Me And Software Etc.

 My friend and another former Daynoter David Farquhar has a post up about Babbages, one of the three big software retailers (the other two being Egghead and Software Etc.) in the 90s.  My history with Software Etc. was, well, kinda brief.  Like many of my previous jobs.

I had been in college, working towards a degree in Math, Computer Science, and Business.  Unfortunately, I had not been able to get into the classes I needed to finish my degree before I ran out of money, so I went to work at Wendy's.  I started out as a grill closer, which was where they started most of the guys.  I don't say this because I'm sexist, but because back in the late 1980s, it was pretty much assumed guys would have the upper body strength to clean the grill, the fryers (including the chicken pressure fryer) and other things.  Yes, there were women who could do the job, but working in Wendy's back in those days, a closing crew in our area was typically a manager, who was often during the week a crew chief, not a real manager (the difference being crew chiefs were hourly, managers were salary), a front register person who handled the front room, a sandwich person who did the sandwich board and the dining room/guest spaces, the grill closer who closed the grills and the fryers, and the back register person, who had to be the hardest-working person in the close.  They handled the drive through register, closed the salad bar, which meant refilling the crocks for the openers, dumping out the expired crocks, washing every dish in the place, and ... well, yeah, all of that.

I started out as a grill closer, and because I was willing to work any time of the day, I eventually did opens, mids, and closes.  And got promoted to crew chief.  After an entire summer closing Tuesday through Saturday three out of four weeks, and one week Monday through Friday, because a manager had to do month-end books.  Then a management position opened up, my store manager had faith in me, and ran me up the flagpole.  The district manager, who liked my work (she'd highlighted one of my Saturday Night Inventory worksheets and sent it out to all the other locations as a "should look like this" example), so I went to another store as manager.  And found a girlfriend.

Because she was going to graduate in June, and wanted to move to the Twin Cities, I started talking to my district manager about open management positions there.  And there weren't any.  So I started making a list.  

I knew retail.  Before going to work for Wendy's, I'd worked construction and retail, and wanted to work with computers, so I started by sending unsolicited resumes to every computer software retailer in the Twin Cities.  It was about $60 in postage, and not one single response.  So I took a huge leap of faith and quit my Wendy's job and moved in with my girlfriend in the Cities.  And kept pounding the pavement looking for a job.  After probably a dozen interviews, I got one at the Software Etc. in Edina.

The Edina store was in the basement of Southdale, which means it was in the original enclosed mall.  There were many open-air malls in the country, many of them called "downtown" but Southdale was an entirely new animal.  In my home town, we had "Crossroads" which was a mall with a J. C. Pennys on one end, and a Sears on the other.  While I was in college, the mall went through a major expansion, and they added a Daytons, a Target, and a few other things.  Southdale was an entirely different scale.  Three levels, from basement to the top floor, didn't capture all of it.  The basement included a below-grade drive-through garage, big enough for semis and garbage trucks to drive through.  On several occasions, I drove under the mall, picked up merchandise, and transferred it to other locations.\

The Sofftware Etc., in Edina was the second store Software Etc., opened, but it was the first stand-alone.  Upstairs was a B. Dalton's, which was where the whole Software Etc. Idea started - though not in Edina.  It actually started in a collection of retail locations in downtown Minneapolis.  A collection of many retailers, nearly all of which are now gone, was called "City Center".  It had restaurants, walk-past food stands (sort of the 80s era equivalent of Food Trucks), along with many major retailers gathered together and connected by skyways.  The B. Dalton in City Center had a corner "Software Etc." location that was considered store 1 in our system.  When I interviewed, and got hired, we had just opened a store on fifth avenue in New York (Before Apple Did), and the Edina and Fifth Avenue stores ran neck and neck for the highest sales in the company.  

At the time, we had something like ten stores in the Twin Cities area, plus one in Duluth.  I'd worked at the Edina store for a few weeks when the Minnetonka store needed an assistant manager, the previous manager left, so the assistant got promoted.  I interviewed with the district manager, Dan Lauer, and two days later got offered the job.  

