Marc Perlman and the art of the second chance

Marc Perlman’s office has room for birdseed and hair dryers. Ski pants and gloves have found their way in, too. In a 2024 glimpse of his working quarters in North Kingstown, the merchandise shared space with the desk and the awards. A jacket was waiting for another season. The arrangement offers a useful introduction to the co-founder of Ocean State Job Lot: even after decades at the head of a retail chain, the goods are still close enough to get underfoot.

Perlman’s career began with a smaller act of attention. Living in Manhattan, he noticed shops selling merchandise for less than he thought it was worth. There was a business to be understood here. He called his brother Alan. A college friend, Roy Dubs, joined them. In 1977, they founded Ocean State Job Lot.

The business would eventually find opportunities in abandoned retail properties as well as unsold products. Along the way, its charitable programs found further destinations for coats, food and seeds. Follow those objects and buildings, and a pattern emerges: circumstances change what something can fetch, while usefulness often survives the change.

The bargain began before the store

Born in New York City and raised on Long Island, Perlman graduated from the University of Rhode Island in 1969. He studied engineering. His eventual occupation would require plenty of practical calculation, although the objects involved would range well beyond anything a single course could prepare him to buy.

The founding partners pooled $500 and began selling at New York flea markets. Their first Rhode Island store opened on August 15, 1977, in North Kingstown. It occupied 3,000 square feet. That is an agreeably unceremonious beginning for a company whose later sales figures would require nine digits.

The name was similarly practical. When Dubs went to incorporate the business, the partners had yet to settle on one. He chose Ocean State Job Lot. Rhode Island supplied the first half; the retail trade supplied the second. A job lot is a batch of goods sold together, often at a reduced price. The name told you where to look and roughly what to expect when you got there.

There is a particular pleasure in a name that declines to sound expensive. Customers do not walk into a job lot expecting someone to explain the artisanal provenance of a can opener. They want to know whether it works and what it costs. Perlman and his partners had a business that could answer in the language of the shelf.

When the bargain comes with a parking lot

The same commercial logic can operate on a much larger object. In January 2019, Job Lot announced that it had bought six former Toys “R” Us locations and agreed to lease a seventh. The properties included a route into Pennsylvania, a new market for the company.

Perlman pointed to the price and the space. The former toy stores averaged about 40,000 square feet, enough for a wider assortment and a more comfortable shopping trip. A building associated with one retailer’s departure could accommodate another retailer’s next move. Here was a closeout opportunity with its own roof.

“We realize that people work hard for their money,” Perlman said at the time. The sentence is plain enough to disappear inside a business announcement. It also identifies the customer’s side of the transaction. An attractive property deal matters only if the business inside gives people a reason to return.

In March 2025, the company announced a transaction for 15 former Big Lots locations across eight states. Maryland and Delaware were joining its map. Perlman described expansion as a longstanding plan that had to make sense on value. Growth had a condition attached.

The sequence gives his career a certain consistency. First comes a useful thing whose previous owner needs a different outcome. Then comes the question of whether Job Lot can put it to work. The question applies equally well to a box on a pallet and a store beside a road.

“We realize that people work hard for their money.”

Marc Perlman, January 2019

The purchase order still matters

A growing store network creates distance between a founder and the individual buying decision. In 2018, colleague Paul Conforti described Perlman as reviewing all purchase orders. That detail places him close to the part of the enterprise where a promising deal becomes an obligation to pay for, move and sell actual goods.

Conforti also described a collaborative approach to difficult decisions: bring the relevant people together and talk through the problem. These two habits sit comfortably together. Knowing the orders gives a leader specific questions to ask. Gathering colleagues gives those questions somewhere useful to go.

The family connections were substantial. By 2018, 16 members of the Perlman, Aronow, Conforti and Portno families worked or had worked in the business. Their jobs reached across buying, technology, legal work, operations and human resources. A family retailer at this scale still needs people who can carry out quite different kinds of work.

Perlman has also invested in businesses beyond the chain, including restaurants, auto dealerships, soap manufacturing and pet supplies. The range puts his interest in buying and operating into a wider frame. The retail business remains the enduring public thread, but it has never been the whole of his commercial activity.

A coat takes the long way round

Job Lot began its first food donation program in 2005. Over time, giving became another way to use the company’s access to merchandise and distribution. The practical question shifted from finding a customer to reaching a recipient, with much of the intervening work still involving buying, collecting and moving goods.

The Buy-Give-Get coat program makes the route visible. Customers purchase a coat at a discounted price, give it back for distribution, and receive the purchase value in a Crazy Deal gift card. Local and regional partners help get the coats to veterans in need.

The customer has something to use on a future shopping trip. The recipient gets a coat. The store supplies a familiar place to take part. Its appeal depends on a sequence people can understand at the register, without an evening spent deciphering a fundraising brochure.

For the 2025 holiday programs, Job Lot reported 78,000 coats and 275,000 toys donated with customers’ help. A separate checkout drive raised funds equivalent to more than three million meals. These are collective results: customers, associates and distribution partners all have work in them. Perlman’s company supplies the retail machinery through which those contributions can travel.

The seeds that missed their season

One of the more telling examples fits inside a paper packet. Job Lot cannot resell its previous year’s seeds. Through the company’s foundation, they go instead to URI Cooperative Extension, where gardeners can turn them into something much more interesting than a stockroom problem.

In spring 2024, URI Master Gardeners raised 12,000 vegetable, herb and annual seedlings for community sharing. Nearly 100 nonprofits registered to collect plants. Most were grown from seeds donated by the foundation. Schools and community gardens were among the destinations.

The retail season had ended; the growing season was arriving. That distinction explains much of the partnership’s appeal. A packet’s place on a store shelf and its potential in a garden operate on different clocks. Someone has to connect them.

There is labor between donation and harvest: tending seedlings, organizing collection and finding growing space. The university and its volunteers provide that work. Job Lot supplies an input it can no longer sell. It is a modestly sized example of cooperation, precise enough to make the larger idea believable. A seed does not need a better sales pitch. It needs somewhere to grow.

The price of getting it there

In April 2026, Perlman was speaking publicly about another part of the movement of goods: Rhode Island’s truck toll model. He argued that costs imposed on trucking would ultimately reach consumers. He also objected to the effect on transport used for charitable deliveries.

Those were his objections in a disputed public policy debate. Road and bridge funding has its own demands. What makes his intervention relevant to his business story is the attention to the journey between warehouse, store and recipient. The merchandise cannot perform its useful second act while sitting where nobody needs it.

It is the less photogenic side of a bargain. Someone must pay to move it. For a retailer selling on value, those costs belong in the same calculation as the purchase price. Perlman’s public argument returns to the practical work beneath the cheerful discovery on the shelf.

Another address, another opening

By October 2026, Job Lot described a business with 177 stores across 11 states, nearly 7,000 employees and annual sales exceeding $900 million. Perlman remained its co-founder, principal owner and CEO. In 2024, he had received an Inspiring Leaders award in the CEO category from Inspiring Workplaces.

The next property already had a history. In October 2026, the company announced its purchase of a 43,988-square-foot building in Hamilton, New York. Big Lots had occupied it; Ames had been there before. Job Lot planned to open in spring 2027.

Ames, Big Lots, Job Lot: the address is accumulating retail biographies. Perlman’s business has made room for another chapter. Nearly five decades after the first North Kingstown shop opened, the next opportunity still has a recognizably familiar shape: useful space, an available deal, and customers who may have a reason to walk in.