson to install AdDept I was escorted to the Data Center (in the same building as the Advertising Department) by a guy whose name was Bill Giardina. He pronounced it Gar DEE nah, with a hard G—as if the i was not even there. I really only needed for him to show me where the box and the system console were, but he stayed nearby and distracted me with homespun chatter all day long.

One evening Doug and I attended a minor league baseball game, probably on the installation trip. The Jackson Generals2 played a seven-inning game at their nice little stadium. I don’t remember the score or the opponents or even who won, but I do remember that we had a very nice relaxing time.

I remember only a little of what TSI needed to code for McRae’s. Oscar had an advertising schedule that he had devised on his PC. We had to produce the same data in roughly the same format. I don’t recall it being exceptionally difficult. We also needed to create an interface between AdDept’s expense and co-op programs and the corporate accounting system that was called Walker.

At Marianne’s insistence I trained two people from the IT department on how to check the backup to make sure that all the important libraries made it to tape every night. I don’t remember whether I tried to talk her out of entrusting people outside of her department with the responsibility for assuring the integrity of the backup. This became an important issue at Proffitt’s, as described here.

The people:I took photos of three people at McRae’s: Marianne, Melba Willis, her right-hand person, and Ivy Klaras3, who managed the accounting area. I don’t remember too much about Melba or Ivy.

  • Melba (nearest to camera) & Marianne
  • Melba at her desk.
  • Ivy.

I worked closely with Marianne both in Jackson and later at Proffitt’s in Alcoa TN. She was intelligent and a hard worker, a combination that I did not often encounter in the business that I dealt with in the South. She was also a big fan of the University of Alabama’s football team.

I got along pretty well with all of the people at McRae’s. This is what I reported in November of 1999:

I don’t like Jackson, but I like the people at McRae’s. I am even warming up to Ivy. This is the only division that is putting in a real effort to take advantage of as many aspects of the system as possible. They are printing claims4 in all media except broadcast. I made a few adjustments to the broadcast claims today. Tomorrow we will print broadcast claims.

On at least one occasion I bought boneless sirloin, green beans, sour cream, and McCormick’s Beef Stroganoff seasonings and made myself enough for two delicious meals in this kitchenette.

Life in Jackson: I have a lot of memories of Jackson. Most of them make me chuckle when they pass through my consciousness, but I never enjoyed my time there. My strategy for dealing with this very strange place was to leave the word “why” at home.

The drive to the Jackson airport was ridiculous. It was quite close to the city center, but unless you were a bird or had a jet pack, you had to drive several miles south to I-20, exit after a few miles, and then drive back north to the airport. At the end of the exit was a stop sign. From there you were forced to cross two lanes of southbound traffic (with no stop sign) to reach a roadway large enough for only one car in the median. From there one had to attempt to merge in with the traffic in the passing lane of the northbound highway.

Between the exit and the airport was a rotary. In all of the times that I visited Jackson I never saw any cars enter the rotary from the east or west.

When I was in the South I often went to Cracker Barrel for supper. I always ordered the same thing: pot roast with green beans and unsweetened iced tea. In Jackson the waitress came up to my table and greeted me with “How are y’all doin’?” Her pencil was poised over her pad.

I responded., “Fine. I’d like the pot roast with green beans and a large unsweetened iced tea.”

Her pencil was motionless. Instead she ventured this evaluation. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

I drove to Kmart one evening. This was before the advent of self-checkout machines. I was in line for a cashier; behind me was a young black woman with her son who was perhaps eight or nine. He tugged on my jacket and said, “Mister, if you were my daddy, would you let me have a Mountain Dew?”

I immediately responded, “Absolutely not. It’s full of sugar and caffeine!” It later occurred to me that that would probably be the last time ever that someone his age might think of me as a potential daddy rather than a granddaddy.

One evening I was at the Jackson airport a bit late for my flight to Atlanta. I checked in and rushed to the gate. To my joy and relief there was absolutely no line at security! I put my briefcase on the treadmill without taking out my computer. The one person on duty let me through. I barely made the plane, but it was even more surprising that I saw them load my suitcase into the cargo hold as well.

In this 2022 photo the bottle is the New-Skin.

After security got so much tighter after 9/11, I often thought how easy it would have been for me to have hidden a gun beneath my laptop.

The worst moment that I had in Jackson came when I was eating lunch with Josh Hill from Proffitt’s Marketing Group. I think that I was eating a turkey sandwich when the thing on the left side of my lower lip started to bleed. I don’t remember if I had my bottle of New-Skin with me. I do recall that I spent the rest of the lunch break in the men’s room until Old Faithful finally blew itself out.

Epilogue: In 2000 the administration of the McRae’s and Proffitt’s stores was consolidated. The accounting and data processing functions remained in the building on Highway 80. Most other functions were transferred to the Proffitt’s headquarters in Alcoa, TN. Marianne Jonas moved to Proffitt’s, where she was the Advertising Director. I don’t think that anyone else with whom I worked in Jackson made the transition to Alcoa.

The story of the AdDept installation at Proffitt’s is posted here.

1. Much more about Doug can be read here and in many of the entries for other AdDept clients.

2. The team name was voted on by the citizens of Jackson. They picked “Generals” to honor the person after whom the town was named, Andrew Jackson. Why they chose Generals over Presidents is a stumper. Jackson’s greatest military victory was the Battle of New Orleans, which actually occurred after the war was over. He had two full terms as president and strongly influenced American history in that role.

