Kmart, doing its best Blockbuster impersonation, only has three stores left
Doesn't conjure quite the same kind of nostalgia, does it?
Aux Features Kmart
Blockbuster—like so many of the horror slasher VHS tapes it peddled to teens throughout the ‘80s, ‘90s, and early 2000s—refuses to die. In fact, it’s resisted its well-earned, long overdue entrance into the Great Video Tape Return Box in the Sky for so long that pop culture has finally entered the franchise’s inevitable“questionably self-aware reboot” era…
So how are things faring for one of its many generational counterparts, Kmart? Not… uh… quite so good, if you can believe it.
According to yesterday’s surprisingly forlorn dispatch from the Associated Press, this weekend will see the permanent closing of Avenel, New Jersey’s Kmart, thus reducing the remaining national Kmart count to just three locations.
“You’re always thinking about it because stores are closing all over, but it’s still sad. I’ll miss the place. A lot of people shopped here,” cashier Michelle Yavorsky told the AP, with U.S. retail historian Michael Lisicky adding more ominously, “Everybody went to Kmart, whether you liked it or not.”
Founded in 1962, Kmart rose to prominence over the ensuing decades as one of the country’s most recognizable big box retailers, with solidly over 2,000 stores during its prime…
Speaking of which, you can mostly blame services like Amazon Prime for hastening the corporation’s death knell. With other competitors like Walmart nabbing the “cheap” niche as Target focused on offering more quality, stylish wares, Kmart just couldn’t find its place among the changing economy. Throw in a Great Recession, corporate changing of hands, and a once-in-a-century pandemic, and that was about it for the Blue Light Specials.
After April 16, just three locations will remain: Westwood, New Jersey; Long Island, New York; and Miami, Florida. We will refrain from making any tired, lazy “that sounds about right” jokes, and instead eagerly await the husk’s inevitable mutation into a Spirit Halloween store.
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65 Comments
Retail deserts, like food deserts, are a thing. Especially for homeless populations and others that are at-risk, assuming they can all just go on Amazon for whatever isn’t always true. This is a big problem for a lot of neighborhoods, and often non-profits would have relationships with retailers so they could provide vouchers for things like work uniforms, boots, and other clothing and necessities.
That’s all to say that K-Mart was never the best (or even top) of the bunch of -Marts…but this is still not good news.
I’m sure they vary a bit, but the Kmart that was around here was always a mess. Like a tornado went through the store or something. It was like no one bothered picking things up off the floor. Just random stuff scattered about.
Yeah, if you wanted a specific toy for Christmas, you had just as good a chance finding it tossed aside in home furnishings as you would in the actual toy section.
I think I was maybe 9 years old the last time I saw a K-Mart that didn’t look like a set from some post-apocalyptic zombie movie. Barren shelves, crap piled in random aisles, flickering or dead lights, mysterious puddles of multi-colored liquid everywhere. It’s like the stores themselves had gained sentience and immediately become suicidally depressed.
It seemed like a quick change the way I remember it. Like, as a child I was dragged to Kmart often enough, and I remember them looking like any other store. But sometime near my high school graduation I remember reading a bunch of stuff about how the company was bankrupt, and almost immediately the stores all turned into what you describe. Sometimes I would go and find decent or even good items marked down 70-90%, just because there wasn’t enough traffic to move anything.
Nope, that sounds about right. Every Kmart looked like it hadn’t been updated since the 70’s.
That’s exactly how our local Kmart was since about 1999 through when it shut down in 2017. It isn’t a coincidence that some big box stores are going out business and some are thriving.
Pretty much how I remember every Kmart I went into as kid in the 80s/90s. Even as a young kid, I had that “ugh, Kmart. Can’t we go to a better store” feeling. They were that dirty and disorganized. Only good thing I remember is they had Cherry and Coke ICEEs. But then the Wal-Mart in our town got them too taking out the one good thing Kmart had going for it.
