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Attention, Kmart customers: On October 20, Kmart's last major location in the continental United States, a store in Bridgehampton, New York, will close its doors.
This leaves only a smaller Kmart in Miami and three stores in the U.S. Virgin Islands as the only locations left – a far cry from the more than 2,300 stores that Kmart operated during its heyday in the 1990s.
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“Kmart was a part of America,” retail history author Michael Lisicky told PBS. “Everyone went to Kmart whether they liked it or not.”
The Kmart store in Bridgehampton, New York. Image credit: Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images
What happened? According to the company's website, Kmart got off to a promising start. The company opened its first store in 1962, the same year as Walmart and Target. In 1966, sales exceeded $1 billion.
However, in January 2002, Kmart filed for bankruptcy protection under the US Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, citing competition and failed sales and marketing campaigns. At that time, Kmart closed around 600 stores and laid off 57,000 employees.
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According to a 2002 analysis, although Kmart initially grew faster than its competitors, a lack of investment in technology hampered its growth. Its market position between the trendier Target and the more price-competitive Walmart didn't help either, as Kmart was unable to define its customers.
Kmart emerged from bankruptcy in May 2003 and acquired Sears about two years later for $11 billion. Meanwhile, sales continued to decline, from $37 billion in 2000 to $12.1 billion in 2014. The takeover was also not a success: Sears filed for bankruptcy in October 2018, emerged in 2022, and today has only about a dozen stores open in the United States.
“Sears should never have gone away; Kmart was in worse shape, but not in more lethal shape,” Mark Cohen, former CEO of Sears Canada and former director of retail studies at Columbia Business School, told PBS. “And now they're both gone.”
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