One of the old time K-marts we occasionally used had a garden shop inside a dimly lit corner of the store. I was going through the potted plants when I saw a brown blur scurry between the plants on the bottom tier. It was the largest rat I had ever seen, and I grew up in farm country.
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About 30 years ago my wife and I bought a house from a guy who worked at K-Mart. He was transferring to New Jersey and apparently was very excited about his opportunity. Even then I was surprised by this. On the other hand, we got a pretty good deal on the house because he had a contract on a house in NJ that did not have a contingency based on the sale of his house here in Illinois. I’ve thought a number of times about that guy and how utter greed and incompetence at top executive level probably screwed him over. I’m also aghast at the utter mess Lampert made of Sears. Those ‘top’ executives are prime examples of capitalism run amok. Evil MFs.
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It was like the kick in the face after K-Mart was already on the canvas. It made sure K-Mart was never going to get up and beat the count.
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Among many other reasons related to mismanagement at the highest levels, the straw that ultimately broke K-Mart’s back was their failure to invest in technology systems.
In the 1980s, Target, Walmart, and other successful retailers invested heavily in mammoth IT systems to automate everything from forecasting, purchasing, logistics and shipping, store planning, POS, sales audit, accounting, inventory, replenishment, and every other aspect of running a huge corporate retail enterprise. These were mostly run on big, expensive IBM mainframes on programs written in tons of COBOL. They may not all have been paragons of good design, but they did a lot of work and got massive jobs done fast.
K-Mart, on the other hand, spent as little as possible on systems. And whatever systems they bought, they did not bother to integrate them with each other. Trucks would drop off trailers filled with merchandise they didn’t even have manifests for. These trailers would sit virtually abandoned in the store’s docks for weeks or months at a time. A store manager might occasionally empty a trailer to free up dock space, but for the most part neither the stores nor HQ had any idea what merchandise they owned, or where any of it was.
With these utterly unorganized and chaotic systems, even the best store managers were unable to replenish their shelves with basics, or run their stores well. And very few good people remained loyal through the collapse. The infamous Blue Light specials eventually became a tool used by store managers to try to clear out the random merchandise, but they were far too little to help.
K-Mart is a poster child of what happens in the long term to a successful business that is run by incompetent thieves bent on plundering its treasury for personal gain.
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Eh, the store I work at has… I think 7 self-checkouts and 7 regular registers, though it’s rare these days we go much above 4 regular registers open.
Christmas Eve was giving me flashbacks to March, though, with all 7 registers open and the line for the self-checkouts going back into produce
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Lampert runs a private equity shop, aka buyout firm, aka vulture capitalist. These exist to buy troubled firms, mostly with other people’s money, and extract whatever they can from them. Frequently the deal is structured so that the firm comes out ahead even if the company craters and goes bust. It is a completely unethical business and arguably shouldn’t even be legal. Mitt Romney’s firm, Bain Capital, is in the same kind of business.
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Exactly. All Lampert does is move assets from holding company A to holding company B while holding company A craters from the liabilities still on the balance sheet.
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But at least K-Mart had groovy in-store music: https://archive.org/details/attentionkmartshoppers
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There was a Kmart where I grew up.in VT, and I remember that 50% of the hanging clothes were just laying on the floor. It seemed perpetual. Every item looked run over. Even as a pre-teen it was just a depressing place. The only (sometimes) interesting thing was the blue light special.
JC Penney started down the same road, and Sears, too. Cruddy atmosphere, cranky employees, cleaning is an afterthought, and lack of leadership = lack of concern plus increasingly lesser quality goods. Rinse, repeat.
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No one seems to remember KMart CEO Julian Day, who would apply his management skills to both Sears and KMart, then go on to his success at RadioShack.
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My obligatory educational video about how the private equity business model works:
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In short, it’s a victim of late-stage predatory capitalism.
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I vividly remember the “K-mart smell” as well. I think it was a combination the popcorn from the snack bar and the off gassing of the products on the shelves.
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Scanning is not just empty busywork
It’s where you and the store agree on what you’re buying and what they’re charging you for it
I’m sure this self-driving RFID system will work great if we assume it never makes a mistake
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Yeah I used to work on RFID applications and it was highly sensitive to factors such as the dimensions of the testing area, and the materials between the interrogator and the tag. Amazon would probably use plastic carts to hold the product, but products themselves could mask signals from adjacent products. Also you have the issue where all products in the cart respond at the same time, overwhelming the interrogator.
I think Amazon could get it to work. It would tend to fail in the direction of handing out free product.
One possibility is to put the interrogator on the cart, and run it continuously.
edit: so your physical shopping cart now behaves like a cart on an e-commerce website. You associate your amazon account with the cart when you enter the store. It watches each product being put in the cart, probably with multiple interrogators, then you walk right out of the store, load up your car and complete the transaction.
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Oh don’t do they they’ll tell you customers the truth.
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As a youngster in the transitional era when cigarette smoking was still allowed in public buildings but mostly frowned upon, K Mart was the only business where I remember having the guts to light up a cigarette while walking the aisles. Nobody seemed to notice.
Anyway, I have to agree with the others who point out that K Mart didn’t invest in technology. The inventory control was so bad that many shelves were completely empty while others were so overstuffed that they just left inventory in the aisles. It felt like they were on the verge of closing, but for at least a decade before they finally did.
They were too big to be run like smaller stores where one person manually organizes things, but not forward-looking enough to invest in technology to manage their scale.
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I think I remember a promotion that Sears was offering free replacements for any Craftsman hand tools that failed under proper use. I wonder if Kmart/Sears is still honoring that with the restructured organization?
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The Craftsman brand has been divested away from Sears. But Craftsman still honors the warranty.
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That’s cool. I doubt I have any of my originals anyway, as I probably sold them off a few years back before moving overseas.
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