That’s been most KMarts since… probably the Bush era, at least. (Also the Ross Dress for Less in my hometown, but I’ve been to others that aren’t quite as dire). I remember a few years ago there was a photo making the social media rounds of a VHS tape of some 1990s Disney movie still wrapped in yellowing shrink wrap discovered at a KMart, which is probably more or less representative of how often their stock got updated.
It seems like just yesterday it was Venture rapidly going out of business, and its shuttered locations were being turned into Kmarts.
God, I’m old enough to remember when Venture went out of business.
Ironically a Borders moved into our old location.
I’m old enough to have worked the register at Venture in highschool. My first experience with the ‘corporate training’ phenomenon that mixed brain dead, pre-school level instructions on working a 10 key register with the new fangled ‘scanners’ that some stores (but not mine) had. We were required to wear a white dress shirt and ‘a tie’. It was the 80’s, so all of my ties were very skinny. Had several shades of leather ties, a white satin one with a keyboard silkscreened onto it (very Laurie Anderson), and a couple of tie-dyed ones.
I think I lasted about 2 months, and then said ‘fuck it, I wanna have a real summer…’
I grew up in one of those suburbs that basically depended on chain stores. There was pretty much no local identity whatsoever. Nowadays it’s a graveyard of failed chains.
My first job was at a Sam Goody and they never trained me for register once. Still not 100% what they wanted me to do there aside from wander the aisles and make sure people didn’t shoplift. Everyone was so blaise about hours that when I finally ran out and essentially got laid off, I barely even noticed.
We didn’t have a Venture near us when I was growing up, but would sometimes see them on roadtrips, and being an avid coin-op player at the time (when my parents would give me quarters), I had the weird misconception that they had something to do with the early 1980s arcade game Venture. They did not.
I collected action figures in the mid 90s, and remember going to Venture to try and find the scarcer ones for my collection.
Wow, damn…Venture.Pace Warehouse bay-bee
Zayre for life!
I live right by the only one in NJ; it’s gotten so pathetic and hardly even seems worth keeping open.
I live by it too. 2/3 empty, no one ever is going there even this last Christmas. I talked to a few owners of some of the stores in the strip mall. They say not having an anchor store is killing them.
My mom talked to the Hallmark people before that store closed and said the owners are interested in having the whole space turned into apartments and such, which is why their lease wasn’t renewed. The TJMax’s lease is up in a year from, I think.
it’s been funny living long enough to see ‘malls bad! they’re closing independent stores and killing downtowns!’ to ‘big box stores bad! they’ve destroyed the malls and the downtowns!’ to ‘amazon bad! they’ve destroyed the big box stores, the malls and their robot stores downtown suck’waiting on ‘wish bad! they’ve destroyed amazon, the big boys stores, the malls and downtown is all weed stores!’
Hilariously enough, Amazon just recently acknowledged that its own retail stores couldn’t compete with… Amazon.
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/exclusive-amazon-close-all-its-physical-bookstores-4-star-shops-2022-03-02/
As much as the Amazon physical store thing seemed absurd, it kind of made sense historically. In the 19th century Sears, Roebuck & Co was kind of the Amazon of its day — it sold things from a catalog that were then shipped to the consumer. But in the 20th century they started building physical stores and eventually got rid of catalog sales altogether in the 1990s — just in time for Amazon to start!
well bookstores specifically was a stupid idea. i was referring more to their automated bodegas with no staff where you just grab stuff off the shelf and walk out and they charge your account.
back in the early 90’s I lived in a far south suburb of Cleveland, Medina. It was a HUGE FUCKING DEAL when they opened the SUPER K-mart. It was enormous. Everything in a bigbox store PLUS a full-on grocery store.
Naturally, it just about killed the tiny little small-town-square downtown.
Super Kmart… dude thank you for the best laugh I’ve had all day.
Ha! From Hinckley, OH here. I remember when that store opened… it was open 24 hours and about the size of 2 football fields. Used to go in there stoned at 2 am to get Twizzlers and Mountain Dew.