Although some sites on the Internet state that the Generals began playing in 1998, the statistics for the team in 1996 can be found here. I was astounded to discover that a factory-sealed complete set of the baseball cards for the 1996 team could in 2023 be purchased on Ebay for only $7.95. I was tempted to buy the one remaining set as a present for Doug. The site is (or at least was) here.

3. Ivy Klaras died in 2017 at the age of 52. Her obituary is posted here.

4. Claims are the documents that advertising sends to the merchandise people to show the amount of money they must collect from their vendors for cooperative advertising.

1998-1999 TSI: AdDept Client: Herberger’s

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Proffitt’s Inc. division in St. Cloud, MN. Continue reading →

Herberger’s (known locally as Herbie’s) was a chain of department stores arrayed across the northern tier of the Midwest. It was the last Saks Inc. division to employ the AdDept system to manage its advertising. Prior to 1997 it was apparently an employee-owned company and, at least according to an article posted here, a wonderful place to work. The writer speculated that Herberger’s went downhill rapidly after it was acquired by the company then known as Proffitt’s Inc.

The Herberger’s on St. Germain St. in St. Cloud was still unoccupied in 2023.

One of the moves that occurred shortly after the acquisition was the direction by Proffitt’s Marketing Group (PMG) to install TSI’s AdDept system in the advertising department on an upper floor (there were only three floors) of the flagship store in St. Cloud, MN.

I visited St. Cloud a total of three times in 1998 and 1999. I found only a few notes and two photographs to help me remember the experience. Furthermore, I cannot recall the names of most of the people with whom I worked, and I was unable to find any references on the Internet. So, this account will mostly depend upon my increasingly unreliable memory.

The purposes of my first trip to St. Cloud were to install the AdDept system on the AS/400 that had been purchased from and installed by IBM and to train the people who would be responsible for setting up the tables and entering the ads. St. Cloud is north of the Twin Cities, just far enough away to be considered an independent city. On that first occasion I flew Northwest Airlines from Bradley to the very nice Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. I then took a long hike to my connecting flight, At the time1 a regional company flying with a Northwest flight number made the trip back and forth several times a day. I described it in one of my emails to Denise Bessette:

We boarded for St. Cloud at 8:20. We rode on a seatless bus to the plane. Then we sat on the plane for a while. Then we taxied for a while. We left at 9:05. We arrived at St. Cloud at 9:22. 45 minutes on the ground; 17 in the air.

On the subsequent trips I just rented a car at the airport in Minneapolis and drove to St. Cloud.

On all of my visits I stayed at a hotel2 that was only a couple of blocks from Herbie’s. I walked there and used the employees’ entrance from the parking lot behind the store.

Anne Hof.

I think that Josh Hill from PMG was present for all of my visits. PMG owned the system and insisted that there would be no custom programming. This made it extremely difficult for the president of a company with “Tailored” in its name. It came at a time when our programming staff was up to its armpits in alligators; that was good. However, for the first time in my life I knew that I sometimes could not provide what the client wanted or, sometimes, even what they needed.

Al DeCamillis and Christie Vierzba in the training room.

The people: I have pictures of three Herbie’s employees: Al DeCamillis3, the Business Office Manager, Christie Vierzba3, the Direct Mail Manager, and Anne Hof. I remember little or nothing about Christie, Ann, and the other workers in the department.

I think that Al was hired between my first and second trip. He was eager to use AdDept for all of the accounting, but he could not use it for his closing. The method he used was “closing to plan,” which meant that the expenses and income that he reported to corporate accounting always matched the planned amount to the penny. The offsetting entry was to a slush account. Evidently this was what he had always done. It meant that the monthly figures in every advertising account were, for purposes of analysis, worthless. No one could ever determine from the general ledger where too much or too little was spent.

My life in St. Cloud: My first visit to Herbie’s was an eye-opener. By that time I had visited the headquarters of twenty or more retailers. Each was either a free-standing structure or the upper floors of a huge store. Herbie’s was indeed in an upper story of a store, but although the building occupied the entire 600 block on St. Germain Street, it was only two or three stories high. It would never have been considered as a setting for a movie about a department store. It was just a store with departments. It even had a good-sized parking lot. The town itself had a much more Midwestern feel than any that I had been in.

I have remarkably few memories of my time in St. Cloud. I cannot remember any restaurants. My only recollection of the hotel was that there was definitely an iron and an ironing board in my room.

Not much of great note or interest actually happened either in the store or in the town while I was there. By far the most memorable event for me was the stress that I underwent while worrying about what was happening back in Enfield. That tale has been related here.

The location for one very unusual event involving Herbie’s occurred during one of my visits to Birmingham. It has been described here.

The logo that was used after the move to Milwaukee.

Epilogue: The installation at Herberger’s was not a happy one for anyone. In 2000 Saks Inc. decided to transfer the administration of the stores to Carson’s in Milwaukee. The jobs for 260 administrative employees in St. Cloud were eliminated. The stores retained the Herberger’s name but they also replaced the flower with a circle of red hexagons that Carson’s displayed on all of its stores. Eventually Carson’s was renamed the Northern Division. It was then sold to the Bon Ton in 2005. By 2017 all of the Herberger’s stores were closed. In 2023 there were still rumors that the brand might be resuscitated, but I found no evidence that any Herberger’s stores had been reopened.

1. In 2023 the only flights to and from the St. Cloud Regional Airport connected the town with Mesa AZ, Punta Garda FL, and Laughlin NV.

2. It was not part of a chain then. I think that it might be a Marriott Courtyard in 2023.