Ha HA HA HAHAHAH! K-Mart dies.

The BBQ Pit
1

Things not to do to stay in business: The K-Mart approach.

  1. Hey, you had years and years and years when you were the only game in town. So you got away with no capital improvements. And making your staff (which once included me) dislike you in a general way. And a dirty store. And incompetent security. Their only catches that I know of in the six months I worked there were one teen mother cashier who screwed her own life into the toilet, and got caught with her hand in the till, and one guy who was so drunk we’re not even sure he was trying to steal. He was most certainly too stupid to realize busting open the cases was a crime.

  2. Then the Wal-Mart starts to muscles in with a hge superstore. And the Kroger next door adds in some space and remodels a bit. And you know, there are a lot of specialty stores coming in. Lots of very good specialty stores.

  3. Your solution? Take you overpriced goods and crappy store and MAKE IT BIGGER. BNecause obviously you’ll have more customers that way, right? And you can sell ore food items, and you’ll show those Walmartians who their daddy is, right?

  4. Apparently, you forget that WalMart is your daddy.

  5. May I reccomend that hiring some more staff and making efforts to retain more people than 50+ year old women with no other skills might help?

Anecdote: When there was going to be a big snow, I went by work to pick up something. They asked if I could stay. I said I’d have to check with m’folks, since I was but a wee lad at the time and my p’rents might be planning something fun, like global conquest, etcetera. I came all the way back to buy some buy some video game, and to tell you happily, NO, Iwon’t be staying. Despite the 400+ people buying their toilet paper in case THE BIG ONE might hit.* I hate your crappy store, the mind-numbing tedium of the work. I feel vaguely guilt about abandoning my fellow co-workers, but not wnough to lose any sleep.

*THE BIG ONE is equal to about one inch of snow. Ice optional.

  1. I got fired from there once. Best damned thing that ever happened to me. Should have realized it at the time.

  2. Your closed now. I get a thrill of joy every time I see that huge, but entirely lifeless hulk of your dead, stinkin carcass. I claim VICTORY!, for I have a goopd student job in the tech world. I have learned new skills, while you have become a putrid, pallid mess.

2

Well, at least your experience hasn’t left you bitter.

3

Are you saying you don’t like K-Mart?

It’s because they didn’t revive the Blue Light Special like they should have, isn’t it?

4

50 + year old unskilled ladies need jobs too. Maybe their spouse passed away, maybe divorced, maybe just left out in the cold with no other way to support themselves. Just remember, everyone gets old.

5

Gee, bandit, maybe you should tell us how you REALLY feel?

6

Does this job require keyboard skills??

7

Open up! Share your feelings!

8

They’re not all closed. Was it just that particular store?

9

That’s true. And they were mostly very nice and pleasant people. However, if those are the only ones they can retain, I submit they are looking at a serious turnover problem. WHich isn’t a problem anymore, aince no one works there at all.

joy

Rarely. I’m afraid I forget my spelling when I get carried away. You should see the mistakes I catch first…

Its kind of funny, really. The Ignles down the road sells nothign bu groceries. Well, sometimes movies and magazines, but I doubt they represent a significatn source of income. Its cheap, ordinary food that people always need. Likewise, the Fresh Market nearby sells good-quality foods at reasonable prices. Both of those stores will survive despite being less than a mile away from the giant Kroger, because they are convienient and useful.

K-mart on the other hand, was neither. They couldn’t specialize, 'cuz THEY wanted to be they big store in town. Well, everyone who could went over to the other store, and all those enlargements (which of course, were supposed to make it look exactly like Wal-mart) just revealed how empty the store was. Even with few cashiers, they never had a real line. Plus, the Kroger next door cut into their sales on sundries and toiletries.

10

Kmart closed 326 stores earlier this year, and 284 stores last year. Several of their stores in this area have closed, though unfortunately not the one near my house.

You’re right that they’re not all closed yet, but it seems to me that they’re dying a slow death. Better hurry and get the rest of that Martha Stewart paint I need for my bedroom.

11

Oh, and it’s “Klaatu barada nikto.”

12

I calls 'em like I sees 'em.

13

We don’t really have K-mart in NYC, maybe 1 or 2.

14

Why were you fired? Just curious.

And I worked there for oh, four years. At the end, just the thought of going to work gave me panic attacks. I couldn’t stop crying while I WAS working.

I STILL have nightmares about that place. (Literally-I have dreams all the time where for some reason, even though I quit, they demand I come in right this minute, and I start having panic attacks again).

Kmart sucks.

15

50 year old ladies with no other skills? What other skills would they need than the ones they need to work at K-mart? If they work at K-mart? That was just mean.

16

Ahh, K-mart.

Gather round, children, and hear a tale of the Golden Age when heros, err, surfed the Internet.

Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, like, maybe, 1997, there was a big company, Kmart, with a big PR firm, and a little student at a little university, Brandeis. The brave little student wrote some short stories for his creative writing class. His friends found them amusing so he posted them on his university website.
You can read them, archived for posterity, here.

The big company did not like the little student’s stories. The big company claimed that the little student’s stories were “disrespectful” and took the “K-mart” trademark in vain. K-mart believed people should only think of the “K-mart” trademark in connection with officially approved K-mart thoughts. Their big PR firm sent a nasty letter to the little university. The little university – named after one of the great architects of U.S. first ammendment jurisprudence – folded up like a cheap table and promptly pulled the student’s stories from its website.

Unfortunately for K-mart, many other people liked the little student’s stories and, unlike Brandeis, had actual endoskeletons. These people posted the little student’s stories on hundreds of sites and laughed at K-mart’s threats. Much discussion ensued. The overwhelming legal consensus was that K-mart must have accidentally assigned the “Kmart sucks” problem to its night cleaning crew rather than its legal department because anyone with ten minutes worth of legal training in intellectual property law would realize instantly that K-mart would have better luck suing Sesame street for its expose on the letter “K” and the number “9.”

K-mart gave up and many tens of thousands of people read the little student’s stories that would not have ever seen them had K-mart simply ignored them.

And now K-mart, in its death throes, is inspiring a whole new round of, err, creativity. It’s, like, the circle of life or something.

17

The one here seems to be doing just fine. They closed the stores as part of their bankruptcy deal, didn’t they? Closing them allowed them to restructure. It doesn’t mean they’ll need to close all of the stores, and it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily dying as a company.

18

Maybe not, dan. But if someone gave me K-Mart stock today, I’d sell it before it lost another nickel of its value.

Restructuring or no, I can’t see how K-Mart has a prayer to survive. They’re trapped in between Wal-Mart and Target, both of which do what they do pretty well. Meanwhile, K-Mart really doesn’t run its stores well at all, and it’ll take more than a restructuring to fix that. They’re doomed.

19

Has anybody else noticed that Wal-Mart treats their employees like shit? Bad benefits too? I’m not talking about managers and such, just the regular employees (the ones that do that actual work).

They keep doing that shit and they’ll end up like K-Krap too.

20

They’re doomed today. Tomorrow (okay, six months), they might not be. The whole purpose of bankruptcy is for businesses to try to get out of the mess they’re in without having creditors kill them first. In some cases, it works, and the company emerges better than ever. In many cases, it doesn’t and is merely a harbinger of the end.

I can’t remember the two airlines, but there were two that filed over the past year or so (USAirways and American?), and one made it through the ordeal better than ever, and the other did not.