Last Full-Size Kmart in the United States Closing in October
“That means a smaller Kmart store in Miami will become the last one remaining in the U.S.”
Another iconic brand in the United States is going the way of the dinosaurs. The last full-sized Kmart store in the U.S., located in Bridgehampton, New York, will close its doors for good in October.
No more blue light specials in home goods.
The FOX Business Network reports:
Last full-size Kmart in US to close
The last full-size Kmart store in the continental United States is set to close in October, leaving only one downsized location remaining, reports say.
The department store chain, which once operated around 2,300 locations in the early 1990s, will shutter the full-size store in Bridgehampton, New York, on Oct. 20, Newsday is reporting, citing an employee there.
That means a smaller Kmart store in Miami will become the last one remaining in the U.S. Kmart, which is now owned by Transformco, also has three stores in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Transformco did not immediately respond Monday to a request for comment from FOX Business, but a spokesperson for Kimco Realty Corp. – which owns the shopping centers where both Kmarts are located in New York and Florida – told Newsday that the Bridgehampton store will indeed be closing.
The Kmart location in Bridgehampton has been open for 25 years, according to Newsday.
Transformco says on its website that the first Kmart discount department store opened in 1962 in Garden City, Michigan.
The company filed for bankruptcy in 2002 before merging with Sears years later, then filed for bankruptcy again in 2018.
The New York Post reports that there are still a few small stores left:
A smaller Kmart in Miami, Florida, will remain open, after the chain closed a store in Westwood, NJ late last year. The company had shuttered its third-to-last location in Avenel, NJ in April 2022.
The remaining Miami location pales in comparison to the storefronts the big-box chain used to operate in its heyday. The Florida shop is closer in size to a CVS or other convenience store, according to an August report by the Miami Herald.
However, Kmart has several stores outside the 50 states that will remain open in the US Virgin Islands and Guam, WJAR reported.
Here’s a video report from ABC 7 in New York:
Anyone else old enough to remember the Kmart stores that also had a cafeteria?
Man, there ain’t nothing like taking the wife and kids down to Kmart for some liver and onions … pic.twitter.com/d3EUGEUXK4
— Super 70s Sports (@Super70sSports) March 22, 2023
I do
Do you? pic.twitter.com/BafUegOgQM— The Phoenix Press (@ThePhoenixPress) November 11, 2023
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Comments
I marked the decline before it went public, in the late 80s I think, suddenly Kmart started running out of stuff. A new inventory control program came in and it didn’t work.
Stuff had bought there for years wasn’t there. The shelf space was there but not the stuff.
Gunnies boycotted K-Mart forever when they picked up Rosie O’Donnell as their spokes-shrew.
“Sorry. It is 1999. We have had enough as a nation. You are not allowed to own a gun, and if you do own a gun I think you should go to prison.”
Then she demanded that her four-year-old son’s school allow him to be accompanied all day by an armed private bodyguard,
That’s the sort of in-your-face hypocrisy Democrats give out medals for.
I won’t visit New York, but I’d love to be in Miami for that store’s failure, so to watch Rosie re-tie the ribbon.
My mother worked in Kmart’s office in 63 and before that the 5 and dime.
There was a time when Kmart had some good deals, but they became less competitive, eventually completely irrelevant.
I literally did not know they still existed.
I had thought they’d gone completely out of business a while back.
I’m 75. I have seen so many store chains come and go. Zody’s. White Front. Gemco. Fedco. Zaire’s. Countless supermarket chains that go away or become just another Kroger property.
This is not to mention ones like Montgomery Ward that never recovered from a stupid remark made by the chairman of the board. Or, JC Penney with their consistent drop in quality without a reduction in price. Or, Sears that did the same as Penney’s regarding quality but also had the entire makings of an Amazon already in place (catalog numbers, warehouses, computerized inventory control) yet no one in management saw what the internet could and did become.
K-Mart shot themselves in the foot with lack of stock, stores allowed to become shabby and run-down, failure to do simple things like hose down the entryways of spilled soft drinks and dropped food items.
Businesses form, thrive, get complacent, and die. K-Mart is no different. Many of you will live to see the death of Target and maybe even WalMart some day.
Not to mention Circuit City, Radio Shack, Toys R Us and others who kept making stupid decisions.
Radio Shack grew up in a culture where people (especially youngsters) personally learned stuff and built things. Now they just buy things and use them. When’s the last time you saw a kid build a model kit? Delayed gratification and patience are lost arts.
Henry, when was the last time anything electronic (new that is) could be built up from discrete components? That’s why so little is being built these days. I, for one, miss Heathkits.
The problem is most of the compact, low power electronic devices rely on surface mount components which are literally miniscule and require a microscope to work on by hand. Even your average consumer with a soldering iron isn’t going to mess around with that.
