Nashville/Murfreesboro K-Marts are clean, & well-stocked, albeit a trifle understaffed.
Very little is locked up.
Neither toys nor shoes are overtly trashed.
I am at a loss to hear of your descriptions.
Are you posting from an alternate universe?
The K-marts around here are not like those described in the OP. In cleanliness, selection, quality, etc., they’re about on a par with Wal-mart, but less crowded. Obviously, quality must vary a lot from store to store.
You hit the nail on the head. Kmart is smelly, crappy, and understaffed… but it’s not evil. I don’t get that same sort of ominous feeling walking into a Kmart as I do in a Walmart or even a Target (and I do shop at Target). The employees are surly and rude, just like minimum wage register jockeys should be! You never get the feeling that your brain is being slowly washed into buying the new hottest DVDs or appliances; at a Kmart, the DVDs etc are set up in utilitarian piles; in fact, you sometimes have to ask to get them! No coercion here, just people getting their shitty shopping done so they can get on with their shitty lives. It’s the chronic depressive’s discount retail store.
You should find your “Christmas spirit” at home, not at a store where they have to pay people to be there.
Most Kmarts in the area could trap a F-14 in the center of the store and not hit anything.
I have heard reports that the local Kmart has shelves of 5.25 floppies in the back room.
For full price. :smack:
You have that backwards.
Kmart bought Sears. Not the other way around.
I do get Christmas spirit at home, but I meant the holiday displays at K-Mart were so sad looking. The trees were crooked and there were smashed ball ornaments, and tinsel all over the floor. Very sad. I just looked at a Martha Stewart item on the shelf and thought how could she lend her name to crap like K-Mart.
Technically speaking the ownership group whose most prominent property is Kmart took control of Sears. They are already cutting help in some Sears but not all. They claim they have no intent to merge the two.
I suspect they will end up closing some Sears stores but keep the ones in better areas and try to keep Sears as Sears.
In my area the Sears in Neptune is already heading downhill quick but there has been little noticeable effect for the ones in Freehold & Middletown.
Neptune is lower Middle Class and the others are Upper Middle Class. I see a pattern, but I might be wrong.
Jim {Who loves Sears and was sadden by the buy out}
That’s funny. There is a K-Mart here in St. Pete whose name was changed to Sears Essnetials awhile back.
Sears has a better rep, if its a good neighborhood, they might want to go with Sears and relagate Kmart to other areas. I think Federated did this with Macy’s for a while.
Jim
I have a theory. If you compared the responses in this thread to the responses in a thread about Wal-Mart, I suspect that you’d find a strong correlation. The K-Marts around here are like the Wal-Marts: dirty, depressing, and staffed by employees who quite obviously don’t care. Apparently, there are areas of the country where these stores are a respectable place to shop, but this isn’t such an area. Target and Meijers are both infinitely better places to shop.
I am not sure you understand the type of K-Mart store in the OP. The closest large store to my house is a K-Mart. You can barely push your way through the front door without feel the depression winds in your face. The lighting is odd and makes it have this ghost-town circa 1975 effect. There are out of season items scattered around randomly throughout the store. Some whole shelves of products are simply empty for no apparent reason. There is never a cashier at any of the many cashier stands. To check out, you have to go to the Customer Service desk and explain that you want to buy something from them and why. Sometimes, there is no one at the customer service desk so they will turn on a self-checkout thing so you can do what you need too. I am 100% serious when I say that I am hesitant to go in there even when it is the closest store because it affects me emotionally for quite some time.
I have been in over 100 Wal-Mart stores all over the U.S. Some are better than others but they all tend to be well-run and failry efficient even if some of the stores are trashier than others. I have never seen a Wal-Mart 1/4 as bad as the K-Mart’s we are describing.
Our K-Mart is clean, the help is friendly, and the store is well stocked with familiar brand names. I buy cat litter there and gardening stuff, and once in awhile a small appliance.
I’m baffled at how they stock the place though. A couple of years ago they had replacement bulbs for some Christmas light strings, but they didn’t stock the light string. They also had a three or four rows of window curtains but no curtain rods (which was what I needed) and when I asked, the manager said they weren’t stocking rods anymore. WTF?
The only thing I wouldn’t buy there is women’s clothes and shoes. That’s some ugly, crappy stuff.
The K-Mart near me has always been like the OP, at least for 15 years or so.
Dirty, smelly (WTF is that smell? Don’t they ever clean it?) and disorganized.
Ten or 12 check-out lanes, but maybe only 2 of them open at a time. Rude and uninformed sale help.
Everything locked up, but you see that a lot now.
Even at the grocery store, baby formula and razor blades are locked up.
There’s a nice big new KMart near my house (Edgewater, MD) which is always shiny and clean, with neatly stocked shelves, nothing scattered on the floor, appropriate seasonal displays, and friendly and helpful staff. My major objections are that they don’t carry nearly the variety of merchandise they need for such a big store, so the same thing can frequently be found in four or five different areas of the store (such as Rubbermaid plastic bins, which take up a lot of room) to make it look like they carry more stuff than they do; and their prices are highly inconsistent. For example, anything in their electronics department costs more than almost anywhere else in town, while their cat food prices can’t be beat. So I just have to shop selectively, but I shop there quite often because it’s actually a nice place to shop.
It’s the first time I’ve ever seen such a nice KMart, however, I have to admit. The last two I’ve seen were like the one described in the OP, so I was quite surprised to find such a nice one near me.
The nearest Wal-Mart, by contrast, is crowded, dirty, poorly stocked, and generally a pain in the rear to get to, find a parking place, find what you need, and get out of. I avoid it unless I want something that noplace else carries, which in the six months I’ve lived here has been exactly two items. So they’re pretty easy to avoid.
I shop at KMart for all kinds of smal
IMHO, it may be partially the neighborhood and the clientele, but it’s mostly the corporate and local management attitude. And the pay scale. And the level of staffing. If you’re only paying a little above minimum wage, most of the staff is going be one or more of the following: (a) not too bright (b) not well educated © not very motivated.
My parents for a long time lived in Dutchess County, which is one of the richer counties in Upstate NY and the Kmart was the same as the OP. I live in Albany County, and the Kmart is worse than the OP. The Kmart in Saratoga County - avery ritzy, high-class place - is filthier if anything. I refuse to believe it’s the neighborhood. Kmart no longer teaches good customer service or indeed even cares about it, if they ever did.
That’s pretty much what the local K-Mart is like. It’s not particularly filthy. It’s just not staffed enough to do everything. The racks tend to be sloppy. Things aren’t very well stocked. Good luck finding somebody to open up a locked case for you.
I only swing by when I’m looking for something at a reduced price.
If it’s the one I’ve seen, the neighborhood ain’t nothin special. It sits on a lot across the street from a UHaul joint and until recently, the parking lot was so potholed it looked like a well used mine field. They have fixed, to be fair about it. Of course, I could be seeing a different place than the one mentioned.
Yeah, that’s the one. It’s on MLK in St. Pete.