Jamesway.

I didn’t step foot into a Jamesway until 1980. I was 11 years old at the time as I believe it was spring 1980. It was grand opening week of the Jameway store in Oswego, New York.

Prior to this grand opening week I had known this location, and another store on Arsenal Street in Watertown, N.Y. as “Welcome to the Wonderful World of Westons”, as the sign proclaimed as you walked into Westons Department Store.

Westons was a regional chain in Upstate New York that went bankrupt and was sold to Jamesway in late 1979.

I remember both the Oswego and Watertown Westons stores having Sweda cash registers with inventory recording capabilities, using the punch tape method found at other department store chains such as Ames and Zayre. After my hometown’s Ames opened I paid closer attention to the Sweda registers at Westons, they worked the same way except they used two-digit department numbers instead of the three-digit class numbers used at Ames. I don’t remember if Westons had the “double-pass” numbering of certain items, where the cashier entered a merchandise number without an amount and then followed with the department number and the amount of the item being purchased. I do, however, remember that some of the Sweda registers at Westons were “Power Penny” machines, where the cents row of amount keys could all trigger the motor, whereas others were not and the cashier had to hit the big black motor bar after hitting the department and amount keys.

When Jamesway opened up in the Westons locations in both Oswego and Watertown, they used the same registers Westons had left behind. This was easily discerned by the fact that the receipts had a blob of ink where the Westons store branding had once appeared and you could vaguely make out the word “Westons”, as if the logo stamp had been covered over with tape.

Original Jameway stores opened up in the 1970s used NCR Class 5 cash registers at the checkouts. The last mechanical cash registers made by NCR, they were also the most sophisticated. Like the Sweda registers used at the former Westons stores, the NCR Class 5 registers punched an optical tape to be read by IBM mainframes located elsewhere. Here’s a Jamesway receipt from an NCR Class 5 register.

Jamesway used two digit department numbers and it wasn’t long before the stores were converted to the IBM 3680 Programmable Store System. I have been racking my brain trying to remember if Ames switched first and Jamesway followed or vice-versa. I’m inclined to think that Jamesway made the move to IBM 3683/3684 registers, but they used the lower model keyboard. There were fewer buttons on the keyboard and the “0” key was to the left of the numeric keypad instead of under the 1-2-3 row. The slash key was located above the zero key, adjacent to the 7-8-9 row.

After the move to the IBM system, Jamesway’s receipts showed a two digit number, followed by a slash mark, followed by the SKU, and then the amount. I intently watched a cashier input this information during a sale, trying to determine if they used the slash key for this input and they did not. There was a department and a separate SKU key to the right of the numeric keypad. The best I can tell, the version of the IBM software they were using was almost identical to the earlier IBM 3650 Retail Store System which ran on older IBM 3651 registers.

Having never been in a non-Westons Jameway before the opening of these locations in Upstate New York, I have no way of knowing if Jamesway may have been running the older IBM systems in their legacy stores.

When I was in college in 1986 I visited the relocated Jamesway store #1 in Lakewood, New York. Jamesway #1 had originally been further out Fairmount Avenue before relocation. Situated in the former JCPenney space in the Chautauqua Mall, this new location too ran the IBM 3683 registers I had seen replace the Sweda registers in Oswego and Watertown. Like those stores, that incarnation of Jamesway #1 was running with the lower model keyboard on the 3683s. I can not find a receipt from this implementation anywhere on the Internet.

About 10 years ago I found some photos from a Jamesway store that were taken in the late 1970s. The store featured in the photo series was using NCR Class 5 mechanical registers with department number keys, just as Ames did when they took over Big N in the late 1970s. I am still trying to locate those photos.

In the late 1980s Jamesway moved to the IBM 4683/4684 registers, however, it appears they did not use the IBM 4680 Retail Application software, but instead went with a system from PSI in Raleigh, North Carolina. The use of PSI software is a theory; I determined this by the format of the receipt issued from the IBM 4683, it bears no resemblance to a receipt from IBM 4680 Retail Application, not even with heavy modification.

The receipt’s formatting is identical to receipts from other chains that used PSI’s software on Fujitsu cash registers. PSI was later purchased by Fujitsu.

With the implementation of the IBM 4683/4684 registers up front, Jamesway introduced scanning to their stores, hence the UPC code on the receipt. Having done some contract programming on IBM 4680 systems and having actually used the software during some holiday cashier duties for other chains, when I watched a cashier at Jamesway work through a transaction on an IBM 4683 at a store in Oneida, New York I knew there was no way they were using IBM’s Retail Application.

Jamesway declared bankruptcy and closed up shop in 1995. I missed the opportunity to purchase one or two of the registers from their liquidation sales. I have fond memories of the chain and always had a pleasant experience in their stores.