Momma raised no fools (well, I wasn't, anyway), so I accepted the job.  And I very very quickly learned that my new store manager was a young fellow a little older than me, with very little life experience - he'd graduated high school, gone to work for a local computer retailer, building computers, got very good at building and troubleshooting basic computer problems, and decided to go into retail.  So I was often the adult in the room when our staff came to us with problems.  After a while I was the one doing the schedule, because he was very frustrated in having to fit all of the people into all of the spaces around all of their requests.  My experience doing it for Wendy's served me well, and I also took over a lot of interviewing and setting up displays.  We were located between a Target and a Byerly's, which is a high-end grocer.  

A few weeks after Christmas, when we did, well, so-so on our sales (we weren't the worst, we missed our numbers by about 2%, which was closer than most of the other stores), an on-line service called Prodigy came to town.  In the 1980s there were a few can't-miss organizations that people considered safe investments.  IBM was one of the biggest names in computers in part because of the IBM PC, and because, well, to that point, no one ever got fired for buying IBM hardware.  AT&T was a telecommunications giant, cell phones were on the horizon but AT&T hadn't yet started to build their wireless network.  CBS, the news network, was a bit of an odd partner, as was Sears Roebuck, but then again, most of the younger readers may never have known a time where an Amazon web site was actually a printed catalog.  I can still vividly remember the day that the Sears Roebuck Christmas catalogs would arrive at our house.  There was the 3" thick "big" catalog with pretty much all of the clothes, shoes, furniture, appliances, tools, car parts, and anything else they sold - except for toys.  The small catalog, known as the "Wish Book" was about an inch thick, and the front section was "occasion clothes" - though yes, they did have socks and underwear.  The back half of that book was all toys.  I still remember my mom telling us Christmas lists were always a book, a toy, and something to wear - though we usually got a little more than that.  

But back to Prodigy, it was a real attempt at a national on-line network for computers.  And what really worked for me was one of the new Prodigy reps in town was an old friend of mine from High School.  She was just learning the job, and so was I, and the task at hand was how to promote their product.  One of the comments that they made was people had built displays out of prodigy boxes, they were bright yellow and orange and pink, so they were pretty eye-catching.  

I decided, what the heck, they were square, I asked for a bunch of flattened boxes to use to build a castle.  It was almost six feet tall, about four feet square, tape, staples, and thin cardboard boxes; and it won their competition in the state for best display.  Which won me a Minnesota Twins Warmup Jacket I hope I still have somewhere.  

It did a lot of other things for me, but that was still in the future, then.  After we did much better our second Christmas, I was starting to chafe a bit in my role.  Which was good timing.  

About halfway through January, 1990, we got a call.  I'd opened, my boss had come in at 2 pm because he had to close one night a week, but I answered the phone.  It was my district manager.  He knew I was living in Richfield, a southern Minneapolis suburb, and Minnetonka was a western suburb, but I'd likely go through Eden Prairie on my way home.  When I worked in Edina, I learned that the headquarters for B. Dalton and Software Etc. was located about a mile from Southdale in an office park.  Most of the executives lived in the southwest corner of the Twin Cities in a suburb called Eden Prairie.  It had one of the newer malls in town, with a very new Software Etc.  

The Eden Prairie Mall's Software Etc. had sixteen-foot-tall windows and looked over the food court.  If you're thinking you might have heard of the mall before, it may be because in 1991, Kevin Smith shot Mallrats there.  That was after my time.

The phone call was because the store manager of Eden Prairie was no longer with the company, the district manager needed someone to close the store.  I volunteered.  I told him I'd get there as soon as possible, hung up, and let my boss know.  "Let's make sure you get the store" he said, and got on the phone as I was leaving.   

I got to the store, and Mr. Lauer asked me to start thinking about those display windows, and what I would do.  I looked at what was there.  We had these silly sort of little display tables that were basically two-by-two foot panels with a + groove in the top.  Interlocking panels would slide together in a + shape, which let you place another panel on top.  We'd usually use three of the flat panels to make a tower, and then display books or software or accessories in each of the corners.  There were four tables set up in the window, which was visually pretty boring.

"Well, Microsoft has a new version of flight simulator coming out next month.  I'd probably take a trip home to St. Cloud, grab a couple of my airplane models, some fishing line, buy some cotton balls, and make some clouds, hang the models, and put a few posters up for Flight Simulator."  I never got an interview, I got told "ok, here's the keys, it's your store."

Which turned out to be a blessing and a curse.  

