129 Years of Family Serving Family: Prissy and Robert Brissette, Dyess AFB Exchange

One in a series honoring the Exchange’s 129 years of family serving family

Who they are: Prissy Brissette, Express store manager, and husband Robert Brissette, warehouse foreman, Dyess Air Force Base Exchange

Years at the Exchange: Prissy, 39 years; Robert, 12 years

Military connections: Prissy’s father is an Air Force Veteran with 22 years of service; Robert retired from the Air Force as a technical sergeant with 26 years of service

Prissy’s father was stationed at Sheppard Air Force Base, and while Robert was visiting, the couple met at a party and immediately hit it off. Robert came to Sheppard AFB for repeat visits before being stationed there in 1998. The couple married in 1999 and came to Dyess Air Force Base in 2000.

Customer experience

Prissy: “We have a lot of fun with the customers.”

Robert: “She has lifelong customers that have been here at Dyess who retired, that still come back to the store today and remember her from her job at the Military Clothing department in 2001.”

Prissy: “I have one that comes in every morning, that goes ‘Hey, Mrs. P’. He knows me too, and they [the customers] are really awesome.”

Memorable moments

Robert: “We used to have a ship-from-store program that we ran out of the main store. It was a lot of work and a lot of fun.

“It was like shopping on steroids. We got a list of things that we had to go find, box up and ship down the road. We worked it like a game because it was like a seek-and-destroy or an Easter egg hunt to see if you could get all the items on the list. It was actually really fun, and my team was all in on the experience.”

A family affair

Not only do Prissy and Robert have an extensive career with the Exchange, but they also passed the baton to their kids. Their daughter, Shawnta, worked at the Exchange as a secretary for a few months before heading to college and, for a short time, their son-in-law also worked at the Dyess main store. Their son, Justin, still works in the main store today as a customer experience associate.

Robert: “Justin is like a little machine where he knows what’s on the floor, what’s in the warehouse and he’ll let customers know what’s there.

“We used to have an associate here who was diabetic, and he was looking for some candy he could eat around Christmastime. So our son went through the Christmas section and found the candy for him that had the least amount of sugar in it. And that led to him selling out all the candy that year for Christmas.”

Family Serving Family

Prissy: “We’re all family, we really are. My customers treat us like they’re family, and a lot of them don’t have family here, so I treat them like they’re my kids. I used to work in Military Clothing, and they did not always know what they needed. So, that’s where I came in.”

Robert: “It’s two parts of a family: military family when you’re in [service] and then you’re retired and you still have the same people that come in to see you when you’re an associate.”