Sears was for sure not done any favors by the private equity backed “reorganization leadership” who nevertheless collected huge bonuses. I’m sure the Kmart side wasn’t in great shape either. But they weren’t in great shape on their own, private equity tends to go after companies in distress because they are cheaper to manipulate.
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Attention K-Mart shoppers shopper.
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You had different KMarts than I recall. I always thought they were messy and random, and this was in their heyday
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Came here for this, left satisfied
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That’s the S-Mart Guarantee!
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Searsopodes.
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Seariously?
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Searsiously!
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I’m old but I remember that until the early 1990s, Walmart wasn’t really a thing in the Northern US. Like Waffle Houses, you had to go below the Mason-Dixon line to see one before that. Instead, discount stores were dominated in the North by K-mart.
There was a K-Mart near my house. For years it was like a ghost town, with maybe a handful of employees in the store even fewer customers. It was a good go-to store if I didn’t feel like waiting in a checkout line, but it always baffled me why they kept that store open. It must have been a heavy anchor on the leaking K-Mart boat.
Now when I drive past the empty store shell, I can’t help but think that K-Mart “Radio Shacked” themselves right into the ground.
Attention Kmart shoppers: this former employee uploaded Kmart’s 1989-1991 in-store music to the Internet Archive
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So where do the FBI guys buy their sunglasses these days?
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I’ll always have a special place in my heart for Kmart, because when I was a poor grad student c. 2000, their free ad-based dialup internet service saved me money I really needed.
Now, to be clear, this thing was powered by three geriatric hamsters, two of which were exclusively there to serve the ads that took up the bottom third of the 640x480 browser window. You’d wait 10 minutes for a 30-second “video” ad to load, which counted against the 30 minutes you had until it unceremoniously cut the connection and forced you to watch another ad. It made blue carcinogenic smoke come out of any computer it was installed on, and I probably managed to successfully load fifty short text-only e-mails over the course of six months. It was terrible. It was terrible for the price, which was free. Why am I nostalgic for that? Fuck those guys! Fuck this whole company, good riddance!
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Never shopped at a K-Mart. Just not my sort of place and never had one worth the trip to go to.
Be interesting to see the list of failed big box chains over the decades. I can recall when these started up in the fifties and it looked like they would take over retail as one stop shops for darn near anything.
Well that sent me down a rabbit hole I’d probably just as soon forget. Where I grew up in NC, the nearest K-Mart was one of those “big city” things, so instead we had a Roses which I’m rather horrified to find still exists. (As in the decrepit corpses of the store that I recall as already well on its way to undeath is still haunting the exact same location.)
Even more horrifying is learning that the damn things are starting to grow out of quarantine and inch their way across the country towards me! Look, I have a lot of negative things to say about Amazon, but at least Amazon was killing off things like that.
I was looking for a particular toy my daughter wanted before Christmas in 2014 or 2015. I was unable to find it at any of the big box stores, but believe it or not, it showed to be available in the K-mart in Vero Beach, about 30 miles away. Prior to this, I hadn’t shopped at a Kmart since the newish (mid 90’s) one local to me shut down in the early 00’s after the out-of-state landlords in the local shopping center tried to raise the rent, forcing it to close and leaving the other location in our town, an early 70’s era store as the sole remaining one in the south part of our county.
But I digress. I went to the Vero location and found what I was looking for. But I was shocked at what was in the store. It looked like it had been looted. Empty merchandise boxes, bare shelves, scattered food where it looked like someone had had a picnic on food from the store while still in the store. Kmart had never been upscale, but this was beyond bad. It was even more surreal when I went to go check out. The cash registers were unchanged. Clunky beige IBM models I recognized from the 80’s when I shopped there, and it appeared that there was only one “walkie talkie” to communicate to the intercom system and the back of the store.
I can only liken the whole experience to going to visit an old, but not close, friend after a decade or two and then seeing that they’ve gone quickly downhill and are about to pass.
This is in contrast to the Sears by me in Melbourne, which I and my parents had shopped at for almost 40 years. It was a dated mid 1960’s building, but it was always clean and well kept inside, right up until the day it closed.
The closed down Kmart closest to me was split, and half of the building became an Ace hardware and the other half a Beall’s. Perfectly sized, Ace had everything I needed and I could avoid Lowes and Home Despot. Until, again, the out-of-state owners of the shopping center decided to double rent, effectively forcing the store to close. As the manager told me because the new rent would have been more than their monthly profit. 15 people lost their jobs. The space sat vacant for about 5 years until an Ollie’s and a Rose’s moved in. I’m not going to vent on my feelings about those two chains…
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