Onetime giant nears the end
Kmart once had more than 2,000 retail stores in the US; now it’s down to a handful
AVENEL, N.J. — The familiar sights and sounds are still there: the scuffed and faded floor tiles, the relentless beige-onbeige color scheme, the toddlers’ clothes and refrigerators — and pretty much everything in between.
There’s even a canned recording that begins, “Attention, Kmart shoppers” — except it’s to remind folks about COVID19 precautions, not to alert them to a flash sale over in ladies’ lingerie like days of old.
Many of the shelves are bare, though, at the Kmart in Avenel, picked over by bargain hunters as the store prepares to close its doors for good Saturday.
Once it shutters, the number of Kmarts in the country — once well over 2,000 — will be down to a handful of stores in the U.S and its territories, according to multiple reports, in a retail world now dominated by Walmart, Target and Amazon.
In its heyday, Kmart sold product lines endorsed by celebrities Martha Stewart and Jaclyn Smith, sponsored NASCAR auto races and was mentioned in movies including “Rain Man” and “Beetlejuice.”
The chain cemented a place in American culture with its Blue Light Specials, a flashing blue orb affixed to a pole that would beckon shoppers to a flash sale in progress. Part of its success was due to its early adoption of layaway programs, which allowed customers who lacked credit to reserve items and pay for them in installments.
Kmart had a little bit of everything: You could shop for your kids’ back-to-school supplies, get your car tuned up and grab a meal without leaving.
“Kmart was part of America,” said Michael Lisicky, a Baltimore-based author who has written several books on U.S. retail history. “Everybody went to Kmart, whether you liked it or not. They had everything. You had toys. You had sporting goods. You had candy. You had stationery. It was something for everybody.”
Kmart’s decline has been slow but steady, brought about by years of falling sales, changes in shopping habits and Walmart, which coincidentally began its life within months of Kmart’s founding in 1962.
Struggling to compete with Walmart’s low prices and Target’s trendier offerings, Kmart filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2002 — becoming the largest U.S. retailer to take that step — and said it would close more than 250 stores.
A few years later, hedge fund executive Edward Lampert combined Sears and Kmart and pledged to return them to their former greatness, but the recession and the rising dominance of Amazon contributed in derailing those goals. Sears filed for Chapter 11 in 2018 and has a handful of stores left in the U.S. where it once had thousands.
It didn’t have to end this way, according to Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia University in New York and former CEO of Sears Canada. Trying to compete with Walmart on price was a foolish strategy, he said, and Lampert was criticized for not having a retail background and appearing more interested in stripping the assets of the two chains for their cash value.
“It’s a study in greed, avarice and incompetence,” Cohen said. “Sears should have never gone away; Kmart was in worse shape, but not fatally so. And now they’re both gone.
“Retailers fall by the wayside sometimes because they’re selling things people don’t want to buy,” he said. “In the case of Kmart, everything they used to sell, people are buying, but they’re buying it from Walmart and Target.”