K-Mart was awesome in the 1970s, especially if you were a boy. They had so many fishing lures, it boggled my mind whenever I went there with my grandmother. It was pretty much fishing heaven.
My Mother worked at KMart for some 15 Years, from the early 80's to the late 90's. She made a little over Minimum wage when she started to nearly double the Minimum wage when she 'Retired'. She could dictate her hours, as a Mother who worked, claimed Unemployment nearly every January when retail employees had their hours reduced, and the overall job wasn't too physically exhausting on her. She was offered $1,000 for every Year she worked there to leave the Company. My Father, who never made my Mother work, supported her and said to quit. KMarts thought was, we can get 2 employees for nearly the price of 1! Oh, the Older Housewives who did not need employment left in droves! The newer, Minimum Wage Employees of the late 90's and Early 2000's became a Constant Turnover. It never seemed the same to me without the Longtime Ladies who were always there growing up. Sadly, WalMart has taken over, Self-Checkouts and all!
Getting unemployment while being employed? Wow, I have a lot of thoughts on that, none of them very positive. People who legitimately need it have to starve for 90 days before they will even take a look at your case.
The last Kmart still open in Kansas was 1/2 mile from me in Kansas City Ks. The store is vacant. I miss Kmart. There were things I thought were poor choices. 1) they added a food section to try to mirror Walmart, but it was a small food section with few selections. 2) They brought in seasonal plants which were kept outside in front of the store, and which were largely neglected. There were 2 hardware stores very close by with a much better selection of plants, and were not withering away. Why didn’t Kmart stop carrying something that wasn’t selling anyway?
After their 2002 bankruptcy, Kmart didn't have a vision for the feature. They made the big mistake of buying Sears instead of focusing on improving their stores
Chuck Conaway began fleecing the company years before Lampert. He made loans to himself which he never repaid, and at one point was even investigated by the FBI. All sorts of shady dealings were happening during this time, one being reporting consigned (and not yet sold) inventory as profit, as a way to "cook the books". Fun fact: Eminem bought the mansion Charles Conaway owned when CEO of Kmart. The company was making VERY stupid decisions, and was hemorrhaging because of them. Eddie Lampert was an opportunist, who came in to cannibalize the company to keep it afloat (while enriching his investment company).
i was a stockholder then and it didn't set well with me that they filed bankruptcy, got rid of us stockholders and emerge from bankruptcy 6 months later with all kinds of money now that they could buy out sears but nothing to us stockholders and we got the shaft instead. I never shopped there again after that at least with my own money. not sure how it worked but they kept putting kmart cash on my rewards account i had with them that was supposed to build as you use it but i would refuse to shop there because of the bankruptcy and what they did to us. so to get me back in the store every little while they would add kmart cash to my account to intice me to shop there again. i would leave them build until right before expiring date and go find something for the $20.00 or whatever the amount built up to every time. i know i brought lots of my yellow straps there for my trailers or should say they gave me lots of free straps over the years until the store disappeared here but they still offered me reward points online(never used) but now i dont get nothing from them. I always wondered how many others just shop with the free rewards points they got just to get them back in the store besides me? that had to add up.
up until they filed bankruptcy, kmart was my to go to store. once they crapped on us stockholders, i avoided that place, my way of getting a little satisfaction back. did the same thing with that one new restaurant chain about the same time frame, they filed bankruptcy to get rid of us stockholders that built the new chain up and then reissued new stocks and was bigger than ever because they didn't have to pay for their own stores, we did so i never ate at that place ever again in the last 30 years or however long it has been and we ate there twice a week usually back then.. actually i think they are gone for good too now come to think of it, i havent seen any around anymore.
Kmart was a part of my childhood, as an 80's and 90's kid. The store was never anything worth bragging about, BUT it will always hold a place in my heart due to the fact that their offering of Lay-A-Way saved by parents many Christmases.
JerseyJeff84 - You're absolutely right, like Ames it holds fond memories for many of us who shopped and worked there. Their cost structure helped the middle class tremendously.
