On November 11, 1918, at the eleventh hour, the guns along the Western Front went quiet. The armistice that ended the fighting of the First World War gave the country Armistice Day, and in 1954 Congress broadened it into Veterans Day, set aside for everyone who has worn the uniform.
People often confuse it with Memorial Day, which honors those who died in service. Veterans Day belongs to the living. Its purpose is recognition: to say plainly, and in public, that what these men and women gave was seen and that it mattered.
That recognition carries particular weight in rent-to-own because veterans have shaped our industry far more than most customers walking into a store would guess. They manage stores and regions and build vendor businesses. Some own companies their parents started, and others own companies they started from nothing. Many came to rent-to-own within a year or two of leaving the service and found a business that rewarded what the service had already taught them.
A store runs on accountability. It depends on a team that trusts one another when the day goes sideways, and on customer relationships renewed every week, one payment and one conversation at a time. Veterans tend to understand that kind of work before anyone explains it to them.
Six Veterans Who Helped Shape Rent-to-Own
This year APRO is telling the stories of six of them.
Read Skinner’s Full Story
Lessons in Service, Leadership, and Commitment
Read their accounts side by side and certain things recur. Every one of them names discipline, though each means something slightly different by it. For Greg, who had lost a college athletic scholarship, it was the structure the Army gave him when he needed it most. For Frank, it was learning early what it means to be trusted with a Top Secret clearance and a responsibility very few others aboard his ship were given.
Each of them has also passed something forward. Jeff’s company offers veterans a five percent discount and gives veteran applicants preference in hiring. Greg has hired veterans at Leopard and supports veteran programs with both money and volunteer time. Mark has spent his career recruiting officers and enlisted men and women out of the military, a Navy SEAL among them, because the training carries over so directly to what we do. John has watched the industry support veterans, including homeless veterans and their families, for half a century, and he calls it an honor to have worked in it.
How Rent-to-Own Supports Military Families
Our obligation to the military also runs in the other direction, through the families we serve. Drive past almost any large military installation, and you will find rent-to-own stores nearby, and they are there for a reason. Military families move on orders, often every two or three years, sometimes on short notice and rarely to a place of their own choosing. A young, enlisted family arriving at a new duty station may have little credit history, a household to furnish within weeks, and no idea how long they will stay.
A rent-to-own agreement answers each of those problems. There is no long-term debt to carry from one posting to the next, and when new orders come, the furniture and appliances can go back to the store instead of onto a moving truck.
Delivery and service are included, which matters a great deal to a spouse running a household alone through a deployment. These are the families APRO talks about when we make the case for this transaction to lawmakers. For them, flexibility is not a convenience. It is how they keep a home together while serving.
This Veterans Day, Make Recognition Personal
Recognition is no small thing, and some of these men know what its absence feels like. When John Blair came home from Vietnam in November 1968, a few days before Thanksgiving, no one told him welcome home. He did not speak about the war for more than forty years. What finally changed that was other veterans, and his decision to wear the Marine Corps openly in honor of the brothers he served with. The rest of us can do something simpler. We can say it.
The six profiles tell each veteran’s story at length, and I hope you will read all of them. On November 11, I would also ask every APRO member to look around their own company, at the store manager, the driver, the vendor rep, the owner, and find the veterans who are already there, behind the counter and in front of it. Most will not mention their service unless someone asks. Ask, and then thank them.
