What really stuck out to me the last time I ended up in a Kmart sometime around 2005 was how - even though that store had been built in the late 90s - it looked like it hadn't been remodeled since 1975.
The last time I step foot in my local Kmart before closing was probably 2015. And it looked _exactly_ as it did when I moved to this town in 1997. Like a weird dimensional pocket where time stood still. The only change was the cafe counter was converted to a customer service desk.
It makes me feel really old when I realize all the stores I genuinely liked going to as a kid have closed down due to bad business practices. That part about Sports Authority and Borders really hit home. Same with other brands like White Hen, Funco Land, Cub Foods, Piggly Wiggly, Circuit City, Toys R Us, etc. Places that don't exist anymore. Gone like tears in the rain.
I just had this same conversation with my wife a couple days ago. JC Penney, Bon Marche, JK Gill, Jafco, Farrells, Frederick & Nelson, Sears - All gone
The worst boss I've ever had was at Kmart. She could not focus on anything, could not remember anything, could not handle stress, and believed every lie the store manager told her (which the store manager took full advantage of). So of course they made her an assistant manager and paid her more money. Absolutely ridiculous.
They went through assistant managers and head managers like crap through a goose at the Richmond, KY store that I worked at. I worked there four years, and I can remember at least four different store managers and countless assistant managers. Some were OK, but some I wouldn't put in charge of a lemonade stand!
And he couldn't compete with that. Thats why he had a job at K Mart. If he wasn't an idiot he could had her management job but she was too much competition for him!
As a kid, Kmart was a store my family went to at least once a week. I have a lot of fond memories of shopping at Kmart, but I noticed the gradually worsening decline over time, and after every single store in my town closed years back, I'm actually surprised there are still any Kmart stores left. But I think it's only a matter of time before the coffin is finally closed.
I worked at a Kmart distribution center for 21 years until 1998. I knew years earlier when Walmart came from behind and overtook them, that Kmart's time was running out. I would go to our local Kmart to buy something on sale and they had no stock on the first day of the sale. I would go to work the next day and find pallets of the item in stock. Near the end Kmart was a shadow of its former self. Empty shelves, rundown stores. Truly sad of what happened to a once great store in the 70's and 80's.
I don't think Kmart really knew what hit them. While they were started the same year as Walmart and Target, those chains were pretty much focused on the areas of the country where they came from and Kmart never really had to face them until the late '80s when they started showing up everywhere. Prior to that, Kmart only had to compete with Grants and local chains which they pretty much put out of business. In a few short years starting in 1990, Kmart went from the biggest discount retailer to what became the world's longest going out of business sale beginning in.1994.
My parents would buy me so many gameboy color video games, beyblades, yu-gi-oh cards, sports cars, etc Kmart will always have a special place in my heart, so sad to see it die a slow and painful death
@@alextacohead1352 The LAST time K-Mart was considered Relevant was in 1994. Mom held on to them as long as she could until the Stores closed down. The Thing that I remember being offended at and vowing to never do business with them again is how they often treated Supply Chain vendors. The Way SEGA was treated by them regarding Dreamcast in 1999-2000 was Criminal.
Kmart is what happens when you forget the User Experience component of your business. Kmart always made me sad and weirdly nostalgic for a time I wasn't even alive in, and that's bad news. You could tell eveyone who worked and shopped there knew that it was a slow sinking ship. I feel bad for all the people who lost their jobs, but I'm sure they were either absorbed by the other two big companies, or were done with retail altogether. Was never a fan, but it's fascinating to see how not to run a successful company.
Eddie Lambert runs them all into the ground, siphons liquidations to his hedge fund, and sits on the commercial properties. That’s why none of the old Sears buildings have been sold yet. Still empty.
Lampert was preceded by immigrant parasite Meshulam Riklis who bled dry many chain stores starting in the 60s before Lampert acquired Kmart in a hostile takeover
Around 2008, the local K-Mart had expanded to include some food. They had clothes, toys, electronics, tools, jewelry etc. Funny thing is, no matter what I was shopping for, they didn't happen to have that! Seems like EVERY TIME I went there, I walked out without what I wanted and had to go find it somewhere else! It was bizarre!
Eddie lampert ran it into the ground he was hyped by Forbes and other media as next Warren Buffett. He let the hype get to him his ego went overboard didn’t listen to anyone. He thought he knew retail would fire anyone who opposed him. He failed to shift online or to groceries and then bought Sears and ran that into ground as well.
Good ole Eddie "Skull and Bones" Lampert did exactly what was expected of him. From the Rothschild 25 Point Plan 9. Seize properties by any means to secure submission and sovereignty. 17. Use systematic deception, high-sounding phrases and popular slogans. “The opposite of what has been promised can always be done afterwards... That is of no consequence.” 19. Masquerade as political, financial and economic advisers to carry out our mandates with Diplomacy and without fear of exposing “the secret power behind national and international affairs.” 20. Ultimate world government is the goal. *It will be necessary to establish huge monopolies,* so even the largest fortunes of the Goyim will depend on us to such an extent that they will go to the bottom together with the credit of their governments on the day after the great political smash.” ---You can't have Walmart, K-Mart and Target when you want monopolies. 21. Use economic warfare. Rob the "Goyim" of their landed properties and industries with a combination of high taxes and unfair competition.
I've been trying to figure out for many years why anybody thought that combining two failing companies with such different models was such a good idea.
@@SmallSpoonBrigadeEddie thought of pushing Sears brands in Kmart and vice versa while he completely failed to focus on cutting costs in supply chain, focusing on groceries (Kmart was first to have groceries and abandoned it while Walmart copied it and went full gear) .
I worked there before and after the merger. E.L. was there to slowly dismantle a pair of struggling retail companies without ever planning to invest in the stores. He destroyed both with his huge ego.
I was a mattress salesman for Sears in 2014 and had multiple arguments with the GM about not having any sales for weeks at a time, it finally ended when I told him I couldn't sell anything if nobody comes through my department even in passing for day on end, the store closed about 3mths after that
I worked for Sears electronics back in the 90s. I quit because they cut my hours due to not selling enough Maintnance agreements Even though my sales were really good. They had the wrong buisness model.
I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, we made fun of people who shopped at K-Mart. It was not like now where most people won't mock or ridicule somebody for buying a shirt from Target or Wallyworld. K-Mart always had a reputation for shoddy knockoffs.
@@notsocrates9529 same for us, too! I remember sitting with my girlfriends at recess, laughing at a teacher because I saw her shopping at Kmart. What was I doing there? Oh, "I didn't wanna go, but my parents made me." LOL.
My local K-Mart was everyone's favorite store in the 70s and 80s, by the 90s it was mid tier, by 2000s it was laughably terrible. People here thought they must be a front because their business decisions were so terrible it couldn't be understood. For example: one year they moved the counties 4th of July fireworks show _across the street_ from K-Mart. The parking lot was packed with hungry, thirsty families. The store _closed early_ and barely made a dime when they could have raked in cash. They closed right after people showed up. It wasn't even holiday hours either, the fireworks show wasn't on the 4th or anything.
You are absolutely right that Mr. Lambert lack of vision ended K-Marts future. As an ex-K-Mart employee in Sandusky, Michigan I can tell you that we actually had a niche business. Most of our shoppers enjoyed the outstanding customer service that all of our employees provided, which was not available at the local Wal-Mart location. They didn't mind paying more for the same or similar products that they could get at Wal-Mart. To this day the Wal-Mart customer service is among the worst I have ever seen. We also had the advantage of non-stop recovery of our merchandise displays. Our aisles were neat and clean unlike Wal-Marts. The biggest problem we faced was an old building with an abondance of roof leaks and an old tile floor that was difficult to maintain. If we had had a timely remodel we would still in business to this very day.
I worked at a Kmart in 1990. The floor managers were kids straight out of high school. For some reason, the store manager would not promote adults. Totally horrible people to take orders from. I lasted maybe 3 months before leaving. To this day I remember dust on the shelves. No wonder that place went down.
Worked for my hometown's Kmart at the end of the company's last high point, during the time that the Sears merger happened. Almost overnight there were changes. We got this whole spiel (complete with hours of new training videos) about how they were re-focusing their business model away from the general family to cater almost exclusively to women from their 20s to 40s. Within a month or two, the men's clothing and shoe sections were cut almost in half to add women's inventory. The following summer, the garden center only ever had two or three lawn mowers or weed trimmers (never mind accessories), almost no BBQ grills, and was taken over by gaudy statues and overpriced fountains and birdbaths. Hardware and automotive were reduced from full sections to two pitiful aisles that were mostly lightbulbs and USB chargers to make room for a "gift registry" station that was NEVER used (yet they still had to pay someone to sit there and man the counter). The seasonal section, which used to carry everything from pools and yard gamds in the summer to Christmas trees and decorations in winter, was given over to seasonal children's fashions so they could keep a steady and unchanging inventory in the apparel department. Sporting goods stopped selling rifles, then shotguns, then even airsoft guns, replacing them in the cases with horribly overpriced things like depth finders, fish finders, nautical GPS units (who has a need for THOSE in West Virginia?), and trailer hitches. Because some paperwork hadn't been filed on time, they even stopped selling hunting/fishing licenses in 2009 and nobody ever bothered trying to get them back. They stopped even trying to maintain the key grinder, so when it needed replacement parts they just shut it down. Same for the photo lab (which was where I worked as manager and was my favorite thing in the entire store); once the free maintenance contract ran out they didn't buy a new machine and turned the entire corner into an apparel section for WVU and Marshall University. The toy section stopped carrying big-ticket items like LEGO or NERF; gone were the large playsets and Hot Wheels tracks. The girls' toy section grew ever so slowly until the boys' was just one lonely aisle of dusty outdated action figures. Board games were discontinued to make way for massive stuffed animals that had to be cleaned with a mini-vac almost every day to keep the dust from piling up. They removed the pharmacy entirely, leaving only a few shelves of Advil and Pepto-Bismol type medicines to put in a section for those fancy recliners with heat and massage functions. The grocery section, which used to be fairly good, was shrunk to make room for a bigger housewares section with more pots and pans, food dehydrators, waffle makers, and all those "As Seen On TV" kitchen gadgets - I kid you not, an entire section of one aisle was given over to a Magic Bullet display. K-Cafe? Taken out to build a department for mattresses that, you guessed it, never sold. But the department to fare the worst? Electronics started ordering fewer and fewer consoles (this REALLY ticked off people trying to get Wiis), fewer copies of video games, movies, and music albums. They condensed the stereos and TVs to one half of the section, whereas each used to occupy half on its own, filling the empty portion with pricy iPhone/iPad accessories. Phones and tablets pretty much replaced digital cameras in the glass cases. By 2010, the department was nothing but a handful of TVs, a few DVD/BluRay players, a movie bargain bin, the Apple stuff, and a never-changing selection of dusty refrigerators, freezers, washers, and dryers. In the space of six years, it went from one of the most profitable stores in the district to a ghost town because they stopped carrying the things people were actually buying and replaced it with overpriced luxury items that nobody ever associated with Kmart, and when the locals couldn't find what they were looking for they gave up and went to other places, like the Wal-Mart about 10 minutes away. Somehow the store hung on until 2018, but the combination of the city implementing new taxes (to offset the drop in revenue from local businesses closing up) and the landlord of the mall raising rent within three months of each other, the store just couldn't hold on any longer and it closed down. As much as I used to love the place as a kid, the company just refused to actually see what was profitable and was trying to cater to a demographic that was never their strongest supporter.
What you just said about the automotive section and bicycle section getting deleted from existence that was my final year shopping there voluntarily I could find all kinds or random things until the day I saw almost nothing and that was a rap for me
This was an amazing description of how badly managed Kmart was. It seems that whoever was in charge preferred to do what they considered the easiest (and laziest) route, instead of actually trying to improve the business. The switch from catering to the general family, over to mostly catering to women from their 20s to 40s instead, also shows that a low IQ must have been a hiring requirement for those in charge of making such decisions.
I'm in that demographic and what Kmart did to that store would NOT appeal to me. I have a strong sense that there was no real market research done that drove those decisions; it was just vibes.
My sister was a lifelong employee and a store manager when she retired a few years back. She knew they were doomed at least 25 years ago as they just wouldn't move out of the 70s.
Kmart was actually fun to go to back in the 70s when I was a kid. Could go the k-cafe, get a sub, popcorn or an icee. Mom’s would hang out and drink coffee waiting for the blue light specials. Kind of sad for people my age. Still have my Star Wars toys and baseball cards somewhere in my attic.
I felt the same way when my family shopped there in the early 80’s. I always looked forward to their little versions of “hot pockets” and an Icee after going to the toys and electronics section. But I never told my friends that we shopped there because of the stigma attached to Kmart.
@@jadizzle lol same, everyone's parents shopped there at some point but we acted like we'd never step foot in there, and we'd accuse each other of buying "blue light specials" and whisper Kmart if we had to tell the truth where we got something 😂
Last time I was in Kmart it was utterly depressing. Lights were missing, stock was scrambled and missing, the workers were scattered and when you could find one, they look depressed. Kmart in the 90s wasn't a go to but it was significantly better than when I went.
God I miss Kmart. I had a lot of fun there as a kid. Blue Light Specials, the cafe, the toys and electronics sections were great. I do find it hilarious that Champion, a brand I always associated with the clearance rack at Kmart is now expensive as hell.
Now that you mention it I remember way back in the early 2000s I used to say that Kmart had a better electronics section. I feel like champion has always been a bit of a rollercoaster. It’ll be a discount brand for a while until someone famous decides to wear one thing and cause it to sell out and then typical business move is to increase price 🙄 Imagine if that happened with Hanes. Fruit of the Loom 😅😅😅
@@alextacohead1352 oh wooowww! Yes you just reminded me they had food! Now I’m kinda picturing that searing section vaguely… Though I don’t remember what they served at all. Was it like mall food!? Pretzels.. hot dogs..?
I live near the Kmart World Headquarters building in Trot, MI. I remember when they added the second story to the huge building. It has been vacant for about 20+ years. Finally, this year it is being torn down.
