Restarting a Career in Food Retailing

ELLIOT ZWIEBACH

PORTLAND, Ore. — When Lari Perkiss lost her job at Fred Meyer after nearly 25 years, she decided to return to college at the age of 47 to get a degree and restart her industry career.

“I decided to go back to something I was familiar with — working with people in the food industry,” Perkiss told SN.

“Without a college education I would have been stuck in place where I was, but having a degree has given me the tools and credibility to promote and support my ideas. And I came out of school with more confidence in the things I knew and the ability to communicate with people in the field.”

Perkiss enrolled at Portland State University to pursue a bachelor of science degree in business and human resources. Three months after she graduated in June 2008, she was hired by Lamb's Thriftway, a local five-store independent operator, as human relations manager.

“Here I'm a generalist,” Perkiss explained. “I handle employee relations, benefits, documentation and training — and anything else they think I can handle.

“And I'm working directly for the people who make decisions, and I like that because I get to make a difference. There's a certain thrill in being able to propose an idea or justify a project or analyze a problem where someone can respond to your ideas on the spot.”

While she was a student at Portland State, “I was old enough to be the mother of most of the other students,” Perkiss recalled, “but I had the advantage of taking what the instructors talked about and being able to apply it to real-world situations I'd already experienced.”

On the other hand, she said, the classes exposed her to ways of doing business that were outside the realm of what she had learned at Fred Meyer.

“In that respect, business case studies were interesting, and we looked at enough studies that I can now make connections between what I'm doing and pieces of different studies,” she explained.

Perkiss said the team process was a valuable part of her college education.

“The dynamics of the team and the combination of different styles was very helpful because it taught you how to be more inclusive as an employer and more aware of how to deal with different generations or different types of people rather than simply following one set of old habits for different groups.”

That's come in handy at Lamb's, Perkiss said, where she helps managers communicate with entry-level employees who prefer being valued as part of a team rather than as individuals.

Perkiss said she was not the oldest person in her business classes, but the handful of age 40-plus students adapted to their 20-something classmates — taking their laptops everywhere, using cell phones and texting.

“You can't do business with 20-ish people without being able to use all their technology,” she explained. “All of us older folks texted to get our points across — it's really a very necessary business tool today.”

The texting has come in handy in her current job in communicating with her bosses, the second generation of the Lamb family, who rely on texts all the time, she noted.

Perkiss had started working for Fred Meyer as a cashier in 1979 — “ the classic entry-level job,” she said. She eventually became a trainer, then began designing training programs and point-of-sale and merchandising systems, and training personnel to use the systems.

She was promoted to assistant vice president, technology shelf development, and as Fred Meyer acquired Smitty's and QFC, her job responsibilities expanded, “and I worked with QFC and Smitty's to design training materials that would fit Fred Meyer's systems to their business.

But when Cincinnati-based Kroger acquired Fred Meyer in 1999, it began installing its own systems, Perkiss said, which made her job redundant; in April 2002, the company let 250 people go, including Perkiss.

LARI PERKISS

TITLE: Human Resources Manager, Lamb's Thriftway

EDUCATION: Portland State University