Like a boxer on it’s last legs Kmart stores continue to close stores across the nation, yet refuses to give up the fight.
Have you been in one lately? It reeks of the stench of death!
I say 3 years from today ALL Kmarts will be shuttered. What say you?
The cockroach of American retailing will never die.
More seriously I bet they’ve got one more round of bankruptcy and vulture capitalists buying the residue for a penny on the dollar then sweating it while selling off the land under it.
So a tiny number of stores belonging to KMart v4 (or will that be v5?) will be here 3 years from now. But not too long after that.
I could also see them remaining a minor regional player in someplace poor like Appalachia or the rural Deep South. Someplace even Walmart doesn’t find worth invading but where KMart already has a few stores.
There are many different regional crap-marts that have 5 dingy stores in 5 dingy towns. KMart will probably end that way: with a whimper, not a bang.
They are already dead to me.
I had a bad experience there a few years ago on a day I was already in a bitchy mood. I swore I’d never set foot in a Kmart again, and I haven’t. A couple of times I’ve hated myself for making the vow, driving fifteen miles to a Walmart when I could have gone to the nearby Kmart, but hey.
I think the real question is: who will last longer, Kmart or Radio Shack?
Radio Shack will live forever. It has no competitors.
The reason is simple: nobody knows what they do, nobody ever goes there, nobody pays attention to them.
That makes their stores the perfect cover doing something profitable, like drug dealing, or money laundering. 
I say 10 years. I remember how Zayre’s, Montgomery Ward (I don’t consider Ward’s the same place), and others managed to hang in well after their time and I have a feeling Kmart could do even better in terms of a slow and lingering death.
Kmart has already hung on well after their time, and has been for a decade now. I predict prior to 2020 they’ll be completely gone.
I realize the linked article is from the Onion, but up until recently there were more RadioShack locations than Chipotle locations. There are currently more than 1,700 RadioShack stores and just over 2,000 Chipotle locations.
Well Kmart has been looking like it’s going out of business for at least 25 years, why not another 25 years?
BTW, is anybody shocked Radio Shack is still in business considering all the hype over its bankruptcy last year? Well apparently they’re being rented out to Sprint by another company. Maybe Kmart will end up in the same boat.
I worked at Kmart for about 10 years beginning when I was 16. I worked my way up from the part time stockboy to management (All hail the great and powerful former Assistant Store Manager!). At the time Kmart was known as ‘America’s management training ground’. They were very thorough in training their managers on the finer details of, well, management (Delegation with out follow up is counter productive!). Other businesses, especially retailers, loved to poach Kmart managers. No matter, there were always plenty more in the pipeline.
Then Walmart came in a staked claim to the “low price” category (and a bunch of Kmart managers). Target quickly thereafter staked claim to the “slightly more upscale” category (and more Kmart managers). Big Lots claimed the “salvage/overstock bargain” category. Other specialty stores claimed the home improvement, automotive, and electronics categories. Kmart waffled and seemingly tried to claim “that gray area between all those categories”, which was essentially nothing. Kmart executives never made the decision to go toe-to-toe in any category, instead trying to dabble in several. Now they are worth little more than the real estate they own. A textbook case of how not to run a retail chain in the face of strong competition.
I wish I could say I was prescient enough to bail because I saw this coming, but in truth I quit there because store management was required to transfer every 2-3 years, my time was near and I was in Love (capital “L” since I did marry her) and didn’t want to move away.
Fact: in 1990 Kmart ($32.1 billion in sales) was in a virtual dead heat with Walmart ($32.6 billion ) for largest US retailer. Sears was 3rd at $30 billion. In 2012 the combined Kmart/Sears stores were at $41 billion and no longer in the top 10 US retailers, Walmart increased it’s sales by an order of magnitude to 329 Billion and was 3-fold ahead of the #2 US retailer (Kroger).
ETA: To the question in the OP, I’d say 5-7 years. It will take that long to liquidate the real estate.
I’ll guess they’ll be around for at least five more years.
The remaining store in my area (more below) is always busy.
They closed the Kmart nearest to my home and I sort of miss it. It was never anyone’s favorite but for a quick trip for aluminum foil or laundry detergent, it was convenient. The garden supplies in the spring were actually quite nicely done, plenty of variety and a bargain.
At least they opened something cool in its place:
K Mart is owned by Sears and Sears it the one closing the stores up. We have a
K Mart in my city and so far it has hasn’t been closes . I hate Walmart and don’t feel like going to NH to shop so I use K Mart or Marshall’s . I wonder when Sears will go out of business.
There used to be a K-Mart a mile from my apartment and I spent more money there than at my local Wal-Mart since it was farther away and more crowded and had more annoying ads in-store. However, the time it took for me to check out was around the same as at Wal-Mart since there were more cashiers per shopper than at Wally World, but checking out each customer was much slower so it evened out. Sadly, they closed it down. Now, I go to Target and only go to Wal-Mart if I know of nowhere else to pick something up.
The K-mart nearest me went away last year. I’d only been in it a couple of times - it was cluttered, dirty, and smelled funny. In fact, I’ve always thought that K-marts smelled funny, but this one was particularly bad. I have no idea how they stay in business - eons ago, before I learned better, I would occasionally go in for sales. They were always out of what I wanted, and the rain checks were worthless.
I’ll be surprised if they last longer than 3 years.
Not soon enough. Then there will be space for an Olive Garden! Olive Garden is never coming, is it? 
OK, a Target then!
Since the whole bankruptcy rigmarole, if not before, Kmart has been basically a real estate investment company. The property is their business. The stores are just a way to have something going on at their properties.
They could close down all their stores today and still be in this business. They will only go out of business when they sell of the last parcel. Which may be never.
OTOH, once the stores are shut down, the name of this property group will likely change. I vote for the S.S. Kresge Corporation.
As long as
My mother is still alive
I am still alive.
Christmas is still observed.
They sell underwear at a net profit.
Kmart will be able to hang on.
Ain’t Moms great? 
Hmmm, I wonder how hard it would be to break off additional stores from the existing stores. If they downsize their footprint I could see them surviving as a Dollar Store-style place that also has some clothes. This would work in spaces where they are significantly closer to a lot of people than other big box stores, since they’d be more convenient (like my erstwhile location.)
