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For what it’s worth, it sounds like Amazon has moved on to visual system. They make the store look like big brother on steroids and so can track what you put in your cart. I’m not sure if they dumped the RFID tags, or this is the cross-check system. You’d imagine that between cameras, RFID tags, and maybe the occasional audit when something looks off, you can probably do pretty good. Sure, people can still walk off with stuff, but they can do that now.
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This type of standard operating procedure will come to every business… it has happened before kmart and will continue long after after…
What are you going on about with saying it failed… the damn company was started in 1899, even if it dies 50 years ago it would not be considered a fail.
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I have walked out of Walmart more than once leaving a shopping cart of goods or just stacking stuff on the nearest level surface because of the wait at the cashier. If they refuse to open enough check stands, they deserve to have to hire people to put the stuff back.
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It failed, as someone previously mentioned, because of the CEO Chuck Conaway. When he was hired, the previous CEO was furious and thought it was a big mistake. Conaway then proceeded to buy out the old timers in upper management so he could replace them with his buddies. One of his buddies, William Mayfield, came over from Walmart to take over the dept. that handled store furnishings. Mayfield then proceeded to copy and sneak out contracts so his friends would have an advantage in winning bids. When Mayfield came in he was going to “save our dept.”, it seemed like he did everything to wreck the place. I will forever name check these greedy S.O.B.'s.
We also knew of the business practices of Walmart as we had the same suppliers. They really gamed the system against the vendors, but it worked (somehow).
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“Tell him, Ray…”
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Not to mention more and more products nowadays are shit.
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I miss the blue light special subs. Had to be at least a week old. Mayo and banana peppers disolved into the bread. 50-50 chance of getting sick, but damn tasty for a buck.
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Nah - they just take people off the checkouts to put the stuff back. 
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Makes sense. It’s the same with people - you need redundancy. I ran a help desk for a while, and was told I had to have 7:00 am to 5:00 pm coverage 5 days/week but only had one staff member. I told them that to guarantee that I had one person on the HD during all of those hours I needed a minimum of 3 people assigned to the HD. Instead I was told to torture the SysAds and developers by making them cover lunch, 7-8 and any time the one HD person was out of the office. You can imagine how well that went.
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My last memory of KMart was the checkout lines twenty five years ago. Stacked high with returns, go backs, or abandoned merchandise, I don’t know which.
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That’s called the “Wal-Mart Effect”. A vicious cycle whereby price-sensitive retailers pressure manufacturers to reduce costs at the expense of ever decreasing quality.
Mr. FISHMAN: Exactly. The pressure at Wal-Mart is unrelenting, that is part of what is admirable about them, they are not complacent. They aren’t sitting back with their arms crossed admiring the brilliance of their work, they are constantly dissatisfied with the cost that everything’s delivered at. Let’s make it a little less expensive. The result of that though is that eventually people have to move manufacturing offshore, they have to reduce the quality of the raw materials in their products, the plastic gets thinner, and it’s very clear that Wal-Mart drives jobs overseas and ultimately undermines the quality of original products in order to deliver on this always low prices promise.
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Well, it was no S-Mart.
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When I was a kid (mid to late 70s) we went to K-Mart occasionally; the design, lighting, aroma, and general seediness seemed to scream “YOU’RE POOR! WE MAKE THIS PLACE CRAPPY BECAUSE - BE HONEST WITH YOURSELF - WHERE ELSE ARE YOU GONNA GO?”
Needless to say, as soon as we could afford not to go there anymore we didn’t. Wal-Mart is undeniably evil, but at least (for the most part) they don’t go out of their way to remind their customers of the utter contempt in which they’re held…
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There’s a reason it’s called “People of Walmart” and not “People of K-Mart”
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have you ever shopped dollar general? the ones around here make the old kmart look like nordstroms.
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Back when it was actually a current offering, I saw the only real-life example of a Commodore SX-64 (a C64 in a luggable case with built-in monitor and floppy drives) I’ve ever seen, in the Kmart electronics department near me.
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this is the answer. K Mart failed because of Charlie Babbitt.
not really, but having two mega famous actors, one of whom was America’s heart-throb, saying “K Mart sucks” in an oscar-winning box office smash hit probably had an outsized effect. But that was the image pretty much my whole life. Nearly every American shopped there at least sometimes, but the place was just low rent (my experience with them starts as a kid about 1980.) even among kids, Kmart was not really mentioned except as the butt of a joke about something being cheap. But our families all shopped there, of course.
something not mentioned in the video was that Kmart’s website bluelight.com GAVE AWAY FREE INTERNET. even if you had no isp, you could connect via phoneline, watch an ad, and then surf the entire web. my first online household, a house rented by me and two others in probably 1997 or 8, had all web browsing provided by bluelight.com.
I don’t remember if you could shop online (I think so, but we literally only used it for free internet) but bear in mind this was when amazon was just a bookseller. as a matter of fact, my very first amazon purchase was made using bluelight.com as the isp. talk about squandered opportunities. with the right tech hires, kmart could have pivoted to a low-cost internet provider (other free providers – NetZero et.al. also failed the free model but maybe kmart could have offered a competitive rate after upgrading the free service) AND dominated online retail (“hell, I’m already here for free internet, may as well buy that new coffee maker I’ve been thinking about getting”) before amazon had any non-book sales. instead, vulture capitalists just bled it dry. so close, and yet so far.
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