I have fond memories of the local K-Mart having a food court, and the local GC Murphy’s five and dime store having unfinished pine board floors. That last one makes me sound like a pioneer but I’m not even 50 yet!
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K-Marts always used to be a mess, and no one seemed to care. I don’t miss them at all, but I do remember when everyone was trying to be their own version of AOL they had a service called “BlueLight”, which I may have logged onto once.
At least where I live, Walmart is pretty much like any other store. We have two in my community…the “old one,” which is a typical-sized Walmart, and a Super Center, a big all-in-one kind of place like our local Fred Meyer (a Kroger property). Both Walmart stores are well-kept, well-lit, etc. I have to shop both places to get all the things I want. Having two Walmarts in the same community is unusual…I hear usually when they build a super center they leave the old store abandoned while retaining ownership so no one else can move in. Our smaller store is apparently a regional management training store.
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Working at Kmart was my third teenage job. It was actually pretty cushy compared to my first two-- picking shade-grown tobacco, and washing dishes at The Farm Shop. Both of which are also gone or almost gone.
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Or, they no longer have to compete with Kmart, so if you’re going to a lower price B&M store, they have less competition.
That was probably after the acquisition by vulture capital and subsequent downslope. Before then, K-marts were clean and organized. Much more so than Walmart and with better inventory than Target (which often has whole shelves with near-zero inventory for weeks at a time).
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To me they all smelled like the popcorn that they sold near the front doors. The idea of K-mart, and that smell, are inseparable to me.
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The first official Kmart store opened in my backyard in 1962, two years before I existed.
Blue Light Specials were part of my childhood. I remember being in stores when they would make the announcement over the PA and then the stampede to buy whatever it was whether you needed it or not.
Their headquarters were also in my backyard until 2005 and a big part of Detroit.
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For me, that’s Sears. Kmart always had an I-cee machine near the front.
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Oz also has Woolworths.
It’s the retail equivalent of marsupials, outcompeted everywhere else, they have found a safe home Down Under.
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I worked there for 9 years…2 years of high school, 6 years (and 3 majors) of college, and a year of “oh my god this cannot be my full time job”.
They kept me through college by keeping my salary and benefits the same as long as I could work at least one weekend a month (2 preferred). Since I was decently over 10$/hr and had 2 weeks of paid vacation, I would work 40hr weeks all summer and the first two weeks back to school I’d take as Vacation (since they figured vacation time based on average of prior 8 weeks labor). Thanksgiving, Xmas break, most spring breaks…I needed the paycheck.
PS. I’m with generic_name on it being “pretty cushy”. My prior job (age 14-16) had been picking tomatoes on a farm (how green can an arm get???), or turning melons, or hoeing or haying or other. And that day started MUCH earlier…
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But Target became roadkill.
K-Mart’s collapse began in the 1980s. While their smaller and larger competitors were busy automating and custom integrating every aspect of their operations, K-Mart refused to spend money on computer systems. They ran books on green ledger paper; they shipped materials to stores based on estimated inventories; trucks carried paper manifests that may or may not have accurately described their contents, etc.
By the late 1980s stores had trailers sitting in their docks for months at a time, acting as leaking tiny warehouses of stuff they could never sell. Much of it was eventually destroyed by mold!
It’s as if they believed the IBM salesmen who promised their POS systems saying “our back end will produce all the reports you need”, without realizing the shitty IBM microsystems were only capable of supporting chains with maybe a dozen (or fewer) locations.
As they descended rapidly into oblivion, management was only too happy to sell to anyone with cash, even a predator like Eddie Lamprey.
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I’d pay attention to the Kmart in Guam. It’s been the world’s busiest thanks to tourism from Japan and it’s still there.
Sears
Kmart
RadioShack
All headed by Julian C. Day prior to their death throes.
Has he ever run a retailer which survived?
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K-Mart was always the kind of place where the people who weren’t classy enough for Walmart would go.
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200 Searses?? Where’d you get the extra zero? Last I checked in December, there were less than 20 Sears stores left, and at least two have closed since.