I wonder if the Kmart in Australia is actually tied to the bankrupt, nonexistent USA one. As in are there any legal or financial ties between them. Or was the Australian Kmart spun off, sold off, from the USA Kmart decades ago. Same Kmart name. But that is the only tie between them. Completely different ownership and management. And different history for the past 30-40 years too.
@@russellseaton2014Kmart Australia when established was a joint venture between Kmart USA 51% and Coles 49% . They were later merged with the creation of Coles Myer. kmart in Australia is now owned by Perth conglomerate Wesfarmers.
Last time I visited Kmart was in like 2012. It was a run down dump by then but it made my mom depressed because she said it used to be a much better store in her youth and she used to like the toys (she collects puzzles) and clothing section. I remember the floors and walls being dirty. It just felt like the store existed with no passion or reason. We bought some kind of movable clothes hamper with wheels and it didn't even come with all the pieces, we took it back 3 times and it still every time was missing pieces. Then we went to Target, Wal-Mart and Toys R Us down the street for her puzzles and clothing and that was the end of that. Your assessment at the end was spot on. They never found their killer app or theme. There was no thesis to their branding. Wal-Mart is about being affordable to average middle class families, and Target was about being trendy with decent quality merchandise. Kmart was a random heap of shit with missing pieces. They never escaped the 1970s and 80s. What was fine for America then is not today, especially with so much more choice. A lack of creativity, vision and purpose will fail you in today's economy. The people do indeed want atmosphere, not just prices.
I worked there twice over the years. The worst thing they did to help kill themselves was never investing in the stores. The POS system was ancient when I last worked there in 93. The registers were barely holding on. And they did ignore what was working for Walmart. They also stayed over stacked with management over the years. They had no system in place to keep good workers. And at the last store I worked at in California, the employees were robbing them blind along with the customers. Not much in the way of security at either store I worked at. I always felt like upper management were too busy counting back accounts to see or care about the horrible Rollercoaster ride they were on. Kmart killed themselves over 30 years. It wasn't any one person. It's like every new ceo that came in was just looking to line their pockets.
Office Depot/Max runs EXACTLY the same way. They and Kmart will be gone within the next 10 years. They did it all to themselves with their idiotic "management" and their attitudes stuck back in the 1970s. And yes, employees (including the managers) were robbing my store left and right for a while. Saw almost $10K of merchandise disappear in two weeks. That's almost an entire day's earnings. And don't even get me started on their almost-zero profit margins...
The two were setup differently. Walmart is like McDonald's in that it wasn't one company like you think (McDonald's isn't fast food, it's real estate who also sells food), Walmart is a logistics company who also sells retail items. That's why Walmart is really the only company who can compete with Amazon, and vice versa as Amazon is also a logistics company. Since Kmart relied on vendors to supply them, it was never going to be the most up-to-date system.
I worked for a major paper company that delivered to K Mart warehouses. Before bankruptcy their receivers would miscount every load claiming shortages. It wasn’t funny because every carton (usually disposable diapers) was counted by a automated counter coming out of my truck. Every load was perfect on my end but K Mart claimed 20 cases short and towards the end up to 100 cases short. My company never backed the drivers up and we were all told to let it go. The price of doing business with a bunch of desperate thieves.
Not necessarily true. The checkers were pushed to hurry up as were the put away fork driver. Miss count were common and being that diaper pallets where light and easy to put away fork drives stab each other in the back because it helped them make their quotas and often they would be removed from the receiving dock before they were completely checked in. The inventories were a trip and the best jobs where in the inventory control, a bunch of senior workers that had no quota and were most secure in their jobs
My Mom put me in a shopping cart when I was a toddler at KMart in the 80's. I fell out of the cart and hit my head so hard that she was worried she was legit going to catch a charge. That is all I remember about KMart.
WAIT this isn't entirely true. I also remember being around 9 years old and getting to buy a pack of colored & scented markers from KMart as my folks were shopping for something else. I was excited, until I opened them in the car to learn that each and every marker was dried out and smelled like nothing. I was so disappointed that it has stuck with me into my 40's. Fk KMart for that.
@@Prolific_Troll When I was a little Tyke in the mid 80s, Mom shopped there all the time, To keep me entertained, she'd buy me an ICEE and give me a Toy to play with while we waited almost 35 Minutes in the Check Out lines. This was in Santa Rosa,CA in 1986-1987.
I worked for K-Mart in 2012-2014 and I knew exactly what there problems were ever just being a store stocker. No advancement in technology, completely messed up system of item numbers, and the computer that told us what volume to put up refused to accept the we literally had no room for the volume of stuff we had stocked in the back. Even I'm places that it was the only large retailer, it couldn't survive.
I moved to a lot of different places during the years when Kmart went from thriving to serious decline. In each place I lived I shopped at both Kmart and Walmart and found Kmart to always have merchandise disorganized and the store a mess. It was a failure of management more than anything else. Walmart was nearly always clean and tidy. That has changed now that Kmart is gone. Walmart doesn't have to try and compete. I keep hoping Target will give Walmart a challenge but they have failed to do that. I have never lived in a city that had a Target. As a kid in the 60s I loved to go to SS Kresges. This video brought back memories.
I recall 2010s KMart. Just like you said, with the addition of the store looking like it needed remodeled, an electronics section that was sparsely populated with some offbrand stuff that looked to be collecting dust for a while, and lots of lights overhead needing replacement. It was very depressing because the employees acted normal but it was obvious that if they hadn't polished up their resume, they should be.
Trust me they built a Target a few years ago, across the street for our big Walmart Super Center, and Target never has anything worth buying in there!! ALSO, the people working at our local Target are much more rude than those working for Walmart across the street!! Walmart has both variety and selection, while our Target is full of "second thought items" it seems like!! Or to put it another way, comparing the two, Walmart is current, up to date and has items you actually WANT TO BUY, while our local Target looks like a place that they filled with Amazon Returns nobody wanted in the first place!!!! So really, given my opinion you really are not missing much without a Target!!!
I worked at a Kmart like six or so years ago very briefly. They only ever had like five people on shift at any given time in the whole store, it was impossible trying to keep the place neat I swear people purposefully put things in random places on the shelves, but really there just wasn't anyone to so much as organize a single isle let alone the entire store. Managers were only ever sat in an office twiddling their thumbs. About the only cool memory I have of the place is getting to experience computers that were made before I was born... The old people there literally had to teach me, the millennial, how to use those registers 😅
My dad always asked me if I wanted to go to "Kame-Apart" with him as a kid I'd laugh every time and go pick up groceries for mom and sis with him. Miss the early 2000's
Loved Kmart 😍 in the 1970s. It was THE place to shop. Loved the popcorn stand🍿 😋 at the entrance and the Slurpees. The cafe in the back had lunch a la carte.
Back in the day and I used to work at Kmart #4145, 50 N.Groesbeck Highway and Cass Avenue in Mt.Clemens, Michigan. From April 30, 1985 until May 8, 1996 and Kmart #4145,has Closed Permanently on Sunday May 8, 1996 on Mother's Day. The Kmart that I worked in had the store front windows. The Grocery Store was a Kmart Foods, then a Wrigley's Supermarket, then a Great Scott!Supermarket ,and a Kroger Store which Closed Permanently before Kmart Closed Permanently. The old Kmart is now a Planet Fitness Gym in the Kmart building, a Subway Submarine Sandwich Shop is in the old Kmart Garden Shop. And, a Dollar Tree 🌳 Store has opened up in the old Great Scott!Supermarket/Kroger Store portion of the old Kmart Building. I remember when Kmart was Closing Stores in the 1980's and the 1990's. And at least the old Kmart Building has been repurposed into other businesses. I still miss Kmart/Sears Stores to this very day. 0:00
The nail in the coffin imo was Kmart fumbled their online. The website was totally separate from the stores. You couldn't pickup the item in store, return it or even get a price match. For my older relatives they had mistrust. They were getting the emails from the store shopper's card. Walmart had no card and just advertised the store deals and started shipping stuff they didn't have in one store to that store. Also Amazon had better prices if they wanted to get stuff shipped.
Walmart has been having online issues too. I tried to use it and finally gave up after dealing with items missing, non-functional, incomplete items, wrong pieces of items, improper deliveries….
I gave up too for those reasons, but I recently needed a toaster (my k-mart $10 one died after 20+ years!) and the only superstore left close by now is target. I didn’t care for their options and decided to try the drew Barrymore one from Walmart and ordered it online since it’s 45 minutes away. I found everything to be much improved and have actually continued to order from them with no issues.
I remember my family avoiding Kmart during the 90s and early 2000s. The stores were just in such bad shape, never staffed well and never really taken care of. Environment might be a weird reason not to like a store but it's definitely a contributing factor.
The Last time I remember having a Positive Experience at KMart was in May of 1994. My Mom was 7 months Pregnant with my Sister and needed items for her Baby Shower, so she took me and my then 6 year old brother(I was 11 at the time) we went to Kmart where I read Comic Books, Video Game Magazines(Ren and Stimpy and the Lion King Movie Spoiler Marvel Mini Series), ate Little Caesars by the Slice(It was like .80 then) and played a little Super NES and Genesis(Mickey Mouse Circus), the Checkout time was quite tedious but again, I read Comic Books while my little brother played with Power Ranger Toys while were checking out. This was North Houston,TX and the people were quite helpful, Clerks and Stockers were friendly and the store seemed organized and properly run. Keep in mind, A Wal-Mart SOON opened about a month or so later. I'll never forget it. In August 1999 in Federal Way/Seattle,WA, I planned on Reserving a Dreamcast at KMart, and by then being 16 and having a Summer job, I expected KMart to properly put my DC on layaway, and when I called them, it MORTIFIED me that not only did the store NOT have or would be able to reserve my Dreamcast for Layaway, but the Customer Service informed me that Only certain KMarts were now carrying Video Games, and that theirs wouldn't be. When I asked for it to be shipped to the store from other one or from Warehouse Shipping, they told me that it wasn't possible. I was FURIOUS with KMart. Absolutely Enraged. Appalled, even checked out their Mess of a Website and what a Dumpster Fire it was. What The Hell happened? Everything about KMart including its Morale had completely changed in just 5 years. Last time I stepped foot in one was in NW Houston in August 2002. I told Mom(Who was a HUGE KMart Fanatic) that she was wasting her time. Told her that KMart sucked now and was a Poorly Run Retailer. She didn't believe me until we went inside. LOUSY Experience. The Store was run down and extremely outdated. Everything felt like it was stuck in 1994. What's worse were the Near Empty Shelves, Mom walked out of there when she sensed the "Hopelessness and Apathy" that was inside the store.
In the early 80s, Kmart was my go-to store for everything. Then we got the news that Walmart was coming to town. Kmart went into full remodel and totally destroyed the store. I couldn't find anything I needed. Prices went up, and quality went down. I started shopping at other stores. That's when they doomed themselves.
I remember the years leading up to K-mart closing they were just pitiful. The stores were always dirty, prices were higher than other department stores, and most of the time the item you needed was out of stock.
This. When I was a little Tyke in the mid 80s, Mom shopped there all the time, To keep me entertained, she'd buy me an ICEE and give me a Toy to play with while we waited almost 35 Minutes in the Check Out lines. This was in Santa Rosa,CA in 1986-1987.
I worked at a Kmart years ago. I hated it. It was crap quality, they couldn't get new hires, computers were outdated to the point where if they got glitched/turned off it would take 10-15 minutes just to boot back up, had too many Karens, too many arguements over Shop Your Way Rewards' terms and conditions (one guy bought three basket loads of clothes just to up and get refunds the next day just to abuse a gas discount promotion. Seriously, read the fine print, people!), the bosses were oblivious/smarmy, the music was so bad I had customers complain about that (seriously, nobody cares about Disco!), it was hot half the time because they were too penny-pinching to even install an AC, a good deal of the higher-ups either retired/got fired en masse, and it was the first job I (almost) walked out on. Two years later, the store I worked in ran out of business, so yes Kmart is getting exactly what it deserved.
About 20 years ago, I saw a 60 Minutes story about the mass firing of older managers. Corporate got the brilliant idea to replace managers who had worked there for decades, working their way up from the bottom, with much younger people, say in their early 20's, who had zero experience in retail, or even business degrees. The idea was, they could pay the kids a lot less than actual managers who had been with the company twice as long as the kids had been alive. Kmart never told any of the older managers why they were fired, so they just thought it was because of a slump in business. Each guy thought the others had moved to other jobs, or retired early because of ill health or something. Then one guy bumped into another guy. Each thought the other had retired, and they were surprised to find they'd both been fired instead. So they went online and looked for Kmart managers who'd been fired around the same time as them, thinking to have a reunion of people from their store, and compare notes. What they didn't expect was the responses they got from former Kmart managers from all over the United States. Everyone was shocked to find that it was corporate-level, not just at their store specifically. That was when I stopped going to Kmart. Soon, I started hearing from friends that Kmart was going to hell, which I expected. Then my boycott of Kmart ended, cos Kmart boycotted itself.
@@emilyadams3228 The Last time I visited KMart was in 2002. Even in '99 I knew they were on their way out. The Stores were EXTREMELY Dated and old, the Shelves and Floor Plans were Terrible and like a Poor Man's Target, and the Inventory was ABYSMAL, Always either out of stock or in such poor and low availability. Plus the Ascetics felt and looked like they were stuck in the Year 1994. Even the Shoddy Cash Register Systems. As for your story, the Stupidity of Corporate KMart astonishes me. The idea of hiring YOUNG inexperienced NO Retailer Degree Managers? That's as Stupid as what Circuit City did with DIVX.
When our K-Mart closed a couple years ago, they had their massive closeout sale, claiming huge discounts. However, if you looked up the product online, it was going for *above* or at retail price. I lost all respect for them at that moment. Lots of good memories shopping there, but they went out as sore losers.
I remember always going to our Kmart built in 1994 from opening till it closed in 03. It was such a warm and inviting place for a kid and the store was clean and had everything you needed. The last surviving k marts of the last 15 years do not resemble even a trace of what their prime looked like. They were all sad and destroyed.