A bit of apophasis here. “We will refrain from making any tired, lazy ‘that sounds about right’ jokes” is in fact a tired, extremely lazy joke.
Every Wal-Mart I’ve been to has seemed like a dump to me, but the worst Wal-Mart I ever went to was still nicer than the nicest K-Mart I ever saw, and that’s going back to the 70s. K-Mart was a fucking dump.
For 30+ years the K-Mart in my hometown was right across the street from a Target. The Target parking lot was always full. The K-Mart parking lot was always empty. How did they stay open for all this time when no one ever shopped there? I do know that they used to have a layaway plan, which is good for some consumers who don’t have credit. But it never made sense that they could even afford to keep the lights on, let alone make a profit.
Same question for Sears. I would go to my local Sears and even a decade ago it would basically be empty — there would be a handful of people looking at appliances and power tools, but the clothing and furniture sections would have more employees than customers.
Bit odd to hang the blame on Amazon, while in the same breath pointing out how WalMart and Target out-positioned them in the market place.The company was poorly run, and was unable to adapt to a changing market place, while its competitors did. I have no love for Amazon, but this isn’t on them.
Yeah, Kmart was dying long before the rise of Amazon.
Kmart and Sears closing doesn’t even have much to do with completion. It was sabatoge from within by a hedge fund that found a way to profit over bankruptcy https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1c33fqdnhf21s/Eddie-Lampert-Shattered-Sears-Sullied-His-Reputation-and-Lost-Billions-of-Dollars-Or-Did-He
Somebody get John Oliver on this.
I’ll always have a soft spot for K-mart, who when I was 15 released a free ISP called BlueLight, which allowed me to bypass the parental controls imposed on my AOL account so I could at last read the articles on Playboy.com
Wow what a fun time capsule that was to read. I had never heard of this service before. Kmart basically bought out a virtual ISP service that leased space on telephone lines and then gave the client software away for free on CD-ROMs. So you could side-load a proxy dial-up internet that would bypass the application-level firewalling of AOL. Noice.
Right…! I used BlueLight for 10 or 15 minutes. Good times…
I too used BlueLight, along with competitors like MadonnaNet, etc, during the free ISP craze of the late 90s.As for K-Mart I remember stealing a Foreigner 4 cassette there in 1982.
My girlfriend’s parents lives no too far from this location. Apparently the store became cash only at some point. I thought that was an odd move for a store already struggling. Probably was about to close for awhile now.
I just moved from a town where they closed the K-Mart about six months ago, and now it’s a Target.
I live not too far away from the k mart in Avenel. Always borderline dead in there and looked like it was a store ripped right the 90s. Never any updates which is understandable.
So I JUST realized Kmart and Target were different stores.
So sad, mine was a cruising area before Grindr started since it was open 24 hours! Strange strange memories I connect to Kmart!
The remaining Long Island Kmart is in, of all the odd places, Bridgehampton. I had to go look it up because I could not remember where there was a Kmart. This would explain why. It still has a 1990s era logo on the sign, too. Alas I am not driving all the way out Montauk Highway to find it and find out if it’s a time warp on the inside too.
Wow, I had no idea that the one nearest to me had closed. I used to go to a dentist that was next door, and after my dental appointments I head to Kmart to buy some cheap shit. There were usually good deals, and I enjoyed the Mad Max vibe that the store had. As recently as 2017, we had two Kmarts in the area, but the one in Santa Rosa was one of the first victims of the huge wildfires that year. The burning Kmart is about 2 minutes into this video:
While on-line companies and Walmart didn’t help, the parting out of the company to reap the real estate value was the goal from day one.
Kmart holds a lot of good memories for me. As a kid in the 70s, I was absolutely enthralled by the blue light special, which they marked with a blue cop-car style light on a wheeled cart or pole and announced over the store intercom. Of all the stuff I could have wanted in Kmart, that blue light was THE thing. Knowing I could never take it home, I always wanted to tag along to Kmart to see it. No idea why I thought that stupid bit of retail equipment was so magical, but I damn well did.Our Kmart also had Coke ICEEs, which my mom always let me have even thought we didn’t buy much actual soda back then. Magical!