I never understood the concept of layaway, unless it's for people who know they live in a house full of thieves: otherwise, why don't you "lay away" the money in your sock drawer until you can afford your desired purchase? I once worked in a cigarettes-lottery-newspaper-magazine store in a blue collar, alcoholic neighborhood. The owner decided we might have more luck selling the VCRs, walkman's, police scanners and disc cameras [guess the era?] in the electronics case if we instituted a layaway plan. It started out as a roaring success. I had a notebook full of customers with deposits on stuff, but then Saturday night rolled around and most of these people asked for their money back so they could go out and drink. I was doing a lot of extra work keeping track of this for nothing. We stopped the program.
I was softlines manager at KMart In late 1970s. In the mid 1980s KMart changed to become more like JCPenneys -- lots of name brand young women's clothing, Martha Stewart dishes, glasses and cookware. They quit carrying the household goods most people depended on. It was downhill from there.
I worked as a softlines manager in the late 80's. The big problem was Antonini who doubled his salary and doubled the homeoffice. Draining the profits. He started to upgrade to compete with the Targets popping up in Michigan but then couldn't complete in price with the Walmarts popping up in the south till Kmart just became a big mishmash of cheap low price stuff mixed with some higher end stuff. They also didn't keep up with the electronics dept. which was a money maker. There are other reasons too.
That merger was actually an act of vulture capitalism designed to strip both companies like a chop-shop strips a car. It was VERY profitable for the vultures, saddling the stores with huge unserviceable debt and putting the cash from taking out that debt into their own slimy pockets. Same with Interstate Bakeries (hostess) and many others also. Many of those vulture practices were illegal until banking and financial rules were changed under Reagan, as well as Reagan (and later Presidents) no longer enforcing the various anti-trust acts which would have blocked such mergers.
Yeah. I had the unfortunate experience of being a vendor to Kmart. I was full of bad attitudes and horrible executives. On the upside I did meet my wife at Kmart. She was a vendor there too.
The Kmart I went to as a kid had a cafeteria at the back of the store where you slid your tray down the rail to choose things already on display or you could order a burger and fries at the front of the line and it would be ready at the end where you paid for it. This was also where I had my first experience with a self-serve soda pop fountain. Had Coke and Sprite and all the assorted Fanta flavors, including root beer. Now this is quite commonplace, but I heard McDonald's is talking about removing their self-serve fountains and eliminating free refills. Most likely others will follow. Hope Circle K don't take out their Polar Pop fountains.
@@jimfinigan1681 i swear u ain't lying.. man that popcorn was One of the best popcorns i ever bought.. I rather have their popcorn than theater popcorn... I'm pissed now, I want k mart popcorn.. we should go find Those k mart bastards and Tell them they're gonna reopen k mart yesterday 😂
In '93, Kmart did away with employees selling certain merchandise for a commission, such as electronics. Consequently, the employees generating the most sales, left the company and sales took a major hit. 16 year old girls were trying to sell shotguns and senior citizens had to explain electronics. Then staff was slashed, which is another way of saying customer service was slashed. Furthermore, Kmart was incapable of competing with Walmart and Target. It takes truly incompetent management to destroy a successful company, yet it happens constantly.
Many CEO's come from America's ownership class, that club we can't join, as George Carlin said. "Buffy needs something to do. Let's put him in charge of X." "X is tremendously successful. But isn't Buffy an idiot?" " Yes, but he must do something. He keeps getting underfoot." "Very well, then. Another martini?"
I busted a Sears store because of the sales people was writing up sales to peoples sears account for the commission . 99% of the people did not know until I called regarding their warranties on those products and the service contract.
Didn’t Walk-Mart embrace technology much faster than K-Mart? By that I mean using computers to track sales and restock items automatically? I read that K-Mart continued to rely on managers making these stocking decisions and using paper for orders.
I worked at a KMart in my teenage years and the store manger spent 4 hours a day in the on floor cafeteria smoking with the other 30 year employees of the store. Many teenagers ran the store multiple hours a day. I knew way back then in the late 80's they were doomed even before I even heard the word Walmart.
