“Shop smart. Shop S-Mart!”
~Ash, housewares
When I think of Kmart, I am immediately reminded of a few of Johnny Carson’s monologues. The ones where the monologue is bombing and he grabs the overhead boom mic and says into the mic “Attention Kmart shoppers! ...”
The biggest mistake Sears Kmart made was not staying current. IOW they should have adopted the Amazon model of online sales.
Just like Blockbuster Video stores.
This is what happened to one of our Kmarts here in Mesa. In this case, it was the reverse: the bulk of the store became At Home and they turned the garden center into a pretty good Mexican restaurant and cantina. If I'm not mistaken, the store itself was built, but never actually opened.
I don’t know where there are any Sears stores either.
ATTENTION KMART SHOPPERS: Will the last one out the door please turn off the lights.
Funny thing: Every K-Mart store I ever walked into (only a few) smelled like mothballs. .... Then again, I’m so, uh, “senior” that maybe it was me! Cheers!
“The Miami Herald reports that the Kmart store there leased out nearly all of its former space to home goods store At Home. That Kmart location has now been reduced to what used to be the garden department of the original store,” the outlet added.
Yes - here that is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTBiahDJ_go
Basically the same size as a Family Dollar or Dollar General. That is all that remains of it now after this full size store closes of the once dominant US retail chain. It still has stores in Australia and New Zealand and while they started under the same ownership they have since been separated in their ownership.
(Sigh) End of an era. When I was growing up in the late 70s/early 80s the families Saturday morning activity was a trip to K-Mart, mom would shop while dad took us kids back to look at the toys and then the Atari games in electronics (and sometimes if we were lucky, he would even let us buy one). Then he would take us back to the K-Mart cafeteria and get us a hamburger, since mom always took a long time.
They had great hotdogs in the 70s and early 80s. First thing you smelled walking in.
Sears made a few mistakes but would have done really well had it simply transferred its hugely successful mail order business onto a WORKING webpage! Instead, it only loaded a fraction of its merchandise to the web and afflicted the site with a totally dysfunctional Product Search Engine that caused so much frustration that millions of people just turned off Sears and never returned. If you can’t find the items you want, you’ll switch over to another website where you CAN. It is just that simple.
Amazon did little more than copy Sear’s mail order business model WITH a working website. How difficult could that have been? (Answer: a computer-savvy 12 year old could have done it)
Then, the killer for Sears was getting bought out by a fellow who invested for the underlying real estate. Closing retail stores (even the ones that were still doing Okay) became the name of the game. This is called “DBM” in business college (Death By Management). Selling off the good asset lines (automotive, tools, appliances, etc.) was just a part of the game.
A terribly ignoble murder, if you will, of an American institution that provided all sorts of (usually good quality, until the end years) merchandise to several generations of shoppers both in nice large stores and by mail order... with a “customer is always right” service and return policy. You could always buy from Sears with confidence that it would work out well.
PS: Chicago, the Sears, Roebuck headquarters, still has a survivor (albeit long since sold off) of the Sears success years in its (50,000 watt) radio station WLS-890AM. WLS stands for World’s Largest Store, which was a Sears, Roebuck slogan for many years. It is now unfortunately owned by Cumulus but its signal can still be heard during the day in a dozen states and at night it can be heard in almost all across America (we’ve listened to it in both New York, Alabama, and California).
Grants, Bradley’s, Ames, Fields, Sears, Wards, and now Kmart. It’s the big box store cycle. Target and Kohls are on their way soon.
Down to the last great store...
They still had nicotine-stained ceiling tiles. It was depressing. A handful of employees just standing around. And everything was super expensive.
Merged with Sears in 2005? How did that work out? Are there even any Sears left?