The stores you mentioned at the beginning of the video are not the last ones in U.S.; there are 2 in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands and someone mentioned one in Guam, which is also U.S. Fun fact: The last one in Puerto Rico, USA, closed in San Juan on October 2022.
I worked at Kmart Canada & spent some time at Troy, MI HQ. I started in 1973 as a stock boy and left in 1995 as a Senior Buyer. I also visited new Kmart ventures & a group of stores purchased in Singapore. K Canada also purchased a 7-store chain in Hungary. What I observed was Nepotism and internal failures like "don't worry about the Competition, they're nothing", Never hired Personnel from the outside, until the early 90's & they were not the best calibre (they were either ousted from other companies or not skilled enough). They never cared about Capability, Professionalism or bringing on board a Target/Walmart Senior Executive. Simply ignored the competition. Location of stores were primarily focused on price/sq.ft. & NOT the best location. Internally, Kmart was dysfunctional. I saw the writing on the wall and resigned in 1995. Amen!
My mom was a manager at Sears shortly before the merger with Kmart. I remember her being constantly frustrated by the decisions of upper management, and when she was unceremoniously let go, i decided never to shop there again. When the merger happened, my disdain transferred over to Kmart as well - but it doesnt sound like i missed much of anything in either store.
K Mart missed a huge opportunity in the 90s. We had a Super K-Mart in our hometown, and I preferred it to Walmart. It was a much nicer store with a good selection, and it was always busy. They closed it and sold it to Home Depot. The Super K concept was a good one, and if they executed it properly, they would still be relevant.
Kmart was very popular in the 60s and 70s because it was pretty much the only store if its kind. When Walmart and Target came around, Kmart seemed to have given up. It became useless to go there to get something specific because they'd never have it. I stopped wasting my time and just went to Walmart, which was further away.
Kmart had the best toy selection out the 3 back in the day. But Kmart should of just focused on themselves instead of competing with Walmart and buying closing businesses.
This is, sadly, an all too common mistake for businesses to make. Granted, it's not necessarily an unwise decision, that can very easily stabilize a struggling business or help it grow, but the fact that they were focusing on doing that and not focusing on building their own brand, made it an unwise decision in the end.
After returning home from college, the neighborhood K-Mart was still going strong in the early 90s. Pretty much grew up in that place. Two friends had manager jobs there, and it had a decent auto service dept. Even after it moved into the store where the corporations venture Builders Square went out, and it added a Sears section with appliances only, it was still decent but barely hanging on trying to compete with Walmart
I only remember K-Mart as this slowly dying megalith where you can expect them not to have what you are hoping they'll have because their inventory sucks. Those empty shelves were an extreme version of what I remember. They weren't completely empty, but there were about as much empty space as there were products. Meanwhile, one of the other two was usually somewhere nearby. It makes me sad for the people who work there; like working on a cruise liner that doesn't have many passengers. Can only imagine if they had a crappy, inexperienced, impatient manager, ya know?
yeah I went there as a kid because we didn't have a Walmart near by and at first they had decent prices then they started to raise them and as you said you could not find anything on the shelves or they were strangely bare at times. I went to the Kmart near where I lived now before it closed and the food court was closed the shelves were barer and they had nothing but hopeless young kids that I'm sure knew it was the end for Kmart. About a year since I last went in there they closed down and have since turned into a thriving mini-mall of assorted stores.
I worked in Loss Prevention for Kmart in the early 2010s. At the store level it was clear that the company simply couldn’t invest in modernizing their stores. One examples was their cash registers that looked like they were from the 80s. Just that alone made transactions take longer, and hurt the customer experience with longer check out times. Mostly importantly though, they failed to invest in talent, and took advantage of low wage employees that were desperate for hours to make ends meet. The management during that time deserves a giant middle finger for forcing those folks to make critical sacrifices just to keep their job. I was fortunate to go back to school, get a college degree, and get the hell out of the company.
Kmart dug their own grave!! The stores were gross, the "help" was nowhere to be found and not any help if you could find anyone, the merchandise was unorganized, the check out lines sucked, etc etc. The "save your way" points rewards system was a joke and never calculated properly.
@@davemccage7918 it was different in the 90's, she had a bigger name back then. Once her feud with Trump started, well really before that even, once she joined the View, she tanked.
There was no help. Things were run on a skeleton crew. One of my fears was that I would have an emergency and not be discovered until my corpse had rotted
My neighborhood Kmart was very happening in the early 90s (and I’m sure beforehand). It held on pretty long (it was one of the last in all of Louisiana). I remember blue light specials and buying clothes etc there. We shopped there as much if not more than Walmart. Then the super Walmart opened a couple minutes down the road, and that was that.
As a former K-Mart employee (worked there for last year of high school and all four years of college) it's kind of sad that they are almost completely gone. As retail jobs go, it wasn't a bad place to work. We just never could complete with Wal-Mart on either price or selection. Walking into a store in the early 2010's was basically the same as walking into one in the 90's, as they hadn't really updated anything. Shoppers aren't going to shop at a place like that (which is also why Sears went out).
A Target recently replaced a K Mart in my area across the street from a Marshalls and LA Fitness. Their computers looked like they were purchased in 1980 and so slow! 😂😂 Just seeing their inventory and workers I knew it wouldn’t last, damn bad leadership did them in.
In 1993, they entered Eastern Europe by purchasing 13 stores in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (the store in Bratislava was SIX STORIES!). They ended up selling them to Tesco in 1996.
I can remember going into K-Mart in the mid to late 80s and, even as a kid, being shocked at how empty the shelves were compared to just a few years before. And it was constantly like that. It got so bad that my mom just quit shopping there, preferring instead to drive over twice as far away to the Wal-Mart. I didn’t realize K-Mart dragged Sports Authority and Borders down with them, though.
My favorite part about Kmart going bankrupt was when Sears was going bankrupt at the same time. One bought the other thinking, "you're going broke, we're going broke...let's just drive this thing into the ground!"
There were two Kmarts within driving distance of me. One is now a Uhaul rental/storage and the other got tore down to build a HyVee. It's a shame because I actually liked shopping at Kmart back in the day. I would occasionally find things Walmart didn't have just browsing aisles.
The Kmart here in my town is sitting empty currently still, it was supposed to be a U-Haul rental/storage but that never panned out. Then the Sears was gutted and torn apart to make it a Hy-Vee.
I remember in graphic arts we had to re-design a logo of the company. We thought needed their logo redesigned I did Kmart my logo was very similar to the one that they changed it to. I brought my design back to the teacher after I seen that and she raised my grade because she said I was on the right track. The only thing different from mine and theirs is I use block letters, and they use cursive with the Mart inside the K
In my hometown they built the Walmart right next to the Kmart. It was really interesting to go through both stores, one after the other. The contrast was clear. Walmart was clean and organized. Kmart was a shoddy mess that hadn't been updated since the mid 1970s.
As a kid, going to Kmart was a big treat. There was basically only K-Mart, Roses, and Hills in our town. Hills had far better toys, and also an area with video games and concessions, which was magical. Then much later we got a Best Store, which was mind-blowing, then we got Walmart much later.
I LOVED going to Kmart as a kid/teenager. One of the first things I bought was a decent pair of jeans from Kmart. Mine somehow lasted into the pandemic( closed April/May 2020)
My father, who was a store manager for K-mart claims the late 80s and early 90s was their problem era. Corporate officers were sponsoring golf ternaments and racing teams instead of focusing on the problems in the stores. Then there were problems with the 401K.
I never realized that Kmart was responsible for my two favorite bookstores closing. The last Kmart near me was sketchy AF. The mall it was in was pretty safe but the store was a different story. I was in there one Sunday, and there was an old guy, half naked, trying on bathing suits in the aisle and people panhandling inside the store.
I did all my school shopping at K-Mart. I could not wait to be able to buy my own stuff ANYWHERE else! I stopped going there when I realized no matter when you went there, or how many people were there, it would take at least 45 minutes to check out. Actually the last time I went, I left my stuff on the counter and walked out because I was waiting for so long for someone to cash me out.
One of my first ever jobs was at Kmart in the late 2000s. Nothing had been updated since the mid 90s, easily, and the monthly shrink numbers were higher than profits consistently. It was completely depressing.
There used to be a Kmart here and the manager told me that Kmart did not own the property this very large store was on, which increased the overhead. So when the store closed they couldn't even sell the land it was on. It just died.
A side effect of the Kmart stores closing was that it left massive properties that couldn't be easily redeveloped. The one in Layton, UT became glorified climate-controlled storage after sitting vacant for 3 years and the massive parking lot is slowly being parceled off and redeveloped. The one in Taylorsville, UT was torn down after it sat vacant for 5 years and is now a high-density apartment complex. So there are some small upsides.
100%. Wayne, NJ location has been vacant for a long time. Belleville, NJ location went vacant 2 years ago. Elmwood Park, NJ location finally got redeveloped but it took almost 10 years for any movement. Then again, that location had two floors and a freight elevator that customers were allowed to use.
We used to go to the Layton Kmart every once in a while when I was stationed at Hill AFB from 2007-15. Even by then you could tell it was dying. It was always oddly dark if you went there in the evening and seemed like a ghost town as far as employees go. It wasn’t nearly as terrible as some of the others I’ve heard about though. Which is weird when I was a kid in Phoenix, Az in the 80’s and early 90’s Kmart was it there. There wasn’t any Walmarts yet. I didn’t even know Walmart existed until I saw it in National lampoons Christmas vacation and asked my mom what the hell it was. “Oh it’s like Kmart” lol The Kmart in Peoria was my first ever job in 93 and it sucked balls unless you worked in electronics and got to match wits with the constant thieves. They had really good pharmacies though that’s pretty much the only reason we ever went to the one in Layton as they were the only ones that ever had my wife’s medication in stock after her lung surgeries.
My hometown lost our Kmart in '94 (3 years after Walmart and Target both moved in) and the lot was HUGE. Like, so stupidly big that it took eight years to be split up and filled by a (also now defunct) Bed Bath & Beyond and a local grocery chain.
The Kmart in my town is now a non-denominational Church. Oddly enough, another defunct company, Rax, used to be directly in front of the Kmart, but it got torn down and there is a gas station there now. The Kmart that used to be in the next town over is now a Life Time Fitness.
That’s too bad. All we had in my town when I was a kid was at Kmart. They have a lot of good memories going there to pick up the original Nintendo and all my games as a kid. I even worked there for a while but at some point they even got rid of electronics, which I think was a huge mistake. I miss seers to.
I remember the last time I saw a K Mart was way back in 2012. We were traveling to Las Vegas, and made a pit stop at a local town. We saw an all too familiar building with a giant red K. People were flocking by the thousands to clear it out; meaning everything had to go. My mom went inside and was saddened to see her childhood disappearing forever. She used to hang out at K Mart with her school friends and siblings in the early 80s.
When I was young Kmart was the go to place. Then the stores started to slip, you seldom left the store with everything you went there for and the final straw was when they opened a Walmart right across the street. The store was clean and well organized, had everything you wanted at a good price and there was no need to go to Kmart anymore. I failed to understand how they could stuff a 120,000 sq foot store with merchandise and somehow not have anything I wanted to buy. The last time I went into a Kmart the store was dirty, the food in the pet section was infested with insects and when I told them about it they were like, meh. Never went back after that.
Even the Employees knew it was falling apart and said what's the point Fuck it, if they didn't care then that's when you really knew the store would shut down soon.
I used to live in Miami near the Kmart mentioned in this vid and every time I would go inside it would make me and my brothers sad... it was sad cuz it was so lonely, there would be like 3 people and one cash register open.. I moved away so idk how it's doing right now....
I worked for KMart from 1993 to 1994 for about six months. And I can say...this was the worst company I've ever worked for. In September 1993 they hired 100 new employees to work a newly built KMart store. We, the employees, practically built that store. We installed fixtures, shelves, and stocked all the merchandise. For three months the new employees worked their butts off. Christmas was hell, but we survived. The day after Christmas, when KMart didn't need us anymore, they fired 70 of the 100 employees without warning. While I did survive KMart's thinning of the herd, suddenly I got stuck doing three more jobs than I did before. I worked Toys, Hardware Home Improvement, Automotive, Seasonal and Cashier. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and walked out.
that was the end of the Antonini era, the most idiotic leader in company history. He's the one who moved, relocated, then even closed new stores, like brand new stores!
Sounds familiar. Did the same at a new store that opened in 1995. After an initial thinning out of staff, about 30-40 of us "originals" stuck it out for various lengths. I was there for 5 years. Was promoted to Sporting goods manager in year 3, and made a 400 in year 4. I knew the writing was on the wall when myself and our GM, the only two male 400's, were pushing in carts and portering heavy items to cars because there was essentially no staff. Left soon after that.
Blame democrat Bill Clinton who illegally signed NAFTA, PNTR with China and changed employment laws including incentivizing employers to fire full time workers and replace them with part timers, to hide the harm his illegal trade treaties were doing to US workers.
The KMart in our local town shut down a long time ago, but the building was recently bought and remodeled into an Ollie’s Discount Store. I’m just glad the building is still up, gives me good memories.
We had a Kmart in the area that disappeared in the very early 2000's. VERY nice store, the crew kept it spotless and well stocked, and the employees were wonderful to deal with. Definitely sorry to see it go as it outshined our local Wal-Mart. But yeah, I can see why Kmart as a whole went down. Every other Kmart I have been in were horrible... stores were filthy, the employees were rude, the food area was nasty, and yeah, Kmart as a whole sold a lot of cheap junk. *IF* Kmart is to survive, it's going to have to completely reinvent itself. Meaning new leadership, new logos, new corporate image, treat it as if it were a brand new business getting off the ground, and make a heavy internet presence and deal as much as they can online. They're going to have to convince potential customers that they aren't the Kmart of the past, and they are going to have to find a way to mark their merchandise in a way that no one can refuse the prices. One thought is they could become a drop shipper of imported goods like a lot of eBay sellers are now.
