i know a certain departed doper is somewhere rejoicing over this but I find this a bit sad …although I remember the last few years of our poor kmart …
Oh no !
I shop at that store all the time when I’m visiting my family. Prices there are actually much higher than one would expect at a K-Mart, but still much lower than shops in the surrounding area. (It’s Bridgehampton; go figure!)
What a bit of bad news !
I still fondly remember the kmart commercials with Penny Marshall and Rosie O’Donnell.
1996 wasn’t that long ago. At least in my memory.
When the KMart near us shut down they had a final sale. You could buy anything, including the fixtures. I bought some shirts and shorts for ninety cents a piece. In retrospect, I overpaid.
I knew that at one time back in the 90s we had a K-mart distribution center here in town, but what I didn’t know until recently was that it was still operating. My grandson got a job there several months back. When he told me that’s where he was working I was very surprised. I said “I didn’t know they were still around!”
I had no idea they still had one open.
The K-mart near where I now live closed years ago. The store was pretty much of a mess. I understand that they were understaffed and didn’t pay well, so it was hard to keep the aisles clear and the shelves orderly, wich probably contributed to the store’s downfall. The store was long ago gutted and turned into somethiung else.
Our last Kmart closed eight or nine years ago. It was walking distance from where I worked and I’d occasionally get the idea to quickly grab something at lunch. I always regretted it. It was unkempt and difficult to find stuff and made me feel claustrophobic. It was replaced with a beautiful Target. A world of difference.
Those were good stores in their day. They had great camera departments. My wife worked at Kmart when she was in high school and remembers it (mostly) fondly. She didn’t actually work for Kmart, however. Some of their departments were leased-out to other companies who staffed them independently.
When they closed the last Kmart, did they offer-up the building as a blue light special?
To get an idea of what a K-Mart looked like in the 1970s and 1980s, look at Wal-Mart or Target today. Maybe not as big (stores hadn’t quite super-sized yet), but with all kinds of cool stuff.
My first Commodore 64 came from K-Mart, with my hard-earned high-school-kid pay.
They had a little sit-down restaurant as well.
Sad to see them go, but not the first in a very long line of large department stores to die.
In New Jersey, I remember K-Mart was a nicer store, and the “lesser store” was Jamesway–they went defunct in the 1990s. The K-Mart slow death is following the same pattern as the Jamesway slow-death, down to the empty store with the fixtures being sold.
I bought a portable 12 inch tv from Kmart in the early 90’s.
Two months later it got zapped during a thunderstorm.
I had my receipt and Kmart allowed the return. Went home with the same model in a sealed box.
I always remembered the fair treatment.
It is sad that Kmart and Sears couldn’t adapt to Internet sales quickly enough.
Remember also that somehow K-Mart bought Sears. While not the worst merger in history (that still might be AOL-TimeWarner) it definitely failed.
Back in the early 90s a woman I worked with had a part time job working at the K-mart returns counter in the evenings. She used to tell me stories about all the crazy stuff people got away with. Returned merchandise without receipts or any proof of purchase, stuff that wasn’t even something the store carried, stuff that had obviously been stolen and brought back… store policy was full refund. Management didn’t even seem to care.
I’m sure it succeeded in that Eddie Lampert made lots of money by selling off the real estate, at the cost of two well-known national retailers. The stores could have done so much better with some money invested in them.
T Y F S O K
My age (62) and location (Detroit) meant SS Kresge and K Mart were a big part of my life.
We used to have a K-Mart nearby. Then again, we also used to have a Bradlee’s, Caldor’s, Ames, and Zayre’s.
Are you in Connecticut? Because that list of stores sounds like where I grew up. We also shopped at Alexander’s Department Store regularly. My parents loved that place.
This, exactly. Lampert destroyed both chains; he wasn’t interested in investing in them, but only in generating profits from selling their locations.
In 2006, the ad agency where I worked had won the Walmart account, then had it taken away from us: Walmart decided that the Chief Marketing Officer they had brought in from outside the organization wasn’t who they wanted after all, and after accusing her of some penny-ante ethics violations during the pitch, got rid of her, and voided our contract.
A few months later, Kmart approached us. “Hey, you know that work you were going to do for Walmart? Would you do it for us?” And, thus, we became Kmart’s agency-of-record for several years, without a pitch. We did some good, fun work for them, but it couldn’t overcome consumers’ perceptions of their stores as being old, tired, and full of cheap merchandise. This one below ran little (if at all) on TV, but went viral online.
For those interested in the death watch of Sears, there are 9 stores left including one in Puerto Rico.
That’s some fine retail store management there Eddie.
Lampert wasn’t ever a retail guy; he’s a financier. His approach in running those companies was clear: wring money out of them, with as little actual investment in them as ongoing retailers as possible.
That ad was promoting their “Shop My Way” service, which was, I thought, kind of useless. By that point, Amazon was already a thing so they weren’t offering anything special.