As Retirement Nears, West Coast Regional VP Recalls a Life With the Exchange

As the youngest of six children growing up in a military family in Nurnberg, Germany, Robert Rice was exposed to the Exchange early—in part because of his mother.

“When we were in Nurnberg, one of the big things was collecting Hummel figurines,” says Rice, now West Coast regional vice president for the Exchange. “My mom, being German, was an absolute fan of the figurines. But they were limited to one per customer. So she lined all six of us up so each of us could get a Hummel on Hummel Day. Whatever Saturday it was, we were up at 6 o’clock, standing in shivering cold or whatever the weather may have been, to help her build her Hummel collection.”

But it wasn’t just his mother. Four of his siblings worked at the Vogelweh main store. The family hung out at the Burger Bar. At the time, Rice was too young to work for the Exchange, but he earned money by delivering the Stars & Stripes newspaper. And his family made weekly trips to the Exchange.

“The first time I ever went to a shopping mall in the United States, I was 17 years old,” Rice said. “I didn’t know anything else but the Exchange.”

Since 1993, he’s been with the Exchange as an associate, a journey that will end with his retirement on Aug. 29. It is a journey that has taken him around the world.

Early days

Rice lived the itinerant life of an Army brat— his family moved from Nurnberg to Fort Hood, then returned to Germany. They came back to the States at Fort Campbell, then went back to Germany again, this time at Kaiserslautern. Then they returned to the States for good, with his father retiring at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.

It was at Aberdeen that Rice got his first taste of working at the Exchange, although it was brief.

“I was the Burger King broiler boy,” he said. “I put the burgers in one end, caught them in a bun on the other, then stuck them in a steamer. That process has changed, but that was my first Exchange job. I did that for a couple of months, then thought, ‘I don’t know if food is the place for me.’”

After his father retired, the family moved to Clarksville, Tennessee, near Fort Campbell. Because Rice was in his senior year of high school, he received permission to stay in Aberdeen. He worked at a civilian retail store for a while, but he rejoined his parents after about eight months and attended college at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, where he received his bachelor of business administration degree in business and economics.

His mother thought there was one place for him.

“Once I got my degree, my mom was adamant that I apply to the Exchange, because she was the ultimate Exchange retiree shopper,” he said. “I sent my application to headquarters and got an interview for the College Trainee Program. I interviewed at Fort Campbell with Bob Bohn. He had Thea Sarver [now the general manager at the MacDill AFB and Patrick SFB Exchanges] show me around, not knowing how well I already knew the Exchange.

“During the interview, he asked, ‘Where do you want to go?” And I said, ‘Pretty much as far away from here as possible.’”

He eventually got his wish, and although his first stop wasn’t as far away as possible, it was still pretty far.

Baptism by fire

At the end of August 1993, Rice joined the Fairchild AFB Exchange, in eastern Washington near Spokane, about 2,000 miles from Fort Campbell. By January 1994, he was promoted to sales area manager.

About seven months later, Fairchild was among four Exchanges that supported thousands of troops and firefighters battling forest fires in Montana, Idaho and Washington. Rice, who had been with Fairchild about a year, was one of the volunteers, taking care of troops’ needs in central Washington with snacks, soda, candy, magazines and more.

“That was quite an experience,” he said. “It was my first ‘mini-deployment.’ The GM at the time, Bettye Golson, was an absolutely fantastic person to work for. She taught us to be as frugal as possible. As part of that, we slept under our Exchange trailers. When she came to visit the site, she saw how grubby and dirty we were and kind of giggled and said, ‘OK, we’ll put you in a hotel.’”

Rice and other team members didn’t always stay at the site—but they didn’t go straight to the hotel, either.

“We had our trailer open at the site during the day,” he said. “At night, we packed a truck full of merchandise and went out and found Soldiers and asked them if they needed anything. We sold them merchandise out of the back of the truck and then came back to our site.”

The next stop for Rice was much farther from Fort Campbell.

Across the Pacific

Rice had hoped that he would be assigned to an Exchange in Germany. That would eventually happen, but first, he was sent in the other direction.

