Once a retail giant, Kmart nears extinction after closure

[Eugene]

Source: Associated Press

Once a retail giant, Kmart nears extinction after closure

By DAVID PORTER
April 11, 2022

AVENEL, N.J. (AP) — The familiar sights and sounds are still there: the scuffed and faded floor tiles, the relentless beige-on-beige 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 COVID-19 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, New Jersey, picked over by bargain hunters as the store prepares to close its doors for good April 16.

Once it shutters, the number of Kmarts in the U.S. — once well over 2,000 — will be down to three in the continental U.S. and a handful of stores elsewhere, according to multiple reports, in a retail world now dominated by Walmart, Target and Amazon.

-snip-

Read more: https://apnews.com/article/business-new-york-city-new-york-new-jersey-lifestyle-9e06f958526665df9f7c9422f67516ef


People walk into a Kmart in Avenel, N.J., Monday, April 4, 2022. When the New Jersey store closes its doors on April 16, it will leave only three remaining U.S. locations for the former retail powerhouse. It's a far cry from the chain's heyday in the 1980s and ‘90s when it had more than 2,000 stores and sold product lines endorsed by Martha Stewart and former “Charlie's Angel” Jaclyn Smith. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

[Thomas Hurt]

1. Huh, thought it was already dead and buried years ago.

[Demovictory9]

3. No.the.last one in so cal closed last year..it was a shell of a kmart

Full of.weird brands i had.never.heard of..bargain rate like a dollar store

[ProudMNDemocrat]

2. Just like Woolworth's, KMart is almost gone.

The quality of merchandise went downhill many years ago. Walmart is no better.

[bucolic_frolic]

4. Kmart made a run in the 1990s when Floyd Hall was CEO

The peak was the remodelings, at about $600k per store, with food pantry up front, and new house brands called American Fare, plus Martha Stewart household and gardening goods, as well as Kathy Ireland and Jaclyn Smith clothing lines. I think they had a guy called Jerry Baker for gardening too.

But the press was lousy. Said they didn't have a computerized inventory and never knew what was really on the shelves because the checkout tapes didn't update quantities. And lack of capital, and proprietary real estate strip malls with Kmart as anchor.

As the sharks circled there were rumors vulture capitalists wanted the real estate. It all crashed when a new CEO came in, hired new marketers and started a price war with Walmart. They went first BK about 5 months later.

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/26/business/kmart-saying-ex-chief-misled-board-wants-payments-returned.html

Did Conaway and Lampert know one another? Lampert HQ was CT. Conaway was former CEO of RI-based CVS. Hmmmmm. The stars aligned.

[Srkdqltr]

5. Similar to Sears. Keep up or die.

[PoliticAverse]

6. Nothing quite more ironic than a company that became famous...

for letting people order from their homes and delivering products to them being done in...
by the innovation of companies letting people order from their homes and delivering products to them.

[Srkdqltr]

9. I thought that also. Penny's and Montgomery Wards too.

[Eugene]

8. Sears and K-Mart are the same corpse.

Merged in 2004, run into the ground by a hedge fund and bankrupt in 2018.

[Warpy]

10. Sears had already sold off a lot of their best signature stuff by the time KMart bought them

KMart didn't get much for overextending itself except their large appliances, and who's going to buy those at a KMart?

I'll miss Kmart, their stock was better quality than Wally's and their prices often cheaper.

All the good middling sort of chains are going under because nobody's in the middle any more.

[Chainfire]

7. And before K-Mart it was J. M. Fields.

I look forward to the day that somebody beats Wal-Mart down. I am betting it will be Amazon. Shut out China and neither of them has any product to sell.

[Warpy]

11. You want that to happen, find a way to get the GQP out of the government

and find a way to make "conservative" a dirty word that means beggaring the American people to fatten a few oppressors.

WalMart will curl up and die when people who put in a day's work get a day's living wage, meaning they'll be able to afford alternatives to Wally's and The Dollar Store.

WalMart might be stepping in it right now, they've upended a lot of their stores to make them more amenable to online shoppers. That means in person shoppers can't find a damned thing in stores that have been construction sites for over a year. Give people an alternative, they'll take it.

Republicans who fucked us over have been kicked out before, it's not an impossible task. My guess is that if the USSC overturns Roe or if they just let Texas style vigilante laws stand, the GQP will lose the fundagelicals, who disproportionately live in states where such appalling laws have been or will be passed.

A lot of them admit they prefer the Democrats, "but them pore baybeez."