I worked for the contractor that did the Kmart blue light announcements in the 1980s for all the stores nationwide. They were building stores by the dozens right up until the crisis came and then they suddenly stopped overnight leaving a lot of properties that they had option that never got Kmart store. I’m not sure they had any business plan in those days other than to keep opening stores until they had one on every block. When the halt was announced on new store construction, it came as a shock to everybody in that. I always had a feeling, from talking to people in the industry that Walmart was much better at cutting deals with suppliers then Kmart was.
WalMart got big enough that it's able to bully suppliers into meeting their ever lower price demands regardless of what it does to quality. Kmart simply never had that sort of muscle.
@@philj9977 Sam Walton learned how to UNDERCUT competitors with "Bulk Supply" during the 40s. That's always been Wal-Mart secret formula. Mad TV was calling this out WAY Back in 1997.
@@bluegrassman3040 Sam Walton was Very CUTTHROAT. He was Determined to grow his Chain WW so he would play the old "Bulk Appraisal" Game of making Sure suppliers would use Larger Mass Volume for Wal Mart when compared to Other Stores so he could have them sold at Much Lower price Marketvalue in larger wide Inventory. Wal-Mart Devoured alot of their Competitors with this Tactic.
I worked at a Super K-Mart from 2003 - 2013-ish. My issues when working with them were: there was a manager that was universally hated across the store and nothing was never done, they made customers leave with how hard they pushed getting people to sign up for their awards program (I watched one guy get asked four times before he got to back of the store), and they got rid of name brand grocery items.
CEO Joe Antonini is actually the one who ran Kmart into the ground. Sam Walton used to work for Kmart, and left in disgust by how it was being run. He ended up founding Walmart, to compete against Kmart. We all know how that worked out. BTW, Joe had a brother named Dick Antonini, who was CEO of Foremost Insurance, and he also made bad decision's, that ended up with him being ousted from the company, but not in time (this was later than what happened at Kmart). Foremost was sold to Farmers Insurance. However, both brother's ended up with tons of money, due to their golden parachutes. My older sister worked for Kmart, and I worked for Foremost, during the time both of these event's occured.
Mr. Sam never worked for Kmart. He worked for JC Penny's. He did visit many Kmart stores, as he did other competitions. He observed what they did right and incorporated them into Walmart. He wrote about numerous good things Kmart did and he built on them. He proved Kmart could've built, on their successes and become better. Instead, they became lazy and complacent.
6 months later but i just have to vent about working at kmart. I was there for a few weeks right at the end of their life. They literally had us move empty buckets from one shelf to another and back again, every day, over and over. Because according to them there wasnt anything else TO do. The time wasted there was phenomenal. Not to mention every aspect being horribly mismanaged. Also there was an ancient, broken slurpy machine that had fossilized slurpee left in them from who knows how many years ago. Shit just sat there lol
I miss Kmart, but I can't pretend they were doing good even before the 2010s. When I last walked into the Cincinnati area's final operational store in 2019, I felt a mix of depression and hope that this would be their last year in operation. I had a strong emotional connection to this specific location, as our family would often shop here back in the day, but at this point I just wanted it to go. Sure enough, the store closed just before Christmas and Kmart was done in the Cincy area and the state of Kentucky. The location is expected to be redeveloped as a new Kroger grocery store.
They only peaked in the 1970s because there was a recession, and that affected not only people’s ability to buy goods but the quality of the goods they were able to buy. Manufacturers used that as an excuse to cut corners on everything. Even the food industry used that as an excuse to mess around with the food supply.
@@Attmay KMart also still thrived in the 80s and was a stable of my Early Childhood of the mid and late 1980s. But by the Early 1990s, Wal-Mart got into the Game. I remember visiting one for the first time in Portsmouth,VA in April 1991, I KNEW they were gonna be SERIOUS Trouble for KMart. They were BIGGER, with a BETTER Floorplan, Better Catalog(Pre Internet Days) had Better Supply levels and larger spaces. Its like When Best Buy hit the scene when Montgomery Ward was trying to invest heavily in its Electronics Department. I do know though that the 70s was the "Stagflation" Period and that Supply and Demand outweighed everything else during the Nixon,Ford AND Carter Years.
I used to shop at k-marts and I remember having a choice of Walmart, fredmeyer, Kmart and shopko and target. We still have a Smith's market place, which was a remnant of fredmeyer. The Kmart and Fred Myers were fairly close to each other. I was a kid during their construction and I remember going in the jobsite when they weren't there and playing around with friends. We used to grab the rebar that was sticking out of the concrete vertically and jump off the foundation with it bending it. Later my mom shopped there and shopko, most of my Christmas stuff came from kb toys, shopko or Kmart and sometimes toys r us. I remember fredmeyer having a nintendo 64 display at normal height and not way above. I used to go play that before I had my own. Kmart strained your neck. I remember shopping there later and picked up milk there. Barely bought any food because it was lousy priced and the selection just felt sad and depressing like they were trying to compete with Walmart and target grocery. The stores were looking lousy, but their photo centers were doing okay for portraits. I felt bad for Kmart, I remember sears looking more ghetto. There was a sears super center that opened and was really nice, but overpriced. Kmart still held on, but sears felt more empty here. I was sad to see shopko and Kmart go. I didn't realize sears guy had Walmart too, that guy I remember having some crazy ideas sears was going to be huge. Then he destroyed it all. Sad end of an era. Strangely last time I went into target, it felt like a Kmart again. With looking dated and having crap selection. There are two other stores that are nicer here, but strangely the location I went to was newer. I think the floor tile, messy from Christmas shoppers and the pathetic variety just felt bad, but the place was super busy for Christmas shopping. I only liked target for clothes anyhow, it's a nice change from Walmart for toy shopping for Christmas.
I loved the Kmart that used to be near me. However the thing that always stuck out to me was the store looked so outdated on the inside, that it looked dirty. They carried good products, but it felt like they couldn’t attract the people into the store to buy the products.
The only clear memories I have of Kmarts are when they were dying. It was fairly close to this skate park I went to when I was teenager with my friends, I bought an unhealthy amount of caffeinated drinks from their fridges NO ONE stopped us from being the little shits we prolly were, now that I think about it
A big reason for me to stop shopping at Kmart was lack of inventory, things not priced or being unable to locate items in the store. I would take my shopping list into the store and come out of the store with nothing because things weren't being restocked. When it was restocked, it was put somewhere else in the store or at the opposite end of the store. So, it got to be way too confusing to shop there and leaving the store having bought nothing at all. Walmart had been open for awhile, but it was a MUCH further drive to make, but because of my bad shopping experiences with Kmart, I started making the longer drive to Walmart. But, it wasn't long before a Walmart opened up near me. I think I've only shopped at Target only a few times in all the years it's been around. To me, Target is like a wannabe Macy's with the higher prices but gives a discount facade. Too pretentious for me and I was very insulted when they moved in after Fedmart closed promising same low prices that was a con. Sadly, I'm starting to notice some of the same issues lately at the Walmart that Kmart was doing prior to closing down. Naturally, since covid, some of the shelves are still hard to get products, but they are starting to price gouge on many products. For example, a simple low brand toilet bowl cleaner was three bottles for $5. Now, just ONE is $13. I actually went to Home Depot to buy my toilet bowl cleaner for $3. Instead of getting in my car and driving to Walmart, I'll sit at home with my shopping list and check out the prices first and then shop where things are cheaper. Also, I have given up ordering anything online from Walmart because they will separate your order in many different orders so they can charge you an extra $6 per order. So, Walmart beat up Kmart in the competition, but they both share the same thing in poor management, so to save face in the public eyes, they ramp up propaganda that they are failing because of shoplifters. Always put the blame somewhere else. Just like Fedmart, Kmart and Walmart are all in the biz to profit and when they have gotten their money peaked, they let the biz just die. After all, another Mart is on the horizon with the same biz plan. Even Costco isn't offering any real cost savings to their members after the expensive membership fee is paid. As long as it's a good tax write off and the biz can close up with the profits intact, they aren't losing out. Kmart did the same thing as other biz... get in quick, grab the money quick and get out quick. It's a matter of time before Amazon out prices itself as well on crappy products like Temu. One thing I gotta say about Kmart is that they really worked harder to keep prices LOW, which Walmart isn't attempting to do anymore. Target isn't even in the same category in my opinion. I just don't shop there. With the way Walmart is doing biz in my area, I think opening a new Kmart might actually succeed. Regarding the Walmart super stores I think they are one aspect of their downfall. I visited relatives in Kansas years ago and went into a super store there to buy ONE item that I usually bought at the regular Walmart back home. I was shocked that it was more than twice the price. I was told that they had to increase the prices of everything in the store to compensate the produce losses. Gee, their produce was too expensive as well. This wasn't a discount store, but a rip off store. I was very sad to see Kmart go. I was very sad to see Fedmart close as well. But, I suspect Walmart will soon be another passage of time as well. Online biz is hurting physical local businesses. Well, it boils down to money and greed. If businesses were to lower their profit goals more, they would have a shot at surviving comfortably. I liked Kmart and would like to have them back!
I was a child and was able to tell Kmart was trash. Even the blind can see through their sales gimmicks. If you mark an item you 400%, then say it's 50% off, that's still 200% on!
Interesting analysis. It reminds me of the equally tragic, although more rapid, decline of Venture stores. I still remember when they tried to move from the discount space and position themselves as higher-end, but with no change in the merchandise offered. It was weird and their collapse was easily predictable. Kmart could have ruled as the low-cost leader but, as you conclude at the end, they never really capitalized on their niche.
Kmart actually ended up acquiring a good chunk of Venture stores in 1997. In fact, I live right down the street from a former Kmart/Venture that closed in 2003, became Burlington in 2004 and then moved out back in 2019 to a smaller store. What is it now? A building for the school district!
Here in Indianapolis, we had Hill's stores when I was a kid in the '80s and early '90s. When Hill's went out of business, their stores got swallowed up by Venture. Then, when the Venture stores went out of business, some became Kmart stores. This all happened in fairly rapid succession in the '90s. Kmart already had a presence here, but Venture leaving the space allowed Kmart to expand. We also have a number of storefronts that were abandoned by Target. It wasn't because Target wasn't doing well, it was because Target wanted fancier digs in more affluent neighborhoods. I have to hand it to Target. They know who their audience is. You don't see Target stores in lower-income neighborhoods. I always remember Kmart being terrible. My mom went there quite a bit. Target was the cool store.
@@christiangonzales7429 Venture had a Huge Expansion in the Early 90s that failed miserably. I remember when Mom worked for them in Houston in 1993. I think that one closed down by like 1996. Only lasting a few years.
I weirdly have fond memories of a Kmart because we had one right across our neighborhood when I was a kid. It was on that one location where now you can find the only Jollibee in all of Chicago. I thought they had gone out years ago, I'm actually impressed they're still living today.
target in Australia is not the same or anything similar to the US version! think they just licensed the name & logo (even though they look different too)
Wesfarmers owns both Kmart and Target in Australia and have no affiliation with their US counterparts. In fact, Wesfarmers is going to merge both of them into one unit.
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When’s the last time you saw a Kmart?
The nasty-ass border of Cranston and Providence, RI.
3 yrs ago in North Canton, Ohio.
There's still one here in Guam
in new zealand and australia they are still popular here
Back when I was in Job Corps I think, which was like 2005? lol
What really stuck out to me the last time I ended up in a Kmart sometime around 2005 was how - even though that store had been built in the late 90s - it looked like it hadn't been remodeled since 1975.
many of their remaining locations still look that way lol. The only difference is that they closed a lot of their Little Caesars/K Cafes
The last Kmart I was in looked like Post Malone became a store.
I feel like they closed years ago and no one told the employees
The last time I step foot in my local Kmart before closing was probably 2015. And it looked _exactly_ as it did when I moved to this town in 1997. Like a weird dimensional pocket where time stood still. The only change was the cafe counter was converted to a customer service desk.
Ya Kmart was such a time warp every time you went in
It makes me feel really old when I realize all the stores I genuinely liked going to as a kid have closed down due to bad business practices.
That part about Sports Authority and Borders really hit home. Same with other brands like White Hen, Funco Land, Cub Foods, Piggly Wiggly, Circuit City, Toys R Us, etc. Places that don't exist anymore. Gone like tears in the rain.
I just had this same conversation with my wife a couple days ago. JC Penney, Bon Marche, JK Gill, Jafco, Farrells, Frederick & Nelson, Sears - All gone
Cub Foods is still around, or was it formally not owned by SuperValu?
@thisplaceisazoo there are still plenty of JC Penny's still open.
@@bmjv77 barely.
@@bmjv77 maybe elsewhere, but not around me
The worst boss I've ever had was at Kmart. She could not focus on anything, could not remember anything, could not handle stress, and believed every lie the store manager told her (which the store manager took full advantage of). So of course they made her an assistant manager and paid her more money. Absolutely ridiculous.
They went through assistant managers and head managers like crap through a goose at the Richmond, KY store that I worked at. I worked there four years, and I can remember at least four different store managers and countless assistant managers. Some were OK, but some I wouldn't put in charge of a lemonade stand!
Eddie Lampert bought it out of bankruptcy
You pretty much described retail in general.
And he couldn't compete with that. Thats why he had a job at K Mart. If he wasn't an idiot he could had her management job but she was too much competition for him!
@@thehorrendousspacekablooie179fair
As a kid, Kmart was a store my family went to at least once a week. I have a lot of fond memories of shopping at Kmart, but I noticed the gradually worsening decline over time, and after every single store in my town closed years back, I'm actually surprised there are still any Kmart stores left. But I think it's only a matter of time before the coffin is finally closed.
I worked at a Kmart distribution center for 21 years until 1998. I knew years earlier when Walmart came from behind and overtook them, that Kmart's time was running out. I would go to our local Kmart to buy something on sale and they had no stock on the first day of the sale. I would go to work the next day and find pallets of the item in stock. Near the end Kmart was a shadow of its former self. Empty shelves, rundown stores. Truly sad of what happened to a once great store in the 70's and 80's.
And 90's.
