What I don’t understand about K Mart is the pricing. It not only isn’t cheap, it’s the most expensive. Sure they have some cheap crap, and they have sales, but when you price their regular stuff…cleaning products, limited food stuff, ect…it’s the highest priced stuff in town. Like Manhattan bodega, airport shop expensive. I don’t understand their model, which is basically:
Come here only for the sales because we’ll gouge you mercilessly on everything else.
And yea, the one in my town is the same as mentioned: Mostly empty, poorly stocked, totally self serve, and always 4 or 5 people in line at the only open checkout.
This is what we do where I work. We have to refer to micrometers occasionally, using the standard QWERTY keyboard. And no, nobody here is going to bother with convoluted ALT combinations or strange fonts to make a mu character appear. We abbreviate it as um, and anybody capably of understanding a technical report knows what we mean.
Our local Kmart was razed to the ground very shortly after its closing.
I can’t believe Kmart – or Sears, for that matter – has managed to hang on this long. It’s been a decade or so since I set foot in a Kmart, but the experience was very much like those described in this thread. I did go to Sears a few years ago – I had a gift card – and, other than the hardware department, the place looked like it was about to close. It was horribly understaffed, and the clothing sections were pitifully understocked.
What amazed me most was Sears closing down the catalog. I would have thought they, of all the retailers (along with Penny’s and M. Wards), should have made the jump to online shopping with the least trouble.
Amazon was founded a year after the catalog went bye-bye.
This is exactly right. Walmart was waaaay ahead of the game in terms of state-of-the-art inventory management and distribution systems. In contrast, Kmart was using woefully outdated versions of the same.
I remember reading a comparison some years back. I wish I knew where to find the cite. Anyway, at the time, Kmart was ordering inventory by having a human walk around and enter orders based on what was on the shelf. “Oh, the shelf is empty. Better order some more Right Guard.” The Right Guard would show up on a truck a week later. The results were a lot of out-of-stock items and money tied up in inventory that somebody over-ordered.
Walmart, in stark contrast, used its humongous database and sophisticated analytical tools to predict when the Right Guard would be sold out. They could have more Right Guard in the store and ready to be stocked before that last one sold out.*
Other big retailers have learned well from Walmart’s ingenious inventory and distribution innovations, and have made big investments in their own systems. Kmart, however, hasn’t kept up.
*Of course, Walmart has run itself into a new set of problems because of its short-sighted zeal for cost-cutting. That Right Guard may be sitting in that back room and ready to be stocked, but the shelf is empty because they don’t have enough manpower to actually get it on the shelf.
I worked at a K-Mart when I was a teenager, in the photo department. The way we found out we should order more stuff was when people would come in on the weekend responding to ads for stuff on sale. They’d run an ad for a particular camera that we normally had 3 or 4 of, max. Dozens of people would come to buy one and get pissed at us because we didn’t have them in stock. Had to send 'em up to the customer service counter for a rain check. That made us look like asses and was crappy for morale.
Only good thing I remember was the guy that ran security who, after numerous announcements for people to take their purchases to the checkout at closing, would announce over the P.A. “Release the Dogs”! The laggards would scurry out in a big hurry.
I live 5 minutes from a K-Mart and have been there maybe twice in the last 15 years. It’s poorly lit, dirty, incredibly cluttered, and it seems like all the products are half open or somehow torn or dented. The staff are surly (if you ever see any of them), it’s hard to find anything, and the whole experience is just depressing.
Last week I was in the shopping center with said K-Mart buying something at the grocery store next door, and suddenly remembered that I needed a small appliance. “Maybe I’ll just walk over to the K-Mart and see what they have. . .nah.” Got back in the car and drove 5 miles to Target, where it’s clean, well-lit, has a wider selection of products, and has staff that will actually help you find things and not act like you’re an asshole for asking where the Dustbusters are.