The store was almost fully staffed, though I did lose two guys early on because they were close friends of the former manager.  One of the guys who quit was the assistant manager who had just been promoted and was only part-time.  So I had to fill the assistant manager position, and I chose a man who really didn't fit the role.  The things you learn when you're young are often helpful, but you might learn a little too late.  In my case, I'd come to a decision to let the assistant manager go when he came in and told me his wife had been diagnosed with a remission of her breast cancer.  Being I was getting close to getting married, I was a bit... susceptible  I expect he figured that.  

But in 1990, we were seriously in trouble.  When I walked through that door, we were about ten days away from ending the first quarter of the fiscal year, which had started the previous November.  If you know retail, there's the whole Christmas selling season, which is where most stores make a majority of their sales.  When I looked at the sales figures, we were almost 31% below our expected sales for the year.  Which meant we had done a little over 69% of what was expected.  So we were pretty much toast for the rest of the year. 

When I got my display windows filled and a bit more visual interest in the front of the store, which was pretty easy, as I could reach out to the various software publishers, most of whom stopped in my store, and I asked for visual stuff.  I got special access because Edina was often difficult to get to, but we were pretty close to one of the mall's exterior doors, and right over the food court.  So anyone looking to show off a store wanted to bring them to Eden Prairie, which was a bit of a sore point with the district manager, because it wasn't often a showcase.

But I had another group of clients that I couldn't let down.  About halfway between my wife's office and the mall, I'd pass the corporate offices of Northgate Computer.  If you were looking at IBM clones in the 1980s/early 1990s, Northgate was the Dell of the day.  Their keyboards were Dr. Pournelle's favorites, their machines were a good solid clone that did well.  As I built the visual interest and the software in the store, I started getting Northgate engineers swinging through on their lunch hours for updates magazines, software, and other things.  I remember selling one of the first games on CD (Wing Commander) to a Northgate engineer who said he wanted to use it to test one of their new systems, which was going to include a CD-ROM drive in the base configuration.

I had many conversations with Northgate people back in the day.  One of the conversations I remember was when I asked an engineer "what's the best system to get?"  He replied "anything shipping is obsolete."  That's stuck with me to today.  Which is longer than Northgate lasted.  But there was more to do.  And then I got smart.  

After filling some open staff positions, I talked with my new guys, and one of them was very much an Amiga fan.  When I'd worked in Edina, the store manager there had a fund the district and regional managers had authorized to order new Macintosh titles.  He was a big Apple user, and we had many Mac users come into the store looking to special order software.  I didn't have that kind of budget, but what I did have was a microfiche.  We were a computer software retailer, not a computer process retailer, so we used the old school methods.  Which was where I got smart.  

My wife worked about 3 miles from the mall, so on days i had to open, I'd drop her at her office, then go to the mall.  I'd be there before 8 am, we didn't open until 9, so I could do a once-over of the store's close, then pour over the microfiche.  It listed all of the software we had in our warehouse, which was about ten miles from my store, in south Bloomington, Minnesota.  I could make a list of SKUs and then send an email (we did have that) to the correct address and they would send what I asked for if it was still in the warehouse.

This was the method I used to pull interesting titles, like Microsoft Flight Simulator, and other packages.  I started grabbing anything that looked interesting in the Amiga titles, and started buying and reading Amiga magazines for more information.  I was able to build our Amiga clientele and sales, but it also helped me pull off a few more good moves.  When Microsoft released Windows 3.1, I got ahead of the inventory system and ordered 18 copies of Windows 3.1 in the high-density 5.25" disks, and an even dozen in the 3.5" disk.  

What happened was I got what I ordered, some of the local stores got shorted because I'd asked for more than they thought I'd sell.  I had to transfer out five copies, total, but at the end of the day, I had sold everything on the shelf.  So I stayed on top of the inventory, including selling a number of Amiga 500s, the only computers we did sell.

During the summer of 1990, we had really turned around our sales, which was a blessing and a curse.  When the corporate bigwigs had great new ideas, we got dragged in.  So I was standing in my store in May of 1990, it was full of corporate buyers and representatives from Nintendo, Sega, and NEC.  We were talking about video game systems, which weren't something we had much experience with, but it sounded like that was probably going to change.  I was asked about NEC and their Turbografx systems, which sounded pretty cool.  I'd told them I had a little experience when I was in Southdale, as we'd seen a video game system that was going to be able to emulate any video game system, and the games would be in cartridges just like the older Nintendo systems.  The Nintendo guys weren't too impressed with us, but they were talking about a hand-held system they had coming up.