I still have an unassembled full-size oscilloscope kit my uncle gave me before he died, When I was working, I didn’t have the time to assemble it, and now that I’m retired, I have zero use for an oscilloscope. 😢
We got our grandson a subscription to KiwiCo when he was in third grade. They were quality kits. He was mildly enthusiastic but easily frustrated. Kids in my day would have worked paper routes for these.
“The problem is most of the compact, low power electronic devices rely on surface mount components”
Even the old warhorses are moot today because the infrastructure is buggywhip. Who wants to build a wired telephone? Who would assemble a crystal radio in order to hear… no more AM radio transmissions? Who wants to spend weeks to build a wooden R/C plane when he can buy a WiFi camera drone at Sam’s?
Henry, I need a fix! Please! If there is a way to get an address to you I will pay for the shipping!
Please…! Just one more kit…!
(I’m serious…)
Griz, post your “want” for Henry’s scope on craigslist. Tell Henry (here on LI) where to find it. He can respond to your craigslist post. (Or someone else will. You could ask Henry to use his LI username when he replies to your ad.)
Grizz, I have a storehouse of plastic and flying model rockets and would gladly send you one, if that’s to your taste. Craigslist is partitioned, though, so after you list, be sure to tell me what city to look in.
(Or were you asking for the oscilloscope?)
Radio Shack sold a lot of defective components to hobbyists
Motorola and Japan sold a lot of defective components to Radio Shack.
Hell, Taiwan sold boatloads of defective capacitors to Apple, HP, Dell, and others, causing early mortality to about two whole years of their product lines.
Henry, see my post address to Griz concerning your scope.
Montgomery Ward was my grandfathers business partner in Eau Claire Wisconsin. Ward and he split up and Ward went to MN and was successful, my grandfather was successful, for awhile , but the Depression wiped him out , he never recovered
Set a precedent for the family I think. Bad business decisions made worse with the economy
Oh, what could have been
I sound like harris
Sears may have made the sort of mistakes you mentioned, but its decline began before online shopping became important: Sears stopped giving shoppers a reason to visit the stores on a regular basis. Shoppers are able and willing to buy only so many durable goods (hardware, small appliances, large appliances, etc.). Walmart, on the other hand, offered a huge assortment of consumables (food and other supermarket items, health and beauty products, etc.) at prices that had shoppers returning regularly, and they found many of the items Sears WAS offering, too.
Nothing drives home the price of inflation like those old ads. A full lunch for less than $2.00 with tip, even if you splurge and go with the Chicken platter.
I’m guessing late 60’s, early ’70’s.
And I like liver and onions.
Hah. Now that I’m old enough to like it, my doctor says I shouldn’t eat it.
I went to the grand opening of Kmart in Garden City, Michigan off of Ford rd. and Middlebelt rd. in 1962. Submarines sandwiches were 29 cents each or 4 for a dollar.
And $100 a week for pay was fairly normal.
According to the internet $1 of 1962 dollars is ~$10.42 today. Even if they were disappointing sandwiches, that’s not a bad price for four.
Amazon has raised my standard of living enormously, starting with its book business. You could get anything, between that and abebooks (who apparently coordinated used book stores and so had out of print stuff you lost years before),
Now anything, not just books, you exactly need is on amazon, even stuff you’ve never heard of, if you know how to search for it.
Don’t buy food or vitamins, you will very often get expired products and they don’t do returns on food
They will if you make a big enough stink
Being in the computer/comm industry, I distinctly remember the pre-Internet days of connected cable, like France’s Minitel, They had “home shopping!” and never let you forget it, to the envy of the world. Everybody wanted to do “home shopping! Until they learned that it consisted of hyped merchandise that other people wanted to sell you, not stuff you actually wanted to buy, “Gee, I thought that meant I was going to be able to put in an order to have my groceries delivered.” Fat chance. What they offered you was an embryonic version of HSC/QVC. It took 25 years to get from there to simple pizza delivery, then 15 more to get to the “critical mass” version of Amazon. Now I can get items via Amazon that I don’t have a chance in hell of finding in a 50-mile radius.
Amazon is a blessing for small-town folks, or folks like me where our area may have 190,000 people, but just don’t have what you are seeking.
The #1 supporter and customer of Amazon products is small town Trump supporters who rely on Amazon to buy products that they are too lazy to drive to their local small town retailer to buy the same product. Trump supporters are the best thing that ever happened to the Democrats.
A typically ridiculous observation from you, as the rural areas that have the fewest local shopping options are the same areas where Trump supporters are naturally concentrated.
Conservative “alternatives” to Amazon have been attempted (such as Public Square) but they all turn out to be mini QVCs. I need laptop docks and plumbing parts, not cases of survival food and gun-themed coffee.
