FILE – Kmart shoppers mill around the flashing blue light, sign of the “Blue Light Special,” at the first Kmart ever built in Garden City, Mich., on March 1, 1982. (AP Photo/Dale Young, File)
FILE – Kmart shoppers enter and leave the first Kmart ever built in Garden City, Mich., store, on Nov. 12, 1993. (AP Photo/Richard Sheinwald)
FILE – Shoppers wait outside a Kmart store for a 7 a.m. Thanksgiving Day sale in Nashville, Tenn., on Nov. 23, 2006. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File)
FILE – Shoppers rush into a Kmart store in Chicago on on Nov. 25, 2011 for Black Friday sale. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)
FILE – Shoppers look for groceries at a Kmart store in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., on Nov. 21, 2001. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, File)
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FILE – Kmart shoppers mill around the flashing blue light, sign of the “Blue Light Special,” at the first Kmart ever built in Garden City, Mich., on March 1, 1982. (AP Photo/Dale Young, File)
In 2002, Kmart declared bankruptcy as Walmart and Target devoured its market share. Its website never took off, allowing Amazon to beat it in the e-commerce space. There were executive pay scandals, a purchase by a hedge fund manager who stripped it bare and a disastrous 2005 acquisition of Sears.
Mark Cohen, a former Sears Canada CEO and former director of retail studies at Columbia University’s graduate school of business, said Kmart would have thrived if not for the top executives who ran it into the ground. It could have been Walmart.
“It sold in its heyday things that people continue to buy in large quantities today,” Cohen said. “Kmart went down the drain because it was led by incompetent managers.”
Transformco bought Kmart and Sears out of another bankruptcy in 2019 for $5 billion — its critics say mostly for the stores’ real estate. There were 202 Kmarts remaining.
Over the past five years,
By TERRY SPENCER
MIAMI (AP) — The last Kmart on the U.S. mainland sits at the west end of a busy suburban Miami shopping center, quiet and largely ignored.
All around it are thriving chain stores attracting steady streams of customers in sectors where the former box-store chain was once a major player: Marshalls, Hobby Lobby, PetSmart and Dollar Tree.
But at this all-but-last outpost of a company once famed for its “Blue Light Specials,” only an occasional shopper pops in, mostly out of curiosity or nostalgia, then leaves after buying little or nothing.
“I hadn’t seen Kmart in so long,” said Juan de la Madriz, who came to the shopping center on a recent weekday to buy dog food at PetSmart. The architect spotted the Kmart and wondered if he could find a gift for his newborn grandson. He exited 10 minutes later having spent $23 on a stuffed dog and a wooden toy workbench.
“It will be sad if it closes,” he said about the store, “but everything now is on computers.”
A customer exits the only Kmart store left in the continental United States, Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2024, in Miami. (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier)
The last full-size Kmart in the 50 states closed Sunday in Long Island, New York, making the Miami store — now a fraction of its former size — the last operating in the continental U.S. At its peak 30 years ago, Kmart operated about 2,500 locations. Today, four others remain: three in the U.S. Virgin Islands and one in Guam. There is also a website.
Transformco, the Illinois-based holding company that owns Kmart and what’s left of another former retail behemoth, Sears, did not respond to email requests for comment or allow the store manager to speak. The company’s plans for the Miami location are unknown — but there is no indication it will close soon.
The last outpost
If the Miami Kmart were a brand new mom-and-pop retailer, a shopper might think it could eventually thrive with advertising and a little luck. Kmarts long had a reputation for clutter and mess, but this store is immaculate and the merchandise is precisely stacked and displayed.
The size of a CVS or Walgreens drug store, the branch occupies what was its garden section during its big-box days. A couple years ago, an At Home department store took over the rest of the space.
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