I actually have more nostalgia for Kmart than for Blockbuster. To me, the only defining characteristic of Blockbuster is that the employees there knew less about movies than the employees of the smaller stores. Kmart at least had the Blue Light Special to distinguish itself from Wal-Mart, Roses, and other discount retailers. A distinction that was immortalized in a classic Calvin & Hobbes strip.So long, and thanks for all the ICEEs.
It’s so stupid Blockbuster didn’t kill Netflix in the crib.They already had all the infrastructure. All they needed was a website.
They did not even need to create a website, they had the chance to just buy Netflix in 2000.
It’s so stupid Blockbuster didn’t kill Netflix in the crib.They already had all the infrastructure. All they needed was a website.
Video stores were on their death bed before Netflix showed up though. Back in the 80s videos were rented because buying a be tape typically cost in the range of 100 bucks. But by the 90s you could buy a video from Walmart for under 20 bucks. So much less reason to rent your favourite movie.Add to that the fact that cable companies were letting people watch pay per view movies (with the window between video release and ppv release getting shorter). And the costs associated with switching from VHS to DVD and it becomes a much more competitive business.
Also, there *were* no Wal-Marts in the North until the late 1980s at least. They started in the South and stayed there for decades. So the North had its Kmarts (and Ventures and Treasure Islands, etc.) But by 2000 it was clear Wal-Mart was in the lead even in the North.
A distinction that was immortalized in a classic Calvin & Hobbes strip.Man, that’s exactly what I was thinking of!
I worked in an office building right next door to KMart’s corporate offices in Troy, MI. It was huge, and employed a lot of people. When the first wave of layoffs hit them in the recession we could see long lines of people, carrying their belongings, trooping out of the building. It was really sad. People make jokes, but the shrinkage of KMart cut deeply for its employees, suppliers, landlords, and neighborhoods. I just can’t laugh about it.
Even though they were clearly an inferior Wal-Mart, I always liked K-Mart because:
1) ICEE bar
2) The video game section had those flip-racks that let you read the front and back of the box.
3) Ours was next to a restaurant called “Starv’n Marv’n” which must’ve endured a shit-load of South Park jokes when that show hit.
I’m pretty sure the decision to kill Sears/Kmart was made in 2010, and everything since then has been the CEO taking the company apart as profitably as possible.
Correct. This has everything to do with the hedge fund that came in and was able to make profit on bankrupting the companies https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1c33fqdnhf21s/Eddie-Lampert-Shattered-Sears-Sullied-His-Reputation-and-Lost-Billions-of-Dollars-Or-Did-He
Kinda sad, my second ever job when I was 16 was at a little Caesars inside a Kmart. I’d say it wasnt Amazon that killed them, they were flailing long before Amazon. They really started to suffer after target rebranded themselves as the sort of millennial, cosmopolitan alternative, and Kmart basically still looked like an old Sears by comparison. I mean, not gonna shed a tear for big box retail, but on a very minor level it’s sad.
I legit haven’t seen a K-mart in 30 years. I thought they were all gone a long ass time ago. I mean like, you never hear about them anymore even.
There’s generally a long decline of a chain from prominence to final death. For example this article made me think of Treasure Island, which was J.C. Penny’s (itself near death these days) discount chain. I haven’t seen one myself since the 1980s, but looking it up, they technically lasted until 2008.
And yet another pop culture reference will fade into history.
I live and work down the street from the Avenel KMart. In the 80s it was a delight to visit with grandma as she perused the garden department. She purchased some outdoor furniture, shrubs and flowers there while my brother and I were treated to hot popcorn and Icees at the snack bar. As I got older I dug their selection of LPs and cassettes.In the early 2000s, KMart sold Martha Stewart Everyday items, which I found to be attractive and of decent quality for the money.I visited the Avenel KMart last fall out of curiosity and found entire areas of the store closed off. I bought a bottle of shampoo out of pity.