A store detective who learnt to read the receiving dock first

I learnt what shrink means at the receiving door of a discount department store in Joplin, Missouri. In June 1994, a month after finishing a degree in criminal justice at Cardell State University, I joined Tollerson's Discount Centers as a store detective. I expected to spend my time catching shoplifters, and for a few months I did. Then the store's operations manager asked me to sit in on an inventory count that had gone badly wrong. We traced most of the gap to delivery invoices signed without anyone counting the cartons. Nobody had stolen anything. The store had paid for goods it never received. That afternoon taught me that the loss in a retail ledger usually has several causes, and that the most visible one is rarely the largest.

The next lesson was harder. In the autumn of 1998, by then an investigator covering eleven stores, I interviewed a nineteen-year-old cashier who had been alone at the front of a Tollerson's store at closing time when a man with a handgun demanded the contents of the till. She was not physically hurt. She left the company within a month, and before she went she asked me why she had been on her own. I had no good answer, and nobody above me asked for one. Tollerson's filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001 and closed its stores the following year. By then I had joined Wexham Value Stores, a listed small-box discount chain, as a regional asset protection manager.

At Wexham I spent five years in asset protection, rising to director for a western division of about 900 stores under Margery Sorrell, the vice president who taught me to report losses by cause rather than by store. In 2004 I proposed that no Wexham store should close with one person on duty; the company adopted the rule only for 120 stores it rated high risk. In 2005 I asked to move into store operations. Margery thought it a mistake, because I was well placed to succeed her. I wanted to run stores rather than audit them, and I took a district of nineteen stores in central Arkansas at a lower grade. Three years later I became regional vice president for 410 stores across Arkansas, Oklahoma and north Texas. I completed a weekend MBA at Wolcott Plains University in 2011, and it was there that I first read a lease schedule as a financing document rather than an occupancy cost.

In 2013 Lyle Brannock, chief executive of the family-owned Brannock Food Stores in Wichita, Kansas, hired me as senior vice president of store operations for 128 supermarkets. Supermarkets taught me fresh food, scheduling across departments and the economics of an in-store pharmacy. In 2017 and 2018 I ran the closure of fourteen of our fifty-eight pharmacies, all in small towns where dispensing no longer covered its costs. The decision was sound on the figures. I also read every letter that patients sent us, and several of them still shape how I think about what a store owes a small town.

Stonebeck Capital Partners bought 71% of Marrick Variety Stores from the founding family in June 2019 and recruited me as chief operating officer, with an agreed expectation that I would succeed Thomas Marrick as chief executive if the board judged me ready. That condition mattered to me. Thomas had led the company for twelve years and remained a significant shareholder, and I wanted to earn the role inside the business rather than arrive in it. The pandemic dominated my first full year. Our stores stayed open as essential retailers, and I spent much of 2020 on staffing, supply and protective equipment for 1,060 stores. The board appointed me chief executive in May 2021.

Since then my work has turned on a handful of decisions. We required two people in every store at closing time and accepted the cost. We began hosting independent pharmacists in towns that had lost their pharmacy instead of opening our own counters. I recommended a smaller dividend recapitalisation than our owner proposed. When import tariffs changed in 2025, we cancelled part of the holiday buy rather than pass every increase to customers. Each choice carried a cost that a director argued against, and I have been wrong about part of each.

I work best with people who bring me the uncomfortable number early. I ask store managers what a new policy will make them do at a quarter to nine on a weekday evening, and I visit about 150 stores a year, unannounced where I can. With our board I try to separate what I recommend from what I would personally gain, and to put the dissenting view in the paper rather than leave it for the meeting. People who have worked for me would probably say that I am slow to approve spending on security equipment, quick to approve spending on people and more interested in the receiving dock than most chief executives they have met.

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