“I used to toy with my Human Resources manager at Fairchild,” he said. “Every day, I’d walk in and say, ‘Do I have orders?’ She’d always laugh and say no. One day, I didn’t ask—and here she comes, running down the hall: ‘You’re on a worksheet! You’re on a worksheet!’ I said, ‘What?,’ and she said, ‘You’re going to Okinawa.”

In November 1994, Rice joined the Camp Butler Exchange as a sales area manager. Although Okinawa wasn’t at the top of his wish list, he found that he liked it there.

“Okinawa was fantastic—learning the culture and seeing how dedicated the associates were,” Rice said. “It was super-friendly. I still have relationships with associates there. They operated with precision and were so welcoming. I saw one, Gerri Tonaki, recently. He’s an Express manager now but back then he was a reorder associate. He literally had the CRCs [customer reference codes] for every product memorized.”

After three years at Camp Butler, Rice moved on to Guam, where he managed the Four Seasons at the Andersen AFB Exchange.

“We did some really fun things there, because it was a Four Seasons/Toyland,” Rice said. “This was during the Beanie Baby craze, which was absolutely insane. I ordered every Beanie Baby that was available out of the warehouse and we had Beanie Baby Month. We released one a day and had a calendar saying when we were pushing them out. Customers lined up every single day to get whatever Beanie Baby was available that day. In that overseas environment, it really built a connection with the customers.”

In December 1997, Super Typhoon Paka blew through Guam, with sustained winds as high as 195 mph and gusts up to 236 mph, doing damage and knocking out power for weeks island-wide.

“The Four Seasons became the hub, because it had generators for sale,” Rice said. “We were able to coordinate with vendors and headquarters to get them airlifted in. But it was still a limited supply, so we came up with a lottery program. If we pulled your number, you were able to buy a generator.”

The generators didn’t help Rice away from the store.

“We lived off-base and we didn’t have power for a month. My wife would tell me, ‘This is a hot mess. You have to stay clean, because we can’t keep washing your clothes by hand every day.’ But it built character. We barbecued every day. After the electricity came on, I don’t think I barbecued for three more years.”

In spring 1998, Rice went back to the States to visit his family. The typhoon-induced power failure had prevented a full Christmas celebration in Guam, so his parents decorated their home for Christmas so Rice and his wife could have a full holiday celebration.

A little more than a year later, Rice was back in Tennessee, this time at Arnold AFB.

Back in the States

During his Exchange career, Rice worked at some of the largest Exchanges and some of the smallest. For 10 months beginning in June 1999, he managed the Arnold AFB Exchange, a southern Tennessee store that’s part of the Fort Campbell system.

“It was a super-small store with a commissary attached,” he said. “It was a basic troop store with a big Class VI. It was an opportunity to learn a different aspect of the business because I didn’t have any clothing experience. Even at Foster, I managed hard goods, and then the Four Seasons in Guam. At Arnold, we sold underwear and sweats and some souvenir T-shirts. There was a mini-Snack Avenue where we’d pop popcorn every day.”

During Rice’s Arnold tenure, his oldest daughter was born. In  November 1999, he  moved on to the Wright-Patterson AFB Exchange in Ohio, where he was sales & merchandise manager for about a year and a half. His second daughter was born there. Then in November 2001 he finally got his wish to return to Germany—and to one of the biggest Exchanges.

Coming home to Germany

Because he had family in Germany and his mother was from there, Rice had made return visits before 2001, and before joining the Exchange. He happened to be in the country on vacation when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

“I actually got to see quite a bit along the east/west border, as the East Germans were coming into the West,” he said. “I was also able to go to the East side before the border completely fell, as they were letting folks freely cross the border.”

In 2001, he returned for a longer stay, beginning as sales & merchandise manager at Vogelweh, part of the Kaiserslautern Military Community [KMC] Exchange. He had the upstairs floor of the store; Penny Madison, another sales & merchandise manager, had the bottom half.

“I absolutely loved it,” he said. “It was coming home. I went to high school in K-Town. One of the folks working at the store had gone to school with me. Teammates knew my siblings and some even recalled working with them.”

Rice moved back and forth between the Vogelweh and Ramstein stores, first as a sales & merchandise manager at one and then at the other, until he became retail business manager (RBM) for all of KMC. After a brief stint as RBM, he became the main store manager at Vogelweh.