What you're describing is literally the situation at my local Walmart today...
I don't think Kmart really knew what hit them. While they were started the same year as Walmart and Target, those chains were pretty much focused on the areas of the country where they came from and Kmart never really had to face them until the late '80s when they started showing up everywhere. Prior to that, Kmart only had to compete with Grants and local chains which they pretty much put out of business.
In a few short years starting in 1990, Kmart went from the biggest discount retailer to what became the world's longest going out of business sale beginning in.1994.
My parents would buy me so many gameboy color video games, beyblades, yu-gi-oh cards, sports cars, etc
Kmart will always have a special place in my heart, so sad to see it die a slow and painful death
@@alextacohead1352 The LAST time K-Mart was considered Relevant was in 1994. Mom held on to them as long as she could until the Stores closed down. The Thing that I remember being offended at and vowing to never do business with them again is how they often treated Supply Chain vendors. The Way SEGA was treated by them regarding Dreamcast in 1999-2000 was Criminal.
Kmart is what happens when you forget the User Experience component of your business. Kmart always made me sad and weirdly nostalgic for a time I wasn't even alive in, and that's bad news. You could tell eveyone who worked and shopped there knew that it was a slow sinking ship. I feel bad for all the people who lost their jobs, but I'm sure they were either absorbed by the other two big companies, or were done with retail altogether.
Was never a fan, but it's fascinating to see how not to run a successful company.
Eddie Lambert runs them all into the ground, siphons liquidations to his hedge fund, and sits on the commercial properties. That’s why none of the old Sears buildings have been sold yet. Still empty.
Lampert was preceded by immigrant parasite Meshulam Riklis who bled dry many chain stores starting in the 60s before Lampert acquired Kmart in a hostile takeover
the rich loopholes are crazy to me
@@nevercatnorcradle
You can't tax unrealized gains. Not a loophole
So that's why the buildings are still there.
@@AkameGaKillfan777 yes. All are still empty.
Around 2008, the local K-Mart had expanded to include some food. They had clothes, toys, electronics, tools, jewelry etc. Funny thing is, no matter what I was shopping for, they didn't happen to have that! Seems like EVERY TIME I went there, I walked out without what I wanted and had to go find it somewhere else! It was bizarre!
Eddie lampert ran it into the ground he was hyped by Forbes and other media as next Warren Buffett. He let the hype get to him his ego went overboard didn’t listen to anyone. He thought he knew retail would fire anyone who opposed him.
He failed to shift online or to groceries and then bought Sears and ran that into ground as well.
Good ole Eddie "Skull and Bones" Lampert did exactly what was expected of him.
From the Rothschild 25 Point Plan
9. Seize properties by any means to secure submission and sovereignty.
17. Use systematic deception, high-sounding phrases and popular slogans. “The
opposite of what has been promised can always be done afterwards... That is
of no consequence.”
19. Masquerade as political, financial and economic advisers to carry out our
mandates with Diplomacy and without fear of exposing “the secret power
behind national and international affairs.”
20. Ultimate world government is the goal. *It will be necessary to establish huge
monopolies,* so even the largest fortunes of the Goyim will depend on us to
such an extent that they will go to the bottom together with the credit of their
governments on the day after the great political smash.”
---You can't have Walmart, K-Mart and Target when you want monopolies.
21. Use economic warfare. Rob the "Goyim" of their landed properties and
industries with a combination of high taxes and unfair competition.
I've been trying to figure out for many years why anybody thought that combining two failing companies with such different models was such a good idea.
@@SmallSpoonBrigadeEddie thought of pushing Sears brands in Kmart and vice versa while he completely failed to focus on cutting costs in supply chain, focusing on groceries (Kmart was first to have groceries and abandoned it while Walmart copied it and went full gear) .
Yes and the same person won the bankruptcy court to buy the company
I worked there before and after the merger. E.L. was there to slowly dismantle a pair of struggling retail companies without ever planning to invest in the stores. He destroyed both with his huge ego.
I was a mattress salesman for Sears in 2014 and had multiple arguments with the GM about not having any sales for weeks at a time, it finally ended when I told him I couldn't sell anything if nobody comes through my department even in passing for day on end, the store closed about 3mths after that
Same in 2018. Was there two weeks and didn't do shit
I worked for Sears electronics back in the 90s.
I quit because they cut my hours due to not selling enough Maintnance agreements
Even though my sales were really good.
They had the wrong buisness model.
I wasn't in the US when Kmart was a thing, but coworkers tell me that it was decent in the 80s but by the 90s onward it was really a depressing place.
I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, we made fun of people who shopped at K-Mart. It was not like now where most people won't mock or ridicule somebody for buying a shirt from Target or Wallyworld.
K-Mart always had a reputation for shoddy knockoffs.
Not the ones in Los Angeles and other major cities I believe in the 90s it was still popular for low income families
@@notsocrates9529 same for us, too! I remember sitting with my girlfriends at recess, laughing at a teacher because I saw her shopping at Kmart. What was I doing there? Oh, "I didn't wanna go, but my parents made me." LOL.
My local K-Mart was everyone's favorite store in the 70s and 80s, by the 90s it was mid tier, by 2000s it was laughably terrible. People here thought they must be a front because their business decisions were so terrible it couldn't be understood.
For example: one year they moved the counties 4th of July fireworks show _across the street_ from K-Mart. The parking lot was packed with hungry, thirsty families. The store _closed early_ and barely made a dime when they could have raked in cash. They closed right after people showed up. It wasn't even holiday hours either, the fireworks show wasn't on the 4th or anything.
90s definitely not, even the 2000s it was respectable.
You are absolutely right that Mr. Lambert lack of vision ended K-Marts future. As an ex-K-Mart employee in Sandusky, Michigan I can tell you that we actually had a niche business. Most of our shoppers enjoyed the outstanding customer service that all of our employees provided, which was not available at the local Wal-Mart location. They didn't mind paying more for the same or similar products that they could get at Wal-Mart. To this day the Wal-Mart customer service is among the worst I have ever seen. We also had the advantage of non-stop recovery of our merchandise displays. Our aisles were neat and clean unlike Wal-Marts. The biggest problem we faced was an old building with an abondance of roof leaks and an old tile floor that was difficult to maintain. If we had had a timely remodel we would still in business to this very day.
I worked at a Kmart in 1990. The floor managers were kids straight out of high school. For some reason, the store manager would not promote adults. Totally horrible people to take orders from. I lasted maybe 3 months before leaving.
To this day I remember dust on the shelves. No wonder that place went down.
Worked for my hometown's Kmart at the end of the company's last high point, during the time that the Sears merger happened. Almost overnight there were changes. We got this whole spiel (complete with hours of new training videos) about how they were re-focusing their business model away from the general family to cater almost exclusively to women from their 20s to 40s. Within a month or two, the men's clothing and shoe sections were cut almost in half to add women's inventory. The following summer, the garden center only ever had two or three lawn mowers or weed trimmers (never mind accessories), almost no BBQ grills, and was taken over by gaudy statues and overpriced fountains and birdbaths. Hardware and automotive were reduced from full sections to two pitiful aisles that were mostly lightbulbs and USB chargers to make room for a "gift registry" station that was NEVER used (yet they still had to pay someone to sit there and man the counter). The seasonal section, which used to carry everything from pools and yard gamds in the summer to Christmas trees and decorations in winter, was given over to seasonal children's fashions so they could keep a steady and unchanging inventory in the apparel department. Sporting goods stopped selling rifles, then shotguns, then even airsoft guns, replacing them in the cases with horribly overpriced things like depth finders, fish finders, nautical GPS units (who has a need for THOSE in West Virginia?), and trailer hitches. Because some paperwork hadn't been filed on time, they even stopped selling hunting/fishing licenses in 2009 and nobody ever bothered trying to get them back. They stopped even trying to maintain the key grinder, so when it needed replacement parts they just shut it down. Same for the photo lab (which was where I worked as manager and was my favorite thing in the entire store); once the free maintenance contract ran out they didn't buy a new machine and turned the entire corner into an apparel section for WVU and Marshall University. The toy section stopped carrying big-ticket items like LEGO or NERF; gone were the large playsets and Hot Wheels tracks. The girls' toy section grew ever so slowly until the boys' was just one lonely aisle of dusty outdated action figures. Board games were discontinued to make way for massive stuffed animals that had to be cleaned with a mini-vac almost every day to keep the dust from piling up. They removed the pharmacy entirely, leaving only a few shelves of Advil and Pepto-Bismol type medicines to put in a section for those fancy recliners with heat and massage functions. The grocery section, which used to be fairly good, was shrunk to make room for a bigger housewares section with more pots and pans, food dehydrators, waffle makers, and all those "As Seen On TV" kitchen gadgets - I kid you not, an entire section of one aisle was given over to a Magic Bullet display. K-Cafe? Taken out to build a department for mattresses that, you guessed it, never sold. But the department to fare the worst? Electronics started ordering fewer and fewer consoles (this REALLY ticked off people trying to get Wiis), fewer copies of video games, movies, and music albums. They condensed the stereos and TVs to one half of the section, whereas each used to occupy half on its own, filling the empty portion with pricy iPhone/iPad accessories. Phones and tablets pretty much replaced digital cameras in the glass cases. By 2010, the department was nothing but a handful of TVs, a few DVD/BluRay players, a movie bargain bin, the Apple stuff, and a never-changing selection of dusty refrigerators, freezers, washers, and dryers. In the space of six years, it went from one of the most profitable stores in the district to a ghost town because they stopped carrying the things people were actually buying and replaced it with overpriced luxury items that nobody ever associated with Kmart, and when the locals couldn't find what they were looking for they gave up and went to other places, like the Wal-Mart about 10 minutes away. Somehow the store hung on until 2018, but the combination of the city implementing new taxes (to offset the drop in revenue from local businesses closing up) and the landlord of the mall raising rent within three months of each other, the store just couldn't hold on any longer and it closed down. As much as I used to love the place as a kid, the company just refused to actually see what was profitable and was trying to cater to a demographic that was never their strongest supporter.
What you just said about the automotive section and bicycle section getting deleted from existence that was my final year shopping there voluntarily I could find all kinds or random things until the day I saw almost nothing and that was a rap for me
This was an amazing description of how badly managed Kmart was. It seems that whoever was in charge preferred to do what they considered the easiest (and laziest) route, instead of actually trying to improve the business. The switch from catering to the general family, over to mostly catering to women from their 20s to 40s instead, also shows that a low IQ must have been a hiring requirement for those in charge of making such decisions.
BEST case study summary for RETAIL FAILUIRE I've seen . WELL done .
@@stephenk.5839 - Nailed it 👍.
I'm in that demographic and what Kmart did to that store would NOT appeal to me.
I have a strong sense that there was no real market research done that drove those decisions; it was just vibes.
My sister was a lifelong employee and a store manager when she retired a few years back. She knew they were doomed at least 25 years ago as they just wouldn't move out of the 70s.
Kmart was actually fun to go to back in the 70s when I was a kid. Could go the k-cafe, get a sub, popcorn or an icee. Mom’s would hang out and drink coffee waiting for the blue light specials. Kind of sad for people my age. Still have my Star Wars toys and baseball cards somewhere in my attic.
I felt the same way when my family shopped there in the early 80’s. I always looked forward to their little versions of “hot pockets” and an Icee after going to the toys and electronics section. But I never told my friends that we shopped there because of the stigma attached to Kmart.
A certain joke in *Ruthless People* will have to be explained to future generations.
@@jadizzle lol same, everyone's parents shopped there at some point but we acted like we'd never step foot in there, and we'd accuse each other of buying "blue light specials" and whisper Kmart if we had to tell the truth where we got something 😂
You might have something of value in you attic.
@@jadizzle I Grew up on KMart. Through my early Childhood in the mid and late 80s.
Last time I was in Kmart it was utterly depressing. Lights were missing, stock was scrambled and missing, the workers were scattered and when you could find one, they look depressed. Kmart in the 90s wasn't a go to but it was significantly better than when I went.
God I miss Kmart. I had a lot of fun there as a kid. Blue Light Specials, the cafe, the toys and electronics sections were great.
I do find it hilarious that Champion, a brand I always associated with the clearance rack at Kmart is now expensive as hell.
Now that you mention it I remember way back in the early 2000s I used to say that Kmart had a better electronics section.
I feel like champion has always been a bit of a rollercoaster. It’ll be a discount brand for a while until someone famous decides to wear one thing and cause it to sell out and then typical business move is to increase price 🙄
Imagine if that happened with Hanes. Fruit of the Loom 😅😅😅
Move to Australia there is I one in every city lol
@@XamryI always went there for electronics. During the Lambert era, they stopped stocking that dept.
I miss the food court and electronic section as well.
@@alextacohead1352 oh wooowww! Yes you just reminded me they had food! Now I’m kinda picturing that searing section vaguely… Though I don’t remember what they served at all.
Was it like mall food!? Pretzels.. hot dogs..?
I live near the Kmart World Headquarters building in Trot, MI. I remember when they added the second story to the huge building. It has been vacant for about 20+ years. Finally, this year it is being torn down.
Kmart is still one of Australia’s biggest retailers
I wonder if the Kmart in Australia is actually tied to the bankrupt, nonexistent USA one. As in are there any legal or financial ties between them. Or was the Australian Kmart spun off, sold off, from the USA Kmart decades ago. Same Kmart name. But that is the only tie between them. Completely different ownership and management. And different history for the past 30-40 years too.
Looks were (as Americans) are in the wrong country.
One of the many ways Australia is backward
@@russellseaton2014Kmart Australia was always a separate company, licensing the name from the USA company.
@@russellseaton2014Kmart Australia when established was a joint venture between Kmart USA 51% and Coles 49% . They were later merged with the creation of Coles Myer. kmart in Australia is now owned by Perth conglomerate Wesfarmers.
