Kmart store slated to close
Spokesman for parent company sees mid-December shutdown
The Kmart on St. Michael’s Drive was still bustling Tuesday, but it won’t be busy for long.
Transform Holdco LLC, the new parent company of the Kmart and Sears brands, announced Tuesday the Santa Fe Kmart and a Las Cruces Sears store are scheduled for closure in December as part of a nationwide shutdown of 100 stores. That’s in addition to 26 store closures in October, announced a few weeks ago.
The St. Michael’s Drive corridor where Kmart is located has been the topic of an on-and-off city revitalization effort, aimed at redeveloping the largely commercial zone, lined with strip malls and parking lots, into a bike- and pedestrian-friendly community with more housing.
Tranform Holdco, also known as TransformCo, acquired Sears Holdings Corps. earlier this year, after the Illinois-based retailer filed for bankruptcy and closed nearly 200 stores. Its former chairman, Edward Lampert, reached a $5.3 billion deal with TransformCo to keep 425 stores open, the New York Times reported in January, but multimillion-dollar losses continued this year.
“After careful review, we have made the difficult but necessary decision to close the Kmart store in Santa Fe, N.M.,” TransformCo spokesman Larry Costello said in an emailed statement. “We encourage customers to continue shopping on Kmart.com for all their
product needs.”
Liquidation sales at Kmart will begin in mid-September, and the shutdown is planned for mid-December, Costello said.
Tuesday afternoon, long lines of customers taking advantage of lingering Labor Day sales on jeans, shoes and other items stretched from four Kmart registers.
Employees declined to comment on the closure announcement, saying company officials prohibited them from speaking to reporters. One employee said workers had received notice Friday; the employee wasn’t sure if the company would offer severance pay.
A manager, who declined to give his name, referred all questions to TransformCo’s corporate communications office. He would not confirm a closing date or the number of employees affected.
“I still have a job I gotta do,” he said.
Costello did not answer questions about how many employees at the Santa Fe store would lose their jobs.
The 2017 closure of Sears, a onetime anchor store at the Santa Fe Place mall, and the loss of Albuquerque locations were casualties of the national chain’s downsizing as online sales and fierce competition from Target and Walmart dominated the retail market.
Meanwhile, Sears Holdings Corp. still owes about $46 million to creditors amid an ongoing dispute over which part of the company will pay up, according to the most recent Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
In New Mexico, Kmart locations remain only in Farmington and Hobbs. Sears will continue to operate stores in Taos, Silver City, Ruidoso Downs, Hobbs, Farmington, Carlsbad and Belen.