During this stint in Germany, he also deployed to the Balkans.

The rewards of deployment

In January 2003, Rice was part of a team that set up new stores in Kosovo, at Pristina and Camp Bondsteel. Among his teammates were Hollie Heft (now Hollie Heft Morales, general manager of the Fort Sill Exchange) and Charlotte Ramsey (now a Planning, Allocation and Reallotment inventory management specialist). Nicola Carter, who retired as vice president of store operations in 2024, and Samantha Davis, who retired as chief of corporate learning in 2023, were also on the team.

“The customers were really happy,” Rice said. “They called Pristina ‘Rodeo Drive’ because all the NATO stores were there, but over in the mud was the Exchange trailer. So we built a new store on ‘Rodeo Drive,’ and it turned out to be a very nice store.”

Rice also deployed to Qatar, where he set up stores at Al Udeid Air Base and Camp As Sayliyah.

“At As Saliyah, we were going from the older store to the new one, moving product,” Rice said. “One day, the older store was a little low on stock, and the newer store was packed up. We were outside talking when one of the young Soldiers walked over and said, ‘Hey, do y’all have any Funyuns?’ I said, ‘Yes, we have them in the store. We’re going to open tomorrow.’

“She looked devastated, because she wanted that taste of home. I said, ‘Hang on, I’ll get some for you.’ I went into the store and took care of her. Just seeing her sheer delight over a bag of Funyuns made the whole thing worthwhile. You wouldn’t think something so small would make such a big difference, but it did.”

The England swing

In July 2005, Rice left Germany to become the store manager at RAF Lakenheath in the United Kingdom, where he would rise to his first general manager job in late 2007.

During his time in the U.K., Rice worked on a major initiative: Establishing an off-installation fuel program for geographically separated units (GSUs). “There were lots of them,” Rice said. “There were units all over the U.K., a little group of 20 here, a little group of 20 there.”

Challenged by then-Europe SVP Jack Morris to come up with a solution, Rice went online, searched for fuel fleet companies in the U.K., and sent an email to each of them, explaining what the Exchange was and what it was trying to do for U.S. military members.

After about a month, Morris came to the U.K. for a visit. Rice and Morris were driving to RAF Menwith Hill , about 185 miles northwest of Lakenheath, when Rice received a call from one of the fuel companies, which was interested in discussing the off-base program.

“Jack and I looked at each other and thought, ‘Oh, my gosh,’ because we had been trying to find a solution. I asked the caller, ‘Where are you? We’d be glad to come and meet you?’ He said, ‘We’re in Harrogate.’ I said, ‘Well, as a matter of fact, we’re on their way there now.’”

Rice worked with the company to develop the off-base fuel program. “From inception to execution, it took seven months to develop a complete program,” he said. “I wanted MILITARY STAR to be the billing mechanism. The customers who were issued fuel cards had to have a MilStar account. Once they tanked up, it would automatically bill to their account.

“We visited every single GSU in the United Kingdom, from Wales all the way up north by Scotland, to make sure folks signed up for the program,” he added.

Going large—and then semi-remote

In November 2008, Rice returned to Okinawa as store manager at the Kadena Air Base Exchange, arriving as work on a new store—the second-largest Exchange in the world—was underway.

Rice had developed a friendly rivalry with Stephanie Burns, now senior vice president for Europe/Southwest Asia/Africa. They had both been sales & merchandise at KMC, he at Ramstein, she at Vogelweh, then eventually trading places at the two stores.

“Fast-forward to Kadena,” he said. “I went there to finish the build and get the store ready for opening, and she was doing the same thing as store manager at KMC. Part of our rivalry was, ‘I’m going to open this store, and we’re going to have the biggest grand opening in the history of the ‘Exchange.’ We beat KMC and Kadena still holds the record for a main store grand opening sales day.” (KMC, the largest Exchange, opened a couple of weeks before Kadena.)

The next step was almost reverse culture shock: In September 2011, Rice returned to the States to become general manager of the Fort Leonard Wood Exchange, in south central Missouri.

