Our lead singer’s first and middle names were Kenneth Mark. He went by Mark, and signed his name K. Mark. So, we coulda been K-Mark and the Blue Light Specials…
That’s pretty cool! Wonder if he was called “K Mark” when he was younger and (subtly) encouraged the band’s choice of name?
I knew a guy back in the day who was named Kyle. When he was a kid, he loved Roadrunner cartoons, so his friends often called him “Kyle E. Woyote.” He tried to get a band together and call it “Kyle E. Woyote and the Roadrunners,” but the practical side of things (i.e., he was a crappy musician and singer) put a quick stop to it.
The local Sears near me used to be a free-standing store on Route 1. Then it became the anchor store for The New England Shopping Center (an outdoor strip mall). Then there was a drastic rebuild and it became one of the anchors for Square One Mall. A couple of years ago it closed.
The couple who owned our house before we bought it apparently got almost everything from Sears. Yo can see the stickers and brand names on all the stuff they left behind. They even apparently bought the house siding from Sears, and had Sears services for things at the house.
We bought clothes and some appliances there, too. Not to mention lots of gifts. But then they closed one of the two floors down, and eventually the other one, and that end of the mall no longer has a major anchor (although the Best Buy isn’t too far away).
It’s weird to see a store with so much legacy just disappear. The K-mart wasn’t as big a loss, but the house seems to have Sears written into its DNA.
But how would Calvin’s Dad explain basic biology without a Blue Light Special?
The KMart up the hill from that Sears is the one I worked in, the one that’s now some Home Depot of Shitty Flooring
Yeah, but at least the aisles in that revamped store are clean.
Of course, some houses literally have Sears written in their DNA, give that they’re kit homes purchased via mail order from the retailer roughly a hundred years ago.
Sorry. The snide comment was unwarranted. I’m a floor snob, and a few times I’ve gone in there I’ve been unimpressed by what they carry. It looks like someone expanded the Home Depot flooring section into an entire store.
I will say, they DO stock the silicone underlayment paper, which isn’t always easy to find in brick & mortar stores.
A couple more Kmart / Sears anecdotes:
In the '90s, my wife’s family owned a cabin up in central Wisconsin. By that point, I’d generally given up on ever shopping at a Kmart back home in Illinois, for the reasons already noted in this thread. But, the town near the cabin had a Kmart, and that was actually a really nice, clean store, with up-to-date merchandise, and we’d make a point of shopping there. (It’s gone now, and Google Maps suggests to me that the building is still empty.)
In 2018 or 2019, with Sears circling the drain, I was up in Green Bay, visiting my parents, for Christmas. There was some electronic adapter that we needed (for their stereo, I think), and on December 26th, my dad convinced me to head out into the day-after-Christmas shopping frenzy, to go look for that adapter. He was convinced that Sears would have it, and so, we headed there. Every other store in town was packed, but the local Sears was an utter ghost town. And, no, they didn’t have the adapter. 
If the prvious owner could have bought the house from Sears, he probably would have.
I know he didn’t because all the other houses at my end of the street have the same floor plan, as do lots of houses on parallel streets. That’s the Mark of the Developer, not the Curse of the Sears Pre-Fab.
Chalk me up as another that has an inane, unexplainable nostalgia for brick-and-mortar stores like Sears and Kmart.
I remember trying in vain to get a job at our local Sears when I was 16 or 17. I had just discovered shade-tree mechanics and I really wanted to work in the tool department. That never happened but I got a job at a bookstore in the same mall so on my lunches I would go wander the tool section drooling over all the cool stuff. I absolutely loved it during Christmas as I’m a sucker for kitschy Christmas decor.
Years later when we had our first kid Kmart was our go-to for clothes and diapers and all the rest. I hated – indeed, still hate – WalMart with a passion as everything seemed overly cheap and the place was always crowded with people who stank of cigarettes and cheap perfume and just… ugh. So Kmart it was. sears was too expensive for our poor selves.
When Kmart left the building it was in sat empty for most of decade and only recently has been repurposed into a Winco. The old Sears building – the anchor store of a traditional mall – was gutted, along with the rest of the mall, and turned into a weird strip mall. There’s a Maurices and a Rue 21 (closed now, as well), a hair salon and probably something else I’m forgetting. The only remnants of the Sears that remain from the store is the lube shop. It was sold and the new owner simply put their name on it and continued as usual. It’s still a going concern and looks just like it did when it was part of Sears, minus all the Die Hard signage.
I miss them both but freely admit it’s for nostalgic reasons. I’d likely still do most of my shopping online except the few things I would go to Lowes or HD for.
Floor & Decor? Lumber Liquidators (though that chain is now liquidating itself)?
Yes, it’s Floor & Decor.
I saw this recently. Love the irony. (Despite LL not selling lumber in general and long ago gave up on selling liquidated products from other chains.) Note that apparently some stores are being bought by the original founder’s group but most stores are going bye-bye.
It seems like every shopping mall in the US has one vacant anchor space that used to be a Sears. I’m actually kind of surprised yours actually found a new tenant. The old Sears space at Sunrise Mall (which is pretty much on its death bed itself) is actually listed in the mall directory as Spirit Halloween now, even though they only occupy the space for like one month out of the year.
It really reminds me of “Our prices are Sofa King low!” which I’m pretty sure actually was an SNL sketch.
ETA: Yes it was, although based on a brief Google search it appears to have taken inspiration from a real store.
Ours got razed to make space for a multiplex. This was just before the pandemic hit, and when the dust cleared (as much as it has) the theater chain decided it no longer made financial sense.
Now the area is being restructured as a [gag] “lifestyle center.”
The former Sears at our former location is not just going to get torn down, the county is buying up most of the mall and tearing it all down for “redevelopment” purposes, housing and such. The mall opened in 1984 and was the big mall for the area. Large parts of it have been vacant for a while.
Given it’s underutilization, it was used for filming including a show the kids watched. Seeing the mall they went to when kids in a show that was retro itself was fun and weird for them.
Sears my first attempt at getting a credit card when I was 17. I had a part time job and listed it, but forgot to mention it to my boss.
One day I came in to work and my boss gave me a look. She told me she spoke with Sears, and I’d be getting my card in the mail, but she was pissed off at me for claiming to make more than she did.
My first card too! They were a different size than regular credit cards. The same width but maybe two thirds of the height. Only their cards would fit in their machines used in the old carbon receipt swipers.
I remember there were people with clipboards on the college campus saying that you could apply for a Mastercard so when I was a Sophomore I did. They said that you had to also apply for their other cards too in order to do so. Of course I was turned down for the Mastercard but I got the Sears card, a Shell gas card and a Zales Diamond card. Eventually I got the Mastercard my senior year. It turned out that the only people granted Mastercards were seniors with Engineering majors which was a minor scandal and they had to change their policy or not solicit on campus.
A little over twenty years later during my divorce process I went to cancel all of my joint cards with the soon to be ex and I canceled the Sears card and the Shell card but couldn’t find any way to cancel the Zales card. To this day, now forty years later, I still have $500 in Zales credit.
Yes!! I remember their card fondly.