Abe Books is amazing. I buy one or two books a month from there. My last 2 were A History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities of Ancient Israel and Tolkien’s translation (with commentary) of Beowulf.
Indeed, obscure (if not exactly “rare”) books can be had there, with rarified prices for some!
I seem to recall a story that as Kmart started to fade to black, they made a try at a come-back by bringing in a WalMart executive. The executive decided to get rid of the Blue Light sales gimmick and move to WalMart’s “Low, low prices all the time” model.
They encountered a rather unexpected problem. A generation of customers had been trained, like Pavlov’s Dogs, to salivate at the appearance of The Blue Light. That is – they’d been trained to wait for things to go on sale.
As my father put it:
Everybody was amazed at the prices, but nobody bought anything because they were all thinking, “Wow! If it’s this cheap now, imagine how cheap it’ll be when it goes on sale!”
Note:
This may not be the actual reason for their decline and fall but I like the story.
From my view as a customer, the decline came from lack of stock, or at times stuff that was shopworn. Poor merchandising causes that. No one knows you have a particular item, it goes stale.
Lots of folks snivel about big bad WalMart but they seem to know what they are doing. They monitor each store very closely and in (I hate this term…) “real time”. If they note an anomaly they check into it right away. An example was back in the days when folks were starting to bring desktop computers into their homes and computer makers were bundling the computer, a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and a cheap set of speakers. The stores got their allotments and of course the sales were being watched.
Some store in Gawd-Knows-Where showed a huge surge in sales; the computers were going out the door very fast. So, a call was placed to the store. “Why?” Because we took one out of the box, set it up on one of the computer table kits that we grabbed from that department and assembled. Folks are able to SEE the computer. Oh, and could you send us more of computer table kit, model blah blah blah?”
WM also discovered that skylights not just saved lighting energy but created higher sales on things like clothing because people were more receptive to buying when the merchandise looked fresh and colorful.
teaming up with sears
would be like letting fjb fly your plane and harris in the atc
1) The final K-Mart collapse should not be a surprise. The economic, political, and cultural template we operated under since WW-II is long gone replaced by bureaucracy and oligopoly. That which worked before can no longer work.
2) This trend is both going to continue absent a replay of a part of our history. and things are going to have to survive an economic shock. We are an importing country for pretty much everything tangible important to our economy. Which means that we are at the mercy of the ability to import.
On or about October 1, a strike is scheduled by the International Longshoreman’s Union. I am given to understand that they are demanding a 77% pay raise over 5 years [not a typo]. If they get it, prices may rise enough that we cannot afford anything, anyway. These are the people who load and unload ships in ports, and ships are how we import and export. In theory, our East Coast and Gulf Coast ports will be shut down; the West Coast being left open for now. The things we sell to the world will be stuck here. The things we buy from the world to enable manufacturing or retail sales will not come in. And while I have my doubts that Biden has any real idea of what is happening, he has apparently said that he will not use the powers granted under labor laws to order the Longshoremen back to work while they negotiate further. I rather suspect the idea is not to micturate in the Wheaties of organized labor just before an election. But keep in mind, this is Biden.
Factories and retail sales and jobs will be shut down. The phrase I use is that “it is going to get hungry out”. The only thing moving across our borders is going to be the continuing and ongoing invasion of hostile foreign nationals aided by the government.
3) Leaving aside the upcoming traditional holiday season that makes up such a large part of our economy, yes there is the matter that we have a national election coming just before the holidays. Adding to the festivities is the detail that there are justified grave doubts on the part of a significant portion of our Demos about the integrity of the electoral process. Then add in that there have recently been two assassination attempts attacking the opposition candidate running against the incumbent administration; both of which have been noteworthy in that neither staffing levels nor standard operating procedures by the administration agency charged with protecting said candidate were followed, nor has anyone in that agency suffered any consequences for said failures.
See the “grave doubts” cited above. In such an environment, who is going to trust either the government or the economy for anything, or take any economic risks? More hard times are coming, and it would not be a bad idea to see that your larders are full and you and yours can be taken care of.
Subotai Bahadur
I think this K-Mart site in Bridgehampton is located on what used to be Caldor; another defunct retail chain.
Many big-box retail chains are still thriving, though — Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Best Buy.
When I bought my house a few years ago, there was actually a K-Mart right down the road. I went there out of curiosity since it had been so long since I had seen one.
As soon as I walked in I realized why. It was in poor repair, downright DIRTY (clearly it had been weeks since anybody had even attempted to clean the floor), and poorly organized with stuff just randomly thrown everywhere, and in general just nasty and run down. The freaking DOLLAR TREE next to it was cleaner and better organized.
So it shocks me not at all that K-Mart is basically gone.