“That was definitely a big change,” he said. “It’s semi-remote, near the Twin Cities, as we called them, of St. Robert and Waynesville [both cities had populations under 5,000 in 2011]. You either went to them or you drove an hour and half to Springfield, an hour and 15 minutes to Lake of the Ozarks or two and a half hours to St. Louis.”

Fort Leonard Wood is home to the Army Training Center & Center of Excellence, with some 75,000 troops training there each year.

“We had a reception center for them, a great main store, a lot of troop stores catering to every single one of the new recruits’ shopping needs,” Rice said. “Whatever their drill sergeant allowed them to have, we carried.

“We opened a lot of restaurants and services,” he added. “We had the first Jimmy John’s at the Exchange. We had a Dickey’s Barbecue, an Auntie Anne’s Pretzels. Anything we could bring in that wasn’t outside the gate was going to be an absolute win, because otherwise customers would have to drive to Springfield or St. Louis.”

Aloha, Hawaii

In February 2015, Rice became general manager of the Hawaii Exchange. It wasn’t all leis and floral shirts.

“There’s a perception that when you’re in Hawaii, you’re at the beach all the time,” he said. That’s not the case. I may have gone to the beach three times in the two years I was there. There are a lot of facilities. There are a lot of demands. But the teams are great and the customers are all thrilled that the Exchange is there, particularly because things are substantially more expensive outside the gates.”

Rice was responsible for two main stores on the big island, another one (now closed) on Maui, and several expresses and smaller stores—including two stores on Kwajalein Atoll, roughly 2,400 miles southwest of Hawaii, and American Samoa, roughly 2,300 miles southeast of Kwajalein. The Hawaii system made for some unusual experiences.

“Probably one of the best-kept secrets in the Exchange is the Express at Bellows Air Force Station in Hawaii,” Rice said. “You literally walk out the door, turn the corner and you are on the beach. If I had known about that early in my career, I would have put in for a job there and lived on the beach.”

“Kwajalein is a unique experience,” he added. “You don’t have motor vehicles there, except for a golf cart to travel between facilities. You rode a bicycle to and from work. But you can walk all of Kwajalein in less than an hour.”

His next move would also cover a lot of territory as West Coast regional vice president.

Big in Vegas (and elsewhere)

Rice has been in his current role since May 2017, based at the Nellis AFB Exchange in Las Vegas with an area of responsibility covering Nevada, California and Arizona. Celebrities appearing in Vegas often made appearances at Nellis, but Rice always seemed to be on the road when they dropped in, although he did get to meet Donny and Marie Osmond.

“I wanted to meet the Vegas Golden Knights after they won the Stanley Cup, but I was on the road,” he said. “Sarah Park, the GM at the time, made a hockey stick with my face on it, so I was there in spirit. But in Okinawa, I met [singer-actress] Macy Gray. It’s the luck of the draw, being in the right place at the right time.”

In his eight years as vice president, nearly all the main stores in the West Coast area have had image upgrades and have opened new concepts, including the Exchange’s first tattoo studio at Nellis.

“The most recent brand-new facility, which celebrated its first anniversary this summer, was the Mojave Express at Fort Irwin,” Rice said. “It was designed a little bit differently—because food trucks are such a big business, it has three food-truck bays on the side and a seating area.”

Post-Exchange

Rice has traveled a lot in his Exchange career, but there are still places to go after he retires.

“I’ve never been on a cruise, so we’re going to go one on, for the first time in the history of me,” he said. “My wife is from Taiwan, and we’ve never been able to celebrate the Lunar New Years there, because it always falls during Exchange inventory. So this will be the first time to do that. I’m going to finish my Route 66 travel—I did half of it when I was at Fort Leonard Wood, now I’m going to do the other half.”

He also plans to spend more time with his family, after 32 years of “family serving family”—which started because of the way his family was served.

“Having been an Army brat my entire life, I’ve seen what the Exchange has done for me and my family, supporting us during the many times my father was deployed,” he said. “This has been my way of giving back. That’s what family serving family means to me, that I’m able to give back and honor my father and the best customer in the world—who was my mother. She absolutely loved the PX.”

 If you’d like to wish Robert Rice well on his retirement journey, please comment on this story. The Luke AFB Exchange team prepared a video honoring Rice. You can watch it here.