In about two hours, it became apparent that the big old display next to my cashwrap area was going to get dedicated to a video game display with empty boxes - our stock would be kept in locked cases to insure it wasn't stolen.  And we had to complete and report our inventory numbers daily.

As they were leaving, a few of the NEC reps stuck behind.  The rest of them were heading to the food court, but they wanted to know what they could do.  "Look, I've got a TV with a built-in VCR over there, it automatically repeats, if we had some sort of video sample, it would be great, but please, don't use 'Ice Ice Baby' - that was in last year's video."  

I was tracking our sales, reporting them to my district manager as required, and things were really starting to look up.  Our controllable numbers were good, our sales were fantastic.  Then I got close to my wedding.  And we had the Gulf War - the first one.  Back when Iraq invaded Kuwait.

My photographer for our wedding was a close friend who was an army reservist, who was potentially going to be recalled for duty.  We also had a lot of other stresses coming up, and then things got even weirder.  I had parents coming in looking for ways to assure their kids that their older brothers and sisters in the military were going to be safe.

Mind you, there were situations I'd encountered in Minnetonka that left me shaking my head.  I had a woman come into the store with her son.  She had a floppy disk that her son had saved his homework on, they didn't have a printer at home, she'd taken the disk to work, but had not been able to open the document.  We had a number of file recovery tools, and I saw a good chance for a sale.  We went over to the computer stand where I had a Mac, a PC, and an Amiga, and I sat down behind the PC.  I loaded the file recovery disk in one drive, and once it was running, removed the disk and put the customer's disk in the drive - we didn't have hard drives yet.

The computer reported the disk was unreadable.  I opened the drive up and pulled out the disk.  I looked at it for damage.  "so when you saved the document to the disk, what did you do next?"  The kid said "I gave it to Mom so she could take it to the office to print it."  I turned to her.  "I put the disk on the fridge so I'd remember it when I grabbed my lunch."  The kid looked at his mom "Did you use a magnet?"  "How else would it stick to the fridge?"  Both her son and I shook our heads.  

"What did I do wrong?"  After the short explanation of magnetic media, I offered to write a quick note for the teacher, and the mom said "I'll do one too."   

But Eden Prairie was different.  About two days after one particularly memorable encounter, a couple of corporate folks came into the store with reporters.  The reporters were looking to do news stories about the upcoming war and what software might have anything to do with it. At the time, we had a couple of combat flight simulators, including a stealth-fighter simulator.  I'd sold one to a woman who's younger son was worried about his older brother, a Navy pilot.  The reporter wanted me to go on-camera, but me, my district manager, and the corporate communications folks all thought that was a bad idea.  So I avoided the cameras.

We built up to the start of the actual ground war, and I was getting closer to my wedding, until October 9th, my father's birthday.  I was excited to get to work because we were going to be flying out to Denver in a few days, and I had been informed by my district manager that my store was doing spectacularly well.  Our video game sales were more than expected, and our regular sales had reached the point where, in mid-September, we were not only going to make our annual sales goal, we were going to exceed it by 31% - the best over-projected performance in the company for stores open more than 3 years.  

I was waiting for the stoplight to turn green, it did, and I proceeded through the intersection.  Literally at the moment I was in the intersection, a white 1991 Pontiac Grand Am ran it's red light and hit the rear of my new 1990 Tempo.  I spun and bounced off the front of a 1989 Cadillac El Dorado.  Yeah, all fairly new cars.  And the woman who hit me told the police officer "I couldn't see the color of the light, the sun was behind it, so I sped up."  My car was driveable, as was the Cadillac.  The engine had come off the mounts of the Grand Am, so I limped to work, then called my wife to let her know.  

To make a long, messy story short, I drove to St. Cloud where we bought the Tempo, the dealer gave us a Taurus Wagon loaner, and I got back to the Twin Cities.  The following Thursday, I missed my first flight of my life, but a helpful agent at the airport was able to book me on the second flight to Denver that day, I waited at the airport, and flew to the Denver Conference with all of the executives who knew me.  I explained the situation, and so when we got to Denver, instead of riding the bus to the hotel, I rode in a limo with some of the executives.

