33 Years of Giving Back: Retiring EVP/CMO Karen Cardin Reflects on Distinguished Exchange Career

Every Saturday when Karen Cardin was growing up, her family made a trip to the PX.

“You could count on it,” said Cardin, Exchange executive vice president and chief merchandising officer, whose father had also worked for the Exchange. “We probably walked the entire store, just because of Dad. We went to the PX every weekend. It was really kind of the thing for everyone, especially overseas.”

Cardin’s family moved six times with two overseas assignments, Okinawa, then in Frankfurt, Germany. At both places, the Exchange was a meeting point.

“You saw friends from school there,” she said. “You saw them with their families. It was just a good feeling. People would go out to the food court and talk for an hour or have lunch together. It was almost like a reunion every weekend.”

The Exchange has always been a part of Cardin’s life. Her father went to work at the Exchange at Little Rock Air Force Base (where her grandfather, a civilian, helped build runways) when he was 16. A couple of years later, he was drafted into the Army. He returned to the Exchange as a manager when his service was over.

“I can remember my father bringing home a big, long green book that had all the facility’s statements in it,” she said. “He would go through it every month. It was all out on the dining room table. We would talk about different things, but I never thought of working at the Exchange as something I wanted to do.”

But then her father died, at only 48 years old, and she got to see another side of the Exchange.

“What got me to really appreciate the Exchange was losing my father at a young age and how well the AAFES family took care of us, because we were a young family,” she said. “The whole group at Fort Leonard Wood made sure that we were OK. They made sure my mom understood the benefits and that we would be OK, which as a big thing for a young widow. My mother was able to raise three young children. I was 16, my little sister was 13, my youngest sister was 11. She was able to raise us with the spousal annuity. She was able to get all three of us through college. We did not want for anything.”

Now Cardin, who joined the Exchange in 1991, is preparing to retire.

“When I had the opportunity, I went out to Little Rock Air Force Base, where I started as a part-time cashier at the Shoppette,” she said. “The manager there, Merv Tatum, told me I needed to get into the management program.

“I thought, ‘Well, I’ll give it a try and see if I like it’,” she adds with a laugh. “Turns out I liked it a lot, because I stayed for more than 32 years.”

The early days

After completing the management advancement program, Cardin was assigned to the Fort Hood (now Fort Cavazos) Exchange, where she was a sales area manager.

“I went to Texas, which to me was completely foreign,” she said. “I hadn’t really traveled there even though I was born there. It was quite a change. It was that first time of having to pay the bills, making sure you had everything you needed. You have those moments where you eat bologna sandwiches so you can make the month’s rent.

“But I loved working at Fort Hood,” she continued. “It was a time when a lot of troops were coming back to the States. There was a huge influx and it was a big store.”

She began to move up in the organization quickly, which she credits to people noticing her hard work.

“I did a lot of long hours. And I was willing to take on any job. There was nothing I wouldn’t do. If a truck needed unloading and somebody didn’t show up, we all got on the truck and unloaded it. I think my bosses, seeing that, said, ‘OK, she’s all in. She’s willing to do what it takes.’ We’d work at Fort Hood sometimes for 24 hours straight, because there was so much going on, so many trucks coming in and so many people we had to help out.”

She moved up to branch manager and was then promoted to operations manager at the Davis-Monthan main store.

“I went to Tucson, Arizona, which is even farther from home,” she said. “That’s where the AAFES family comes in again, because you had a sponsor and you had good people there who helped you find a place to live and telling you the rules of the road around there. They made the transition as easy as possible.”

She continued to move up, getting promoted to sales and merchandise manager after about a year and a half. Then doctors found that her mother, back home in Arkansas, had cancer. Cardin asked for a transfer closer to home. She received a transfer to headquarters, where she joined the Merchandising Directorate.

Finding her niche

Cardin started at headquarters as a buyer. At first, she wasn’t sure it was a good thing. For her, it turned out to be a great thing.

“I really enjoyed it,” she said. “It’s not a job for everybody, because you have to have tough skin. You’re never right. You’re always buying too much or too little and always at the wrong price, there are a lot of Monday morning quarterbacks. The buyers have a difficult job. Everybody in Merchandising has a difficult job. But you come to understand that things aren’t personal, it’s just business.”

Cardin found her niche, an area where she could really flourish. Her first divisional merchandise manager, Vivian Skalsky, took her through the basics.

“We were able to launch a private label,” Cardin said. “She taught me everything about how to look at an assortment and how to work it through the different stores. With private label, that meant developing everything from the packaging to the product itself. All of the products   were approved by Good Housekeeping, which was the first time that had been done at the Exchange, so it really resonated with the customer.”

From 1997 to 2007, Cardin worked in various buyer positions. One of her memories of growing up with the Exchange was Toyland grand openings. As a senior buyer and then as a divisional merchandise manager, one of her areas of responsibilities was toys and Toyland openings.

“It was a lot of fun to plan those events with the stores and provide toys, giveaways and even characters to come in and see the kids and see their smiles,” she said. This was the time when Furby’s were all the rage.   When I was at Cavazos “Everything at the time was Power Rangers. People wanted the Green Power Rangers.”  Something exciting was always happening.

Then in 2007, she got a look at a different part of the world, when she deployed to Kuwait.