Last time I visited Kmart was in like 2012. It was a run down dump by then but it made my mom depressed because she said it used to be a much better store in her youth and she used to like the toys (she collects puzzles) and clothing section. I remember the floors and walls being dirty. It just felt like the store existed with no passion or reason. We bought some kind of movable clothes hamper with wheels and it didn't even come with all the pieces, we took it back 3 times and it still every time was missing pieces. Then we went to Target, Wal-Mart and Toys R Us down the street for her puzzles and clothing and that was the end of that.
Your assessment at the end was spot on. They never found their killer app or theme. There was no thesis to their branding. Wal-Mart is about being affordable to average middle class families, and Target was about being trendy with decent quality merchandise. Kmart was a random heap of shit with missing pieces. They never escaped the 1970s and 80s. What was fine for America then is not today, especially with so much more choice. A lack of creativity, vision and purpose will fail you in today's economy. The people do indeed want atmosphere, not just prices.
I worked there twice over the years. The worst thing they did to help kill themselves was never investing in the stores. The POS system was ancient when I last worked there in 93. The registers were barely holding on. And they did ignore what was working for Walmart. They also stayed over stacked with management over the years. They had no system in place to keep good workers. And at the last store I worked at in California, the employees were robbing them blind along with the customers. Not much in the way of security at either store I worked at. I always felt like upper management were too busy counting back accounts to see or care about the horrible Rollercoaster ride they were on. Kmart killed themselves over 30 years. It wasn't any one person. It's like every new ceo that came in was just looking to line their pockets.
I do remember seeing the POS monitors back in the day and thinking "holy cow, how old is that?!?!?!"
Office Depot/Max runs EXACTLY the same way. They and Kmart will be gone within the next 10 years. They did it all to themselves with their idiotic "management" and their attitudes stuck back in the 1970s. And yes, employees (including the managers) were robbing my store left and right for a while. Saw almost $10K of merchandise disappear in two weeks. That's almost an entire day's earnings. And don't even get me started on their almost-zero profit margins...
@@largol33t1Kmart used to own OfficeMax
“POS” system indeed 😆
The two were setup differently. Walmart is like McDonald's in that it wasn't one company like you think (McDonald's isn't fast food, it's real estate who also sells food), Walmart is a logistics company who also sells retail items. That's why Walmart is really the only company who can compete with Amazon, and vice versa as Amazon is also a logistics company. Since Kmart relied on vendors to supply them, it was never going to be the most up-to-date system.
Our K-Mart died a slow, painful death here in MT, closed in 2014, & since '18, has been a broken, sad concrete lot. 💔
I worked for a major paper company that delivered to K Mart warehouses. Before bankruptcy their receivers would miscount every load claiming shortages. It wasn’t funny because every carton (usually disposable diapers) was counted by a automated counter coming out of my truck. Every load was perfect on my end but K Mart claimed 20 cases short and towards the end up to 100 cases short. My company never backed the drivers up and we were all told to let it go. The price of doing business with a bunch of desperate thieves.
That sucks.
Not necessarily true. The checkers were pushed to hurry up as were the put away fork driver. Miss count were common and being that diaper pallets where light and easy to put away fork drives stab each other in the back because it helped them make their quotas and often they would be removed from the receiving dock before they were completely checked in. The inventories were a trip and the best jobs where in the inventory control, a bunch of senior workers that had no quota and were most secure in their jobs
My Mom put me in a shopping cart when I was a toddler at KMart in the 80's. I fell out of the cart and hit my head so hard that she was worried she was legit going to catch a charge.
That is all I remember about KMart.
WAIT this isn't entirely true. I also remember being around 9 years old and getting to buy a pack of colored & scented markers from KMart as my folks were shopping for something else. I was excited, until I opened them in the car to learn that each and every marker was dried out and smelled like nothing. I was so disappointed that it has stuck with me into my 40's. Fk KMart for that.
@@Prolific_Troll When I was a little Tyke in the mid 80s, Mom shopped there all the time, To keep me entertained, she'd buy me an ICEE and give me a Toy to play with while we waited almost 35 Minutes in the Check Out lines. This was in Santa Rosa,CA in 1986-1987.
I worked for K-Mart in 2012-2014 and I knew exactly what there problems were ever just being a store stocker. No advancement in technology, completely messed up system of item numbers, and the computer that told us what volume to put up refused to accept the we literally had no room for the volume of stuff we had stocked in the back. Even I'm places that it was the only large retailer, it couldn't survive.
I moved to a lot of different places during the years when Kmart went from thriving to serious decline. In each place I lived I shopped at both Kmart and Walmart and found Kmart to always have merchandise disorganized and the store a mess. It was a failure of management more than anything else. Walmart was nearly always clean and tidy. That has changed now that Kmart is gone. Walmart doesn't have to try and compete. I keep hoping Target will give Walmart a challenge but they have failed to do that. I have never lived in a city that had a Target. As a kid in the 60s I loved to go to SS Kresges. This video brought back memories.
I recall 2010s KMart. Just like you said, with the addition of the store looking like it needed remodeled, an electronics section that was sparsely populated with some offbrand stuff that looked to be collecting dust for a while, and lots of lights overhead needing replacement. It was very depressing because the employees acted normal but it was obvious that if they hadn't polished up their resume, they should be.
Walmart and target employees might not be the friendliest, but at least they try. Only had horrible experiences at Kmart, even in the early 70s.
Trust me they built a Target a few years ago, across the street for our big Walmart Super Center, and Target never has anything worth buying in there!! ALSO, the people working at our local Target are much more rude than those working for Walmart across the street!! Walmart has both variety and selection, while our Target is full of "second thought items" it seems like!! Or to put it another way, comparing the two, Walmart is current, up to date and has items you actually WANT TO BUY, while our local Target looks like a place that they filled with Amazon Returns nobody wanted in the first place!!!! So really, given my opinion you really are not missing much without a Target!!!
@@gregbenwell6173In my area, Target, Walmart, and Safeway all have different advantages so we cross-shop them for various items.
I worked at a Kmart like six or so years ago very briefly. They only ever had like five people on shift at any given time in the whole store, it was impossible trying to keep the place neat I swear people purposefully put things in random places on the shelves, but really there just wasn't anyone to so much as organize a single isle let alone the entire store. Managers were only ever sat in an office twiddling their thumbs. About the only cool memory I have of the place is getting to experience computers that were made before I was born... The old people there literally had to teach me, the millennial, how to use those registers 😅
My dad always asked me if I wanted to go to "Kame-Apart" with him as a kid
I'd laugh every time and go pick up groceries for mom and sis with him. Miss the early 2000's
Kmart is definitely your savings store when there is nothing on the shelves.
100% savings because there’s nothing to buy!
Loved Kmart 😍 in the 1970s. It was THE place to shop. Loved the popcorn stand🍿 😋 at the entrance and the Slurpees. The cafe in the back had lunch a la carte.
Realistically, it was AAALLLLL over when Tom Cruise said "Guess what Ray?...K-mart SUCKS!
In the great movie Rainman. Lol.
Yup. Beat me to it. In 1988 when Raymond Babbit declared that K-Mart sucks was truly the beginning of the end for them.
Back in the day and I used to work at Kmart #4145,
50 N.Groesbeck Highway and Cass Avenue in Mt.Clemens, Michigan. From April 30, 1985 until May 8, 1996 and Kmart #4145,has Closed Permanently on Sunday May 8, 1996 on Mother's Day.
The Kmart that I worked in had the store front windows. The Grocery Store was a Kmart Foods, then a Wrigley's Supermarket, then a Great Scott!Supermarket ,and a Kroger Store which Closed Permanently before Kmart Closed Permanently. The old Kmart is now a Planet Fitness Gym in the Kmart building, a Subway Submarine Sandwich Shop is in the old Kmart Garden Shop. And, a Dollar Tree 🌳 Store has opened up in the old Great Scott!Supermarket/Kroger Store portion of the old Kmart Building. I remember when Kmart was Closing Stores in the 1980's and the 1990's. And at least the old Kmart Building has been repurposed into other businesses. I still miss Kmart/Sears Stores to this very day. 0:00
The nail in the coffin imo was Kmart fumbled their online. The website was totally separate from the stores. You couldn't pickup the item in store, return it or even get a price match. For my older relatives they had mistrust. They were getting the emails from the store shopper's card. Walmart had no card and just advertised the store deals and started shipping stuff they didn't have in one store to that store. Also Amazon had better prices if they wanted to get stuff shipped.
Walmart has been having online issues too. I tried to use it and finally gave up after dealing with items missing, non-functional, incomplete items, wrong pieces of items, improper deliveries….
I gave up too for those reasons, but I recently needed a toaster (my k-mart $10 one died after 20+ years!) and the only superstore left close by now is target. I didn’t care for their options and decided to try the drew Barrymore one from Walmart and ordered it online since it’s 45 minutes away. I found everything to be much improved and have actually continued to order from them with no issues.
I remember my family avoiding Kmart during the 90s and early 2000s. The stores were just in such bad shape, never staffed well and never really taken care of. Environment might be a weird reason not to like a store but it's definitely a contributing factor.
The Last time I remember having a Positive Experience at KMart was in May of 1994. My Mom was 7 months Pregnant with my Sister and needed items for her Baby Shower, so she took me and my then 6 year old brother(I was 11 at the time) we went to Kmart where I read Comic Books, Video Game Magazines(Ren and Stimpy and the Lion King Movie Spoiler Marvel Mini Series), ate Little Caesars by the Slice(It was like .80 then) and played a little Super NES and Genesis(Mickey Mouse Circus), the Checkout time was quite tedious but again, I read Comic Books while my little brother played with Power Ranger Toys while were checking out. This was North Houston,TX and the people were quite helpful, Clerks and Stockers were friendly and the store seemed organized and properly run. Keep in mind, A Wal-Mart SOON opened about a month or so later. I'll never forget it.
In August 1999 in Federal Way/Seattle,WA, I planned on Reserving a Dreamcast at KMart, and by then being 16 and having a Summer job, I expected KMart to properly put my DC on layaway, and when I called them, it MORTIFIED me that not only did the store NOT have or would be able to reserve my Dreamcast for Layaway, but the Customer Service informed me that Only certain KMarts were now carrying Video Games, and that theirs wouldn't be. When I asked for it to be shipped to the store from other one or from Warehouse Shipping, they told me that it wasn't possible.
I was FURIOUS with KMart. Absolutely Enraged. Appalled, even checked out their Mess of a Website and what a Dumpster Fire it was.
What The Hell happened? Everything about KMart including its Morale had completely changed in just 5 years. Last time I stepped foot in one was in NW Houston in August 2002. I told Mom(Who was a HUGE KMart Fanatic) that she was wasting her time. Told her that KMart sucked now and was a Poorly Run Retailer. She didn't believe me until we went inside. LOUSY Experience. The Store was run down and extremely outdated. Everything felt like it was stuck in 1994. What's worse were the Near Empty Shelves, Mom walked out of there when she sensed the "Hopelessness and Apathy" that was inside the store.
In the early 80s, Kmart was my go-to store for everything. Then we got the news that Walmart was coming to town. Kmart went into full remodel and totally destroyed the store. I couldn't find anything I needed. Prices went up, and quality went down. I started shopping at other stores. That's when they doomed themselves.
I remember the years leading up to K-mart closing they were just pitiful. The stores were always dirty, prices were higher than other department stores, and most of the time the item you needed was out of stock.
Eddie Lampert and his hedge fund are what finally put the nail into the coffin for Sears and Kmart
I grew up with Kmart in the 70's and 80's.
I remember them having the single slowest check out lines of ANY retail store in existence.
This. When I was a little Tyke in the mid 80s, Mom shopped there all the time, To keep me entertained, she'd buy me an ICEE and give me a Toy to play with while we waited almost 35 Minutes in the Check Out lines. This was in Santa Rosa,CA in 1986-1987.
I worked at a Kmart years ago. I hated it. It was crap quality, they couldn't get new hires, computers were outdated to the point where if they got glitched/turned off it would take 10-15 minutes just to boot back up, had too many Karens, too many arguements over Shop Your Way Rewards' terms and conditions (one guy bought three basket loads of clothes just to up and get refunds the next day just to abuse a gas discount promotion. Seriously, read the fine print, people!), the bosses were oblivious/smarmy, the music was so bad I had customers complain about that (seriously, nobody cares about Disco!), it was hot half the time because they were too penny-pinching to even install an AC, a good deal of the higher-ups either retired/got fired en masse, and it was the first job I (almost) walked out on. Two years later, the store I worked in ran out of business, so yes Kmart is getting exactly what it deserved.
About 20 years ago, I saw a 60 Minutes story about the mass firing of older managers. Corporate got the brilliant idea to replace managers who had worked there for decades, working their way up from the bottom, with much younger people, say in their early 20's, who had zero experience in retail, or even business degrees. The idea was, they could pay the kids a lot less than actual managers who had been with the company twice as long as the kids had been alive.
Kmart never told any of the older managers why they were fired, so they just thought it was because of a slump in business. Each guy thought the others had moved to other jobs, or retired early because of ill health or something. Then one guy bumped into another guy. Each thought the other had retired, and they were surprised to find they'd both been fired instead. So they went online and looked for Kmart managers who'd been fired around the same time as them, thinking to have a reunion of people from their store, and compare notes. What they didn't expect was the responses they got from former Kmart managers from all over the United States. Everyone was shocked to find that it was corporate-level, not just at their store specifically.
That was when I stopped going to Kmart. Soon, I started hearing from friends that Kmart was going to hell, which I expected. Then my boycott of Kmart ended, cos Kmart boycotted itself.
@@emilyadams3228 The Last time I visited KMart was in 2002. Even in '99 I knew they were on their way out. The Stores were EXTREMELY Dated and old, the Shelves and Floor Plans were Terrible and like a Poor Man's Target, and the Inventory was ABYSMAL, Always either out of stock or in such poor and low availability. Plus the Ascetics felt and looked like they were stuck in the Year 1994. Even the Shoddy Cash Register Systems.
As for your story, the Stupidity of Corporate KMart astonishes me. The idea of hiring YOUNG inexperienced NO Retailer Degree Managers? That's as Stupid as what Circuit City did with DIVX.