After checking in and getting to my room and attending the conferences, the next day, we got to tour various "hospitality suites" put on by software retailers.  After a session or two, I noticed people carrying NEC Turbografx boxes.  I thought it was an "empty box promotion" where they'd put various marketing material in a box.  Then I got to the NEC suite, their national rep pointed at me and started his presentation with "this is all his fault.  He said you guys needed a way to show off what our system can do, so we're giving you each a NEC Turbografx."  And they did.  So I had that on my conscience, at least, until dinner that evening.  

I'd often read John Dvorak, along with Jerry Pournelle and other columnists.  My assigned seat was towards the back of the banquet room but I could recognize Mr. Dvorak from his magazine picture.  "The Sega Genesis folks want you to reach under your chairs.  If you have a sheet like this, take a look."  I couldn't see what was on his sheet, but on the bottom of my chair, was a page with the Sega Genesis logo.  "The Sega Folks will ship everyone who finishes this form tonight a Genesis to their store.  It's for your marketing use from now until Christmas, then it's yours."  All because the NEC folks had generated so much excitement from their giveaway.

So I got home Sunday afternoon, worked Monday through Wednesday, then headed to Iowa for the wedding.  Got married on Saturday, opened our gifts on Sunday, then left Iowa early on Monday, arrived home in Burnsville, and pulled another bonehead move.  As I was finishing up with unloading the wedding gifts, I locked the keys for our loaner in the car in the underground garage.  We found a mobile locksmith who could let us in, but needed us to pay via credit card because he needed the money for gas.  "If I pay you in cash, would that work?"  He came, unlocked the car, and we were 3 hours late in getting out of town, heading 5 hours north to our honeymoon on the North Shore.

We came back home after a week, i went back to work, and it was nearly Halloween.  I was closing on Halloween, so that afternoon I ran upstairs in the mall to Target and picked up a couple of cheap bags of candy.  I paid for it out of my own pocket because I was still behind on my e-mail, and there had been a new petty-cash policy implemented at the conference, we were going to get emailed the details, and I hadn't seen them yet.  So Halloween night, we handed out candy and had another huge sales day, the last of the 199 Fiscal year.  

I opened the next morning, and of course, there was the policy, and a note I'd missed from my regional manager ordering us NOT to pay for halloween candy or decorations out of petty cash, and not to give out candy.  So when the store opened and my district manager came in, I new we were going to have a conversation.  Fortunately, I was able to tell him all about the wedding, and other things that had gone on, so when the candy conversation started, I showed him my candy receipt, and explained that it was not petty cash, but my own pocket, that paid for the candy, I'd done it the previous year when there was no policy (and paid for it out of my pocket in Minnetonka), and then I showed him our sales.  

"We really need to rethink that policy" he said after seeing we had tripled our expected sales figure.  "Maybe you got something."

So when I was informed I'd be getting a bonus, I had to follow through.  I told my staff that if they were still employed when I got my bonus, I would pay them a share that would be based on half of the bonus, which I would pro-rate based on their percentage of hours worked during the previous year.  I took everyone who was still there, totalled their hours worked, and then worked out the percentage.  They got that, then out of the other half, I bought a "dorm fridge" and microwave for our back room so they could bring their own meals, they didn't need to buy food in the food court.  So yeah, I gave up more than half of "my" bonus to my co-workers, but let's be flat out honest - I couldn't have done it without them.  

Those were the high point of my time with Software Etc.  Six weeks after the wedding, my father-in-law, who had suffered many stokes over the years, passed away suddenly.  We had to get to Iowa for the funeral, then back to Minneapolis for work.  My wife was able to catch a ride home for Christmas to her mother's with a friend, I was going to drive down after my Christmas Eve shift - or was, had my car failed to start after getting it back from the shop and the accident.  So I flew to Iowa, borrowed my brother-in-law's car to get back home, he got a ride back up here, we got him his car because ours was working, and the morning after Christmas, my store was just not in the shape it needed to be, my assistant manager had let me down.  It was only about a month later I was given the choice to either quit, or take an assistant manager at another store to prepare to open a new one in a new location, if things worked out.

I decided to take the assistant manager position, got transferred back to Edina, and then, about three weeks later, was interviewed for a job outside of retail.  It was the same pay rate I'd been getting as a store manager, but it also offered a company car.  So that worked out.