The rewards of deployment 

In Kuwait, Cardin was still in the buying office. The office did a lot of localized buying, working closely with Europe, because so many troops were going in and out. She spent a few days in Baghdad, working with the military, which was also focusing on local sources, seeing what the Exchange could purchase.

She also worked in the stores. “God bless those folks in those stores,” she said. “They work six or seven days a week, and long hours. The troops were so appreciative of everything they did. It’s that ‘little bit of home’ for them that we always talk about. You could see in their faces how happy they were when they’d come back from the field and say, ‘Hey, they’ve got what I need.’”

Exchange associates, with support from vendors, would hold barbecues and other events for service members. Sometimes, morale-building happened spontaneously.

“One of the military members came into the store and told an associate they wanted to watch a football game,” she said. “The associates turned all the TVs on, tuned to the game. Customers started asking what was going on, and everybody just worked together. We had probably 20 to 25 guys there siting in the middle of the store, watching the game. We bought them candy, we bought them drinks and we just had a good time talking with them. It was fun just to see them relax.”

Cardin’s deployment was short. It was supposed to be longer, but at the three-month mark, she interviewed to become part of  a new department within MD: Planning, Allocation and Replenishment (PAR). After 3½ months in Southwest Asia, she returned to headquarters to start the job as PAR manager..

PAR and above

A job that was completely new to the Exchange brought a lot of changes—and challenges.

“Buying was no longer done how we’d done it for years,” Cardin said. “There were going to be more eyes on it, which to me was a good thing because that only makes you better. But a lot of people weren’t used to that. It also brought a lot of other voices into what you were purchasing. But that was also a good thing, because not everybody will see everything the same.   Analytics would take a more prominent role with PAR using new reporting.

She was named a divisional merchandise manager in Hardlines and then moved back to PAR as its director. Then in late 2010, she assumed the Consumables vice president position. Various vice president positions followed in merchandising, and in October 2016, she became the senior vice president of eCommerce. One of the initiatives she was involved in was the 2017 launch of the Veterans online shopping benefit,

“It’s a benefit that we’re still getting the word out on,” she said. “We had to think differently. It was the first time since 1990 that the benefit was expanded. Every Veteran who I’ve talked to appreciates the benefit.”

MD worked closely with IT and Customer Relationship Management to ensure a smooth launch. “We worked with the late Dr. Jim Skibo, who was fantastic,” Cardin said. “He actually got the National Archives working with  AAFES so we could authorize as many Veterans as possible without it being an issue for them to sign on.”

The big challenges

On Sept. 11, 2001, Cardin was working at headquarters, where the divisional merchandise managers had TVs in their offices. After hearing that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers, she sat down in an office to watch the news update. The second plane hit the second tower, and that’s when she knew the country was under attack. News of a plane hitting the Pentagon and of another one crashing in a Pennsylvania field, after passengers thwarted a fourth attack, came later.

“The attacks brought us closer together,” she said. “Because we had team members in New York, we were trying to figure out whether they were OK.  AAFES put up a container outside the Pentagon, and volunteers ran a store out of that. They worked day and night keeping it going to support the military there.”

Realizing that some sort of U.S. retaliatory action was likely, MD geared up with suppliers to increase product to support troops.   We began forecasting for future demand on key items, and asked for our unfair share to support the troops.. “One of the things that happened, with so many people passing away, was they ran out of flags in New York,” she said. “The buyer at the time gave up all of our flag supplies so that the City of New York could have flags for each one of the funerals. It was amazing to see that teamwork and that compassion.”

Nearly 20 years later, the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Merchandising and other directorates had to work quickly to set up team members to work and communicate remotely. As the Exchange increased work-from-home, so did other companies, which affected the supply chain.

“That’s when you saw the hoarding of toilet paper and paper towels,” Cardin sad. “But companies like Procter & Gamble and others would make sure that military members had what they needed. They would provide us with extra product. We might still run out, but we had things when others didn’t. We had baby formula when others didn’t. We had toilet paper when others didn’t.”

A little more than a year into the pandemic, in June 2021, Cardin was named executive vice president and chief merchandising officer. She still faced the challenge of bringing teams together while they worked remotely, which she considers one of her biggest successes as CMO.

“And being able to continue strong relationships with suppliers,” she said. “That’s not an easy thing to do when you can’t meet face to face. In the last two years, we’ve started building the face-to-face contact back.  Business changed after COVID, and so did the Exchange.  We had to develop new relationships to meet new customer challenges.  The relationship with The Home Dept and launched a new way of doing business for us. It’s been overwhelmingly positive. This partnership improved selection and the delivery experience.  We’ve had a lot of customers who hadn’t shopped with us in a while come back.”

Retirement plans

Cardin’s retirement plan is simple: to enjoy retirement.

“I don’t have any intention of going back to work right now,” she said. “I want to travel. I want to spend some time with my family. I really want to be able to enjoy it and enjoy seeing the world.”

She views her whole career at the Exchange as an opportunity to serve those who serve

“It really is about giving back to those who are willing to stand up and fight for what we enjoy every day,” she said. “Not everyone’s willing to do that. It’s a very small percentage of  the population. But we all enjoy the benefits of what they’re willing to do.

“But for me it’s not only giving back to our military members, but giving back to AAFES. AAFES gave me a life. It gave me a future, because of the benefits here. My sisters will tell you, ‘We know how blessed we were with AAFES.’

“I give back every chance I can to all of my teammates and this organization. Because I know how blessed I am.”