Exchange Teams Prepare for Big Changes as 9 Army Posts Get New Names

This year, nine Army installations named for Confederate figures will be renamed after people who exemplify U.S. military and national values. The changes will have a significant effect on Exchanges at all the posts.

The changes begin with Virginia’s Fort Pickett, which will officially become Fort Barfoot on March 24. For the Exchange, this is more than a simple matter of changing a store name. A lot has to change at these stores.

In early 2022, the Naming Commission, a Department of Defense team responsible for recommending the name changes, contacted the Exchange’s Real Estate directorate to discuss potential impacts. The Exchange’s Command Engineer Col. Kip Korth, began a study to quantify how Exchange operations would be affected.

“The first order of business was to look at a rough order of magnitude on what it would fiscally take to make the changes,” Korth said. “It’s much more than the physical changes. The physical changes were relatively simple. It was all the stuff behind the scenes that took a lot of time and energy.”

An Exchange task force was assembled in October. Every directorate was asked for feedback—and most were affected.

“It’s easier to tell you who’s not affected,” said the Exchange’s Director of the Enterprise Project Management Office Tanesha Roberts, who was one of the leaders of the project. “Everyone was impacted except for EEODI, Administration, Loss Prevention and the Inspector General’s Office. Everyone else had impacts in some form. And the ones that didn’t may still see impacts from a policy perspective.”

Korth said that one of the most affected directorate was Information Technology.

“It’s incredible all the stuff IT has identified that they’ve got to go back and change,” he said. “There are databases we use across the organization. IT is the owner of several, so they can make those changes at their level. But there are multiple sources that feed into larger databases, so they had to make sure everybody across the board was tracking and making the changes at the same time.”

The team met with directorates every two weeks and monthly with region leaders to get up-to-date input. During the discovery process, the team learned about some unanticipated challenges.. One was customers’ bank statements.

“When you buy something at Fort Hood, your bank statement will say ‘Fort Hood Express’ or ‘Fort Hood Main Store,’” Roberts said. “We had to work with external partners to get things like that changed.”

Store receipts, WiFi access pages, social media accounts and more will change to reflect the new installation names.

“We’d learn things in discovery with business units,” Roberts said. “Such as how we manage things with concessionaires and how we’d have to adjust on that side. Concessionaires might have mechanical signage or even merchandise they would have to liquidate because of the change. We work with a lot of short-term concessionaires, including some that sell souvenir items. And since they’re incurring costs because of the change, there could be a need for negotiations.”

The team focused on customer-facing changes, but there are some internal ones as well.

“At the Waco Distribution Center there are regional maps and murals that will need to change,” Roberts said. “Fort Hood [which will become Fort Cavazos] is one of the installations the DC serves, so those maps will have to be updated. But the customer-facing changes are the primary focus.”

Some Exchanges will be affected by multiple name changes. The Fort Pickett Exchange is part of the Fort Lee Exchange, which will also be affected by a name change (Fort Lee is scheduled to become Fort Gregg-Adams in April).

Lajima Marshall-Pierce, the general manager at Fort Lee, started there March 4. But she was store manager at the Fort Belvoir Exchange, which includes the A.P. Hill Exchange, also scheduled for a name change.

“I visited Fort Pickett a week after I came to Fort Lee, and they’re prepared,” Marshall-Pierce said March 15. “They had already removed merchandise that had the old name and the remainder will be out by the weekend.”

Exchanges and installations preparing for a name change will keep an eye on the first renamed locations to see what additional lessons can be learned after the changes.

“It’s an interesting time to become a GM,” Marshall-Pierce said. “It’s history in the making.”

Here’s a timeline of the installation name changes. Dates are subject to change.

March 24: Fort Pickett to become Fort Barfoot

April 10: Fort Rucker to become Fort Novosel

April 27: Fort Lee to become Fort Gregg-Adams

May 9: Fort Hood to become Fort Cavazos

May 11: Fort Benning to become Fort Moore

June 2: Fort Bragg to become Fort Liberty

June 13: Fort Polk to become Fort Johnson

Aug. 25: Fort A.P. Hill to become Fort Walker

Oct. 27: Fort Gordon to become Fort Eisenhower