Ames' E-Commerce operations

[Retail_247]

I remember seeing a post on their forum years ago (which I currently cannot find) about how Ames wouldn't survive today's retail climate due to them "simply not being prepared" for the e-commerce business.

While that may or may not be true (as we'll never actually know) I figured that I should shed some light at their actual attempt earlier on in the new century.

"Ames tried many approaches. In-store kiosks were a bust. Kiosks in 20 stores over three months yielded only one customer a day. Third-party links with other sites stole traffic. Co-branding offered more control but limited income.

Tapping Ames' database of 3 million names, taken from its stores and the Amesmeds.com online pharmacy, was key. The AmesPlace.com site currently attracts 1 million visitors a month."

Quotes from a news report about JCPenney and Ames' e-commerce attempts, from September of 2000:

https://www.dmnews.com/ecommerce-presents-different-challenges-for-penney-and-ames/


Ames did have an online drug store (Amesmeds.com), which I find odd considering the fact that none of their actual physical store locations (that I know of) even had a pharmacy department.

The article also mentions AmesPlace.com, which from the few poorly archived pages that exist on the Wayback machine, looks more like a web directory of sorts, where it just lists other stores, rather than being an actual e-commerce site.

I feel like if Ames lasted a lot longer, there's a small chance that they would've gotten the whole e-commerce thing right.

Also, did anyone work at the stores with one of those 'kiosks' and can provide any information about them?

[TheFugitive]

I left Ames in 1992, long before eCommerce or kiosks were a thing.  That would have happened around the time of the Hills acquisition and the second bankruptcy.

I am not surprised that the kiosks got little use as the core Ames customer (mature female, small town or rural, modest income) would not have been too tech-savvy at that time.

I recall a module in my management training manual about policies for stores containing a pharmacy, but I had never seen one in my travels through PA-OH-MI.  Perhaps they had them in New England.

Ames would have had to become proficient in eCommerce in order to survive as the 21st. Century moved on.  Likely they would have just farmed that out to some third-party tech integrator as lots of other companies did.

One company I worked for that WAS fully prepared to succeed in eCommerce in the mid-90's was Service Merchandise.  We had amazingly advanced tech systems for that time.  I could log in to our AS-400 green screens and tell you how many of an item I had in stock, how many the other stores in town had, how many were in a store 800 miles away, etc.  I could have one put aside and held it under your name.  I could have taken your credit card info and had it shipped to your home.  Their IT and fulfillment systems were really top-notch (although at the time we experienced the same situation as Ames in that few customers seemed to use our Silent Sam kiosks). All that was needed was to hook Service Merchandise's back end to an internet webfront, and be off to the races.

Many tech-savvy managers in the company were screaming that we should do this.  It never happened.  Largely because our CEO, Raymond Zimmermann, did not think it would work (many thought he dismissed it principally because it was not his idea).  We did a small-scale pilot project which failed, and many people thought that Zimmermann wanted it to fail.  Dumb decision.  We could have been Amazon.

[Retail_247]

I recall a module in my management training manual about policies for stores containing a pharmacy, but I had never seen one in my travels through PA-OH-MI.  Perhaps they had them in New England.

I found some old newspaper articles via Newspapers.com about Ames' apparent physical pharmacy locations.
They all appear to be in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Delaware. The pharmacies were closed shortly after their first bankruptcy it seems, with the prescription files being sold to competitor Giant Eagle shortly thereafter:

https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-baltimore-sun-ames-department-store/161555121/
https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/143385344/?match=1&terms=Ames%20pharmacy