When our K-Mart closed a couple years ago, they had their massive closeout sale, claiming huge discounts. However, if you looked up the product online, it was going for *above* or at retail price. I lost all respect for them at that moment. Lots of good memories shopping there, but they went out as sore losers.
I remember always going to our Kmart built in 1994 from opening till it closed in 03. It was such a warm and inviting place for a kid and the store was clean and had everything you needed. The last surviving k marts of the last 15 years do not resemble even a trace of what their prime looked like. They were all sad and destroyed.
The stores you mentioned at the beginning of the video are not the last ones in U.S.; there are 2 in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands and someone mentioned one in Guam, which is also U.S. Fun fact: The last one in Puerto Rico, USA, closed in San Juan on October 2022.
I worked at Kmart Canada & spent some time at Troy, MI HQ. I started in 1973 as a stock boy and left in 1995 as a Senior Buyer. I also visited new Kmart ventures & a group of stores purchased in Singapore. K Canada also purchased a 7-store chain in Hungary. What I observed was Nepotism and internal failures like "don't worry about the Competition, they're nothing", Never hired Personnel from the outside, until the early 90's & they were not the best calibre (they were either ousted from other companies or not skilled enough). They never cared about Capability, Professionalism or bringing on board a Target/Walmart Senior Executive. Simply ignored the competition. Location of stores were primarily focused on price/sq.ft. & NOT the best location. Internally, Kmart was dysfunctional. I saw the writing on the wall and resigned in 1995. Amen!
They just started the demolition of the HQ in Troy recently. Sad
My mom was a manager at Sears shortly before the merger with Kmart. I remember her being constantly frustrated by the decisions of upper management, and when she was unceremoniously let go, i decided never to shop there again.
When the merger happened, my disdain transferred over to Kmart as well - but it doesnt sound like i missed much of anything in either store.
I was most surprised when you asked, “Does Kmart have any chance of survival?” I thought they were already dead 😆
Yea, that confused me too. 2 stores left from a peak of 2,400, they'll be gone by next year.
Me too, guess we'll be seeing a video about Sears next
Videos about Sears' failure have been out for years@illinoiscentralrailroadfan6015
K Mart missed a huge opportunity in the 90s. We had a Super K-Mart in our hometown, and I preferred it to Walmart. It was a much nicer store with a good selection, and it was always busy. They closed it and sold it to Home Depot. The Super K concept was a good one, and if they executed it properly, they would still be relevant.
Kmart was very popular in the 60s and 70s because it was pretty much the only store if its kind. When Walmart and Target came around, Kmart seemed to have given up. It became useless to go there to get something specific because they'd never have it. I stopped wasting my time and just went to Walmart, which was further away.
Kmart had the best toy selection out the 3 back in the day. But Kmart should of just focused on themselves instead of competing with Walmart and buying closing businesses.
This is, sadly, an all too common mistake for businesses to make. Granted, it's not necessarily an unwise decision, that can very easily stabilize a struggling business or help it grow, but the fact that they were focusing on doing that and not focusing on building their own brand, made it an unwise decision in the end.
After returning home from college, the neighborhood K-Mart was still going strong in the early 90s. Pretty much grew up in that place. Two friends had manager jobs there, and it had a decent auto service dept. Even after it moved into the store where the corporations venture Builders Square went out, and it added a Sears section with appliances only, it was still decent but barely hanging on trying to compete with Walmart
I only remember K-Mart as this slowly dying megalith where you can expect them not to have what you are hoping they'll have because their inventory sucks. Those empty shelves were an extreme version of what I remember. They weren't completely empty, but there were about as much empty space as there were products. Meanwhile, one of the other two was usually somewhere nearby. It makes me sad for the people who work there; like working on a cruise liner that doesn't have many passengers. Can only imagine if they had a crappy, inexperienced, impatient manager, ya know?
yeah I went there as a kid because we didn't have a Walmart near by and at first they had decent prices then they started to raise them and as you said you could not find anything on the shelves or they were strangely bare at times. I went to the Kmart near where I lived now before it closed and the food court was closed the shelves were barer and they had nothing but hopeless young kids that I'm sure knew it was the end for Kmart. About a year since I last went in there they closed down and have since turned into a thriving mini-mall of assorted stores.
I worked in Loss Prevention for Kmart in the early 2010s. At the store level it was clear that the company simply couldn’t invest in modernizing their stores. One examples was their cash registers that looked like they were from the 80s. Just that alone made transactions take longer, and hurt the customer experience with longer check out times. Mostly importantly though, they failed to invest in talent, and took advantage of low wage employees that were desperate for hours to make ends meet. The management during that time deserves a giant middle finger for forcing those folks to make critical sacrifices just to keep their job. I was fortunate to go back to school, get a college degree, and get the hell out of the company.
Kmart dug their own grave!! The stores were gross, the "help" was nowhere to be found and not any help if you could find anyone, the merchandise was unorganized, the check out lines sucked, etc etc. The "save your way" points rewards system was a joke and never calculated properly.
Hiring Rosie O’Donald to do publicity is like hiring Harvey Weinstein to manage Human Resources….
@@davemccage7918 it was different in the 90's, she had a bigger name back then. Once her feud with Trump started, well really before that even, once she joined the View, she tanked.
There was no help. Things were run on a skeleton crew. One of my fears was that I would have an emergency and not be discovered until my corpse had rotted
@@ericgrabman6993Kmart got stuck in 1994. NEVER changed with the times, Never Consolidated.
My neighborhood Kmart was very happening in the early 90s (and I’m sure beforehand). It held on pretty long (it was one of the last in all of Louisiana). I remember blue light specials and buying clothes etc there. We shopped there as much if not more than Walmart. Then the super Walmart opened a couple minutes down the road, and that was that.
As a former K-Mart employee (worked there for last year of high school and all four years of college) it's kind of sad that they are almost completely gone. As retail jobs go, it wasn't a bad place to work. We just never could complete with Wal-Mart on either price or selection. Walking into a store in the early 2010's was basically the same as walking into one in the 90's, as they hadn't really updated anything. Shoppers aren't going to shop at a place like that (which is also why Sears went out).
A Target recently replaced a K Mart in my area across the street from a Marshalls and LA Fitness. Their computers looked like they were purchased in 1980 and so slow! 😂😂
Just seeing their inventory and workers I knew it wouldn’t last, damn bad leadership did them in.
In the 90s Kmart even had venues in Mexico! They were full of foreign products and people loved it. Then it slowly faded away.
In 1993, they entered Eastern Europe by purchasing 13 stores in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (the store in Bratislava was SIX STORIES!). They ended up selling them to Tesco in 1996.
I can remember going into K-Mart in the mid to late 80s and, even as a kid, being shocked at how empty the shelves were compared to just a few years before. And it was constantly like that. It got so bad that my mom just quit shopping there, preferring instead to drive over twice as far away to the Wal-Mart.
I didn’t realize K-Mart dragged Sports Authority and Borders down with them, though.
My favorite part about Kmart going bankrupt was when Sears was going bankrupt at the same time. One bought the other thinking, "you're going broke, we're going broke...let's just drive this thing into the ground!"
I don't know how you could be more wrong. Did you even bother watching?
Kmart is crazy popular here in Australia. Target maybe not as much but still around
They like Montgomery Ward, Sears, and Penny's can thank management. Target and many others will follow.
There were two Kmarts within driving distance of me. One is now a Uhaul rental/storage and the other got tore down to build a HyVee.
It's a shame because I actually liked shopping at Kmart back in the day. I would occasionally find things Walmart didn't have just browsing aisles.
The Kmart here in my town is sitting empty currently still, it was supposed to be a U-Haul rental/storage but that never panned out. Then the Sears was gutted and torn apart to make it a Hy-Vee.
I remember in graphic arts we had to re-design a logo of the company. We thought needed their logo redesigned I did Kmart my logo was very similar to the one that they changed it to. I brought my design back to the teacher after I seen that and she raised my grade because she said I was on the right track. The only thing different from mine and theirs is I use block letters, and they use cursive with the Mart inside the K
In my hometown they built the Walmart right next to the Kmart. It was really interesting to go through both stores, one after the other. The contrast was clear. Walmart was clean and organized. Kmart was a shoddy mess that hadn't been updated since the mid 1970s.
As a kid, going to Kmart was a big treat. There was basically only K-Mart, Roses, and Hills in our town. Hills had far better toys, and also an area with video games and concessions, which was magical. Then much later we got a Best Store, which was mind-blowing, then we got Walmart much later.
I LOVED going to Kmart as a kid/teenager. One of the first things I bought was a decent pair of jeans from Kmart. Mine somehow lasted into the pandemic( closed April/May 2020)
My father, who was a store manager for K-mart claims the late 80s and early 90s was their problem era. Corporate officers were sponsoring golf ternaments and racing teams instead of focusing on the problems in the stores. Then there were problems with the 401K.
I never realized that Kmart was responsible for my two favorite bookstores closing. The last Kmart near me was sketchy AF. The mall it was in was pretty safe but the store was a different story. I was in there one Sunday, and there was an old guy, half naked, trying on bathing suits in the aisle and people panhandling inside the store.
They killed those bookkstore.
I did all my school shopping at K-Mart. I could not wait to be able to buy my own stuff ANYWHERE else! I stopped going there when I realized no matter when you went there, or how many people were there, it would take at least 45 minutes to check out. Actually the last time I went, I left my stuff on the counter and walked out because I was waiting for so long for someone to cash me out.
One of my first ever jobs was at Kmart in the late 2000s. Nothing had been updated since the mid 90s, easily, and the monthly shrink numbers were higher than profits consistently. It was completely depressing.
I remember getting my Lego bionicles at Kmart back sometime between 2004-2008. It’s long gone now and has been replaced by Kroger’s.
The Blue Light Special will live in our hearts forever!
There used to be a Kmart here and the manager told me that Kmart did not own the property this very large store was on, which increased the overhead. So when the store closed they couldn't even sell the land it was on. It just died.
A side effect of the Kmart stores closing was that it left massive properties that couldn't be easily redeveloped. The one in Layton, UT became glorified climate-controlled storage after sitting vacant for 3 years and the massive parking lot is slowly being parceled off and redeveloped. The one in Taylorsville, UT was torn down after it sat vacant for 5 years and is now a high-density apartment complex. So there are some small upsides.
100%. Wayne, NJ location has been vacant for a long time. Belleville, NJ location went vacant 2 years ago.
Elmwood Park, NJ location finally got redeveloped but it took almost 10 years for any movement.
Then again, that location had two floors and a freight elevator that customers were allowed to use.
We used to go to the Layton Kmart every once in a while when I was stationed at Hill AFB from 2007-15. Even by then you could tell it was dying. It was always oddly dark if you went there in the evening and seemed like a ghost town as far as employees go. It wasn’t nearly as terrible as some of the others I’ve heard about though.
Which is weird when I was a kid in Phoenix, Az in the 80’s and early 90’s Kmart was it there. There wasn’t any Walmarts yet. I didn’t even know Walmart existed until I saw it in National lampoons Christmas vacation and asked my mom what the hell it was. “Oh it’s like Kmart” lol The Kmart in Peoria was my first ever job in 93 and it sucked balls unless you worked in electronics and got to match wits with the constant thieves.
They had really good pharmacies though that’s pretty much the only reason we ever went to the one in Layton as they were the only ones that ever had my wife’s medication in stock after her lung surgeries.
My hometown lost our Kmart in '94 (3 years after Walmart and Target both moved in) and the lot was HUGE. Like, so stupidly big that it took eight years to be split up and filled by a (also now defunct) Bed Bath & Beyond and a local grocery chain.
The spot where Kmart existed back home ended up being turned into a farm and home store after like 5-8 years of it being empty.
The Kmart in my town is now a non-denominational Church. Oddly enough, another defunct company, Rax, used to be directly in front of the Kmart, but it got torn down and there is a gas station there now. The Kmart that used to be in the next town over is now a Life Time Fitness.
Man, it was such a treat to go to KMart when I was a kid. Good times.
That’s too bad. All we had in my town when I was a kid was at Kmart. They have a lot of good memories going there to pick up the original Nintendo and all my games as a kid. I even worked there for a while but at some point they even got rid of electronics, which I think was a huge mistake. I miss seers to.
I remember the last time I saw a K Mart was way back in 2012. We were traveling to Las Vegas, and made a pit stop at a local town. We saw an all too familiar building with a giant red K. People were flocking by the thousands to clear it out; meaning everything had to go. My mom went inside and was saddened to see her childhood disappearing forever. She used to hang out at K Mart with her school friends and siblings in the early 80s.
When I was young Kmart was the go to place. Then the stores started to slip, you seldom left the store with everything you went there for and the final straw was when they opened a Walmart right across the street. The store was clean and well organized, had everything you wanted at a good price and there was no need to go to Kmart anymore. I failed to understand how they could stuff a 120,000 sq foot store with merchandise and somehow not have anything I wanted to buy. The last time I went into a Kmart the store was dirty, the food in the pet section was infested with insects and when I told them about it they were like, meh. Never went back after that.
Even the Employees knew it was falling apart and said what's the point Fuck it, if they didn't care then that's when you really knew the store would shut down soon.
Opening a Walmart across the street from a Kmart was basically a poison pill for Kmart.
I used to live in Miami near the Kmart mentioned in this vid and every time I would go inside it would make me and my brothers sad... it was sad cuz it was so lonely, there would be like 3 people and one cash register open.. I moved away so idk how it's doing right now....
I worked for KMart from 1993 to 1994 for about six months. And I can say...this was the worst company I've ever worked for.
In September 1993 they hired 100 new employees to work a newly built KMart store. We, the employees, practically built that store. We installed fixtures, shelves, and stocked all the merchandise. For three months the new employees worked their butts off. Christmas was hell, but we survived.
The day after Christmas, when KMart didn't need us anymore, they fired 70 of the 100 employees without warning. While I did survive KMart's thinning of the herd, suddenly I got stuck doing three more jobs than I did before. I worked Toys, Hardware Home Improvement, Automotive, Seasonal and Cashier. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore and walked out.