Being desperate for work after I left the army as an officer, I already had my BA degree from UC Santa Barbara. I joined the Kmart management training program. The managers I saw were the bottom of the barrel. Suckers who couldn't make it anywhere else. No ambition or higher education, just a bunch of cow college losers. I left after about 9 months for another retailer. I left that after about a year. Sent to law school and never looked back.
Were you an 01? :( I worked for K-Mart in the Little Caesars to help pay for college. Not much of a set schedule, they called me in at random times like at 9AM on a Sunday. I took the hours, sure why not I needed the $$$, they overworked me and threatened to fire me if I did not "WORK FASTER! WORK FASTER!". After two and a half weeks, they let me go. Maybe they mistook me for a robot. Manager should have bought a few from Tyrell Corp.
I saw that too at the Kmart I worked at in 1990. Those veteran employees who had been there for decades were mean. I remember once one of them made me work in the women’s section as punishment and reported me when I told her that I grew up with 4 sisters, so the women’s section did not bother me.
I grew up in Michigan and worked at Kresge, K Mart's parent company. Yes, the K stood for Kresge! I remember going to one of the first K Marts. This is sad for me, but I realize life goes on.
I bought my first firearm at a K-Mart. A Marlin model 60 in .22LR with a 4X scope for around $65.00 new that I saw in one of their local ads in my hometown paper. I still have that rifle and I'm 67.
I'm 58 and my 1st gun was a Marlin Model 60 .22LR. I got it for Christmas when I turned 12 and was old enough to get a small game license and hunt squirrels with my dad. He bought the same gun for himself so we could hunt together. They were bought at Kmart and I have both mine and my dad's. He passed away in 2004. I have great memories of our hunts together. I also worked at Kmart from 1984-2002 when our store closed.
Growing up in California in the 80s there were no Walmarts there as the video showed. My first experience with Walmart was when I visited relatives in Kansas City, and they called it Hypermart which I guess was the first version of a super center. My family shopped at Kmart. My mom liked the blue light specials and the fact that you could order a sub sandwich and an Icee while you shop.
Yes! First Hypermart was in my neighborhood in KC. They had @ 30 checkout lanes or something, but only 5 or 6 lanes open at a time. There were no more options for products, but if you wanted 100 of something, you were in the right place. And, the noise! Huge ceilings, no sound buffering, just noise bouncing around a great big barn. Took about an hour to even locate a few item you’d come for and at least another hour or hour-and-a-half to check out. Then you transported your purchases across an enormous parking lot. Sucked!
Yeah, being a Washingtonian, my cousin used to make fun of Walmart commercials since we didn't have one in our whole state. My first Walmart experience was actually in Anchorage, Alaska.
I worked for Kfart as a Manger in the 80's and they treated everyone poorly. I knew when I left after 5 years of insanity, it would fail. They came out with Mini/ Max and they thought this would save the empire. Ordering was very tedious and ads were another headache. Always moving stuff around which ate up labor hours and no time to keep the place fresh looking.
My uncle was a store GM starting in the 1960’s until his retirement. He really was a “company man”, until he wasn’t. He carries a lot of bitterness about how he was treated at the end, how the company was run into the ground and he probably had too much of his retirement fund invested in the company. We used to joke with him, disparaging the company to get a rise out of him. Other times he would ask me if I shopped at Kmart, or Target, in a mocking way. I think he was an honest, hard working guy that did his best for the company, too bad they didn’t stay profitable.
On a recent "bucket list" trip to Australia, I visited a Kmart in a small mall in the city of Cairns. It was modern and quite popular. I can only assume that it is some kind of franchise agreement that allows the name to be used overseas. As it turns out there are over 300 Kmarts in Australia/New Zealand. They started as a join venture between Kmart and Coles a mega grocery store chain there. Eventually Kmart corporation divested themselves of the partnership, but it seems as though these stores are prospering. I made two trips to the store in Cairns, and it was modern with good customer service.
My brother lives way up north near cairns, I am way down in North eastern Victoria and there has been a Coles/Kmart as one building although now 2 seperate entities. In the early 80's they were as 1 and Kmart here does well and the supermarket is always busy. They in fact ripped up and re-did the car park and that must have cost a lot of coin.
Australia has many what could be considered fossil brands. They still have Whoolworth's in Australia. The last Whoolworth in America closed 30 years ago but they are still hanging on in Australia.
For every employee who who cared, there were three who didn’t. Additionally, price tags were frequently missing resulting in 15 to 20 minute delays checking out. Lousy customer service killed Kmart.
@@realSamAndrewThat's just the person's opinion. For that was the start of the DECLINE of Kmart. What and who killed Kmart and sears was Eddie lampert. With his blue star tactics. Kmart without Eddie could've survived much longer. And had Kmart found a genuine investor who wanted the company to succeed they could've came out of bankruptcy and made some changes.
Bro, Kmart was my first job back in 2004. I loved working there. It was so laid back. Then the whole Sears-Kmart thing happened and it was all downhill from there. Sears Essentials had all the weaknesses of both but none of the strengths.
In the 1980's, Kmart focused on merchandising; hiring "merchants" to run the company, Walmart focused on logistics, hiring 'tech' people to make sure the merchandise flowed quickly to the stores. Also Kmart lost its focus, buying up specialty chains like Borders Books, Sports Authority while Walmart stayed focused on its discount stores and Sam's Club. Also, Kmart had a CEO named Joseph Antonini (sp?) - - from what I read in trade publications at the time, he was one to explode in anger upon being given bad news, so his underlings became afraid to tell him bad news he would NEED to be aware of as CEO.
My local Kmart was offered a buy out by local investors who didn't want the workers to lose their jobs. Kmart said no and went out of business anyway with 3 months prepaid yet on their contract with the mall.
Funny you mention that. I liked how all the K-mart's i've been to had that old-fashioned 'feel' about them. As in, walking around a k-mart made it easy for me to imagine how department stores were 30 or so years earlier. Going to a K-mart right after visiting a something like a target, was like taking a trip in a time machine. It gave K-mart a more, "down to earth" vibe.
When he was looking to establish his business, a chain of low cost department stores, Sam Walton went to New England and got advice from the head of a chain of stores called Ann & Hope, which had started out in the old Ann& Hope textile mill building in Rhode Island, a Mr. Chase. There was a gentleman's agreement that, for his advice and help, Walmart would not expand into the New England area, an agreement which held true until after Sam Walton died. Once Walmart DID expand into the area, it spelled the death knell of Ann & Hope, which is very sad, because they were great stores.
@marilynwillett804 I shopped there but always liked the ORIGINAL in the old mill up in Cumberland, RI. They had so much great stuff at extremely reasonable prices. My family bought most of my clothes there when I was a kid.
So many changes (NOT for the better) happened to Walmart after Sam Walton died. His kids inherited the corporation and they sold it as soon as they could. I remember how Walmart used to have banners hanging from the ceiling declaring that they sold only goods that were made in the USA. That was in the 80s. Now, you would be hard pressed to find ANYTHING in a Walmart that is NOT MADE IN CHINA. Sam Walton would be livid.
I used to work at the Kmart in Forest Park, IL. Inventory was kept in a large basement that also led to a series of underground tunnels (not owned by the company) that appeared to also double as some kind of long-abandoned military barracks. Creepy stuff that’s prime content for RUclips urban explorers 😉
In my seventh decade. I do remember Venture but again not in Forest Park. There was one by Harlem and Irving and on by Harlem and Foster. On what street was the Kmart in Forest Park?
At one time, there were 4 K Mart stores here. One that opened in the early 90s, then a Wal-Mart was built about a half mile down the road in the late 90s, which sealed that K Mart's fate. All 4 buildings still stand today, repurposed as a movie theatre, a grocery store, a divided building that is several businesses, and the last one to close in 2018 was renovated into an Amazon warehouse in 2020, but has not opened for some reason. Congratulations on 50k subscribers, love this channel
I never understood the merger of KMart and Sears. The two chains really didn't have that much in common - KMart was the "pre-Walmart" big box discount store while Sears was a mid-market, middle-America everyman store which had its strengths in hardline goods like tools and appliances. On paper, the merger might have made sense but the two chains didn't need each other and it really just seemed like a