What a joke. Using and abusing employees, treating them as discardable
that was the end of the Antonini era, the most idiotic leader in company history. He's the one who moved, relocated, then even closed new stores, like brand new stores!
Sounds familiar. Did the same at a new store that opened in 1995. After an initial thinning out of staff, about 30-40 of us "originals" stuck it out for various lengths. I was there for 5 years. Was promoted to Sporting goods manager in year 3, and made a 400 in year 4. I knew the writing was on the wall when myself and our GM, the only two male 400's, were pushing in carts and portering heavy items to cars because there was essentially no staff. Left soon after that.
Blame democrat Bill Clinton who illegally signed NAFTA, PNTR with China and changed employment laws including incentivizing employers to fire full time workers and replace them with part timers, to hide the harm his illegal trade treaties were doing to US workers.
@@100percentSNAFU what does "made a 400" mean in this context?
The KMart in our local town shut down a long time ago, but the building was recently bought and remodeled into an Ollie’s Discount Store. I’m just glad the building is still up, gives me good memories.
We had a Kmart in the area that disappeared in the very early 2000's. VERY nice store, the crew kept it spotless and well stocked, and the employees were wonderful to deal with. Definitely sorry to see it go as it outshined our local Wal-Mart. But yeah, I can see why Kmart as a whole went down. Every other Kmart I have been in were horrible... stores were filthy, the employees were rude, the food area was nasty, and yeah, Kmart as a whole sold a lot of cheap junk.
*IF* Kmart is to survive, it's going to have to completely reinvent itself. Meaning new leadership, new logos, new corporate image, treat it as if it were a brand new business getting off the ground, and make a heavy internet presence and deal as much as they can online. They're going to have to convince potential customers that they aren't the Kmart of the past, and they are going to have to find a way to mark their merchandise in a way that no one can refuse the prices. One thought is they could become a drop shipper of imported goods like a lot of eBay sellers are now.
Walmart isn't much different when it comes to cheap junk.
I definitely remember KMart since I was born in October 1983. Our family shopped there all the time until 2005.
December 1982 here. KMart was a Staple of shopping for me and Mom during the mid and late 80s.
I worked for the contractor that did the Kmart blue light announcements in the 1980s for all the stores nationwide. They were building stores by the dozens right up until the crisis came and then they suddenly stopped overnight leaving a lot of properties that they had option that never got Kmart store. I’m not sure they had any business plan in those days other than to keep opening stores until they had one on every block. When the halt was announced on new store construction, it came as a shock to everybody in that.
I always had a feeling, from talking to people in the industry that Walmart was much better at cutting deals with suppliers then Kmart was.
Walmart pays less because they buy more product. That’s how they can sell for less than the competitors and still profit
WalMart got big enough that it's able to bully suppliers into meeting their ever lower price demands regardless of what it does to quality. Kmart simply never had that sort of muscle.
@@Tangent360many companies were ruined that way. Briggs and Stratton is one I can think of.
@@philj9977 Sam Walton learned how to UNDERCUT competitors with "Bulk Supply" during the 40s. That's always been Wal-Mart secret formula. Mad TV was calling this out WAY Back in 1997.
@@bluegrassman3040 Sam Walton was Very CUTTHROAT. He was Determined to grow his Chain WW so he would play the old "Bulk Appraisal" Game of making Sure suppliers would use Larger Mass Volume for Wal Mart when compared to Other Stores so he could have them sold at Much Lower price Marketvalue in larger wide Inventory. Wal-Mart Devoured alot of their Competitors with this Tactic.
I worked at a Super K-Mart from 2003 - 2013-ish. My issues when working with them were: there was a manager that was universally hated across the store and nothing was never done, they made customers leave with how hard they pushed getting people to sign up for their awards program (I watched one guy get asked four times before he got to back of the store), and they got rid of name brand grocery items.
CEO Joe Antonini is actually the one who ran Kmart into the ground. Sam Walton used to work for Kmart, and left in disgust by how it was being run. He ended up founding Walmart, to compete against Kmart. We all know how that worked out.
BTW, Joe had a brother named Dick Antonini, who was CEO of Foremost Insurance, and he also made bad decision's, that ended up with him being ousted from the company, but not in time (this was later than what happened at Kmart). Foremost was sold to Farmers Insurance. However, both brother's ended up with tons of money, due to their golden parachutes. My older sister worked for Kmart, and I worked for Foremost, during the time both of these event's occured.
Mr. Sam never worked for Kmart. He worked for JC Penny's. He did visit many Kmart stores, as he did other competitions. He observed what they did right and incorporated them into Walmart.
He wrote about numerous good things Kmart did and he built on them. He proved Kmart could've built, on their successes and become better. Instead, they became lazy and complacent.
@@14DaveHunter Walton was Super Cutthroat.
6 months later but i just have to vent about working at kmart. I was there for a few weeks right at the end of their life. They literally had us move empty buckets from one shelf to another and back again, every day, over and over. Because according to them there wasnt anything else TO do. The time wasted there was phenomenal. Not to mention every aspect being horribly mismanaged. Also there was an ancient, broken slurpy machine that had fossilized slurpee left in them from who knows how many years ago. Shit just sat there lol
I miss Kmart, but I can't pretend they were doing good even before the 2010s.
When I last walked into the Cincinnati area's final operational store in 2019, I felt a mix of depression and hope that this would be their last year in operation.
I had a strong emotional connection to this specific location, as our family would often shop here back in the day, but at this point I just wanted it to go.
Sure enough, the store closed just before Christmas and Kmart was done in the Cincy area and the state of Kentucky. The location is expected to be redeveloped as a new Kroger grocery store.
They only peaked in the 1970s because there was a recession, and that affected not only people’s ability to buy goods but the quality of the goods they were able to buy. Manufacturers used that as an excuse to cut corners on everything. Even the food industry used that as an excuse to mess around with the food supply.
@@Attmay KMart also still thrived in the 80s and was a stable of my Early Childhood of the mid and late 1980s. But by the Early 1990s, Wal-Mart got into the Game. I remember visiting one for the first time in Portsmouth,VA in April 1991, I KNEW they were gonna be SERIOUS Trouble for KMart. They were BIGGER, with a BETTER Floorplan, Better Catalog(Pre Internet Days) had Better Supply levels and larger spaces. Its like When Best Buy hit the scene when Montgomery Ward was trying to invest heavily in its Electronics Department.
I do know though that the 70s was the "Stagflation" Period and that Supply and Demand outweighed everything else during the Nixon,Ford AND Carter Years.
I used to shop at k-marts and I remember having a choice of Walmart, fredmeyer, Kmart and shopko and target. We still have a Smith's market place, which was a remnant of fredmeyer. The Kmart and Fred Myers were fairly close to each other. I was a kid during their construction and I remember going in the jobsite when they weren't there and playing around with friends. We used to grab the rebar that was sticking out of the concrete vertically and jump off the foundation with it bending it.
Later my mom shopped there and shopko, most of my Christmas stuff came from kb toys, shopko or Kmart and sometimes toys r us. I remember fredmeyer having a nintendo 64 display at normal height and not way above. I used to go play that before I had my own. Kmart strained your neck. I remember shopping there later and picked up milk there. Barely bought any food because it was lousy priced and the selection just felt sad and depressing like they were trying to compete with Walmart and target grocery. The stores were looking lousy, but their photo centers were doing okay for portraits. I felt bad for Kmart, I remember sears looking more ghetto. There was a sears super center that opened and was really nice, but overpriced. Kmart still held on, but sears felt more empty here. I was sad to see shopko and Kmart go. I didn't realize sears guy had Walmart too, that guy I remember having some crazy ideas sears was going to be huge. Then he destroyed it all.
Sad end of an era. Strangely last time I went into target, it felt like a Kmart again. With looking dated and having crap selection. There are two other stores that are nicer here, but strangely the location I went to was newer. I think the floor tile, messy from Christmas shoppers and the pathetic variety just felt bad, but the place was super busy for Christmas shopping. I only liked target for clothes anyhow, it's a nice change from Walmart for toy shopping for Christmas.
I miss Borders. I met my wife at my local Borders. 😄
I loved the Kmart that used to be near me. However the thing that always stuck out to me was the store looked so outdated on the inside, that it looked dirty. They carried good products, but it felt like they couldn’t attract the people into the store to buy the products.
The only clear memories I have of Kmarts are when they were dying. It was fairly close to this skate park I went to when I was teenager with my friends, I bought an unhealthy amount of caffeinated drinks from their fridges
NO ONE stopped us from being the little shits we prolly were, now that I think about it
a target commercial started playing during this & i thought it was part of the video 😂
A big reason for me to stop shopping at Kmart was lack of inventory, things not priced or being unable to locate items in the store. I would take my shopping list into the store and come out of the store with nothing because things weren't being restocked. When it was restocked, it was put somewhere else in the store or at the opposite end of the store. So, it got to be way too confusing to shop there and leaving the store having bought nothing at all. Walmart had been open for awhile, but it was a MUCH further drive to make, but because of my bad shopping experiences with Kmart, I started making the longer drive to Walmart. But, it wasn't long before a Walmart opened up near me. I think I've only shopped at Target only a few times in all the years it's been around. To me, Target is like a wannabe Macy's with the higher prices but gives a discount facade. Too pretentious for me and I was very insulted when they moved in after Fedmart closed promising same low prices that was a con.
Sadly, I'm starting to notice some of the same issues lately at the Walmart that Kmart was doing prior to closing down. Naturally, since covid, some of the shelves are still hard to get products, but they are starting to price gouge on many products. For example, a simple low brand toilet bowl cleaner was three bottles for $5. Now, just ONE is $13. I actually went to Home Depot to buy my toilet bowl cleaner for $3. Instead of getting in my car and driving to Walmart, I'll sit at home with my shopping list and check out the prices first and then shop where things are cheaper. Also, I have given up ordering anything online from Walmart because they will separate your order in many different orders so they can charge you an extra $6 per order.
So, Walmart beat up Kmart in the competition, but they both share the same thing in poor management, so to save face in the public eyes, they ramp up propaganda that they are failing because of shoplifters. Always put the blame somewhere else. Just like Fedmart, Kmart and Walmart are all in the biz to profit and when they have gotten their money peaked, they let the biz just die. After all, another Mart is on the horizon with the same biz plan. Even Costco isn't offering any real cost savings to their members after the expensive membership fee is paid.
As long as it's a good tax write off and the biz can close up with the profits intact, they aren't losing out. Kmart did the same thing as other biz... get in quick, grab the money quick and get out quick. It's a matter of time before Amazon out prices itself as well on crappy products like Temu.
One thing I gotta say about Kmart is that they really worked harder to keep prices LOW, which Walmart isn't attempting to do anymore. Target isn't even in the same category in my opinion. I just don't shop there.
With the way Walmart is doing biz in my area, I think opening a new Kmart might actually succeed.
Regarding the Walmart super stores I think they are one aspect of their downfall. I visited relatives in Kansas years ago and went into a super store there to buy ONE item that I usually bought at the regular Walmart back home. I was shocked that it was more than twice the price. I was told that they had to increase the prices of everything in the store to compensate the produce losses. Gee, their produce was too expensive as well. This wasn't a discount store, but a rip off store.
I was very sad to see Kmart go. I was very sad to see Fedmart close as well. But, I suspect Walmart will soon be another passage of time as well. Online biz is hurting physical local businesses.
Well, it boils down to money and greed. If businesses were to lower their profit goals more, they would have a shot at surviving comfortably. I liked Kmart and would like to have them back!
I was a child and was able to tell Kmart was trash. Even the blind can see through their sales gimmicks. If you mark an item you 400%, then say it's 50% off, that's still 200% on!
Interesting analysis. It reminds me of the equally tragic, although more rapid, decline of Venture stores. I still remember when they tried to move from the discount space and position themselves as higher-end, but with no change in the merchandise offered. It was weird and their collapse was easily predictable. Kmart could have ruled as the low-cost leader but, as you conclude at the end, they never really capitalized on their niche.
Kmart actually ended up acquiring a good chunk of Venture stores in 1997. In fact, I live right down the street from a former Kmart/Venture that closed in 2003, became Burlington in 2004 and then moved out back in 2019 to a smaller store. What is it now? A building for the school district!
Here in Indianapolis, we had Hill's stores when I was a kid in the '80s and early '90s.
When Hill's went out of business, their stores got swallowed up by Venture.
Then, when the Venture stores went out of business, some became Kmart stores. This all happened in fairly rapid succession in the '90s.
Kmart already had a presence here, but Venture leaving the space allowed Kmart to expand.
We also have a number of storefronts that were abandoned by Target. It wasn't because Target wasn't doing well, it was because Target wanted fancier digs in more affluent neighborhoods.
I have to hand it to Target. They know who their audience is. You don't see Target stores in lower-income neighborhoods.
I always remember Kmart being terrible. My mom went there quite a bit. Target was the cool store.
@@christiangonzales7429 Venture had a Huge Expansion in the Early 90s that failed miserably. I remember when Mom worked for them in Houston in 1993. I think that one closed down by like 1996. Only lasting a few years.
I remember as a kid in the late 90s and early 00s, Kmart was always seen as below Walmart, just barely above a dollar general.
There biggest mistake was buying Sears. Instead of spending their money to update and renovate their stores, they bought other retailers
Agreed. They SHOULDA brought Radio Shack.
I weirdly have fond memories of a Kmart because we had one right across our neighborhood when I was a kid. It was on that one location where now you can find the only Jollibee in all of Chicago.
I thought they had gone out years ago, I'm actually impressed they're still living today.
Here in Australia we have K Mart and Target. Always preferred Target as it's better quality. Both are going strong.
target in Australia is not the same or anything similar to the US version! think they just licensed the name & logo (even though they look different too)
Wesfarmers owns both Kmart and Target in Australia and have no affiliation with their US counterparts. In fact, Wesfarmers is going to merge both of them into one unit.
Went to my first Hot Mulligan show last night, just wanted to say thank you Nate for introducing me to so many great bands on your other channel. 🖤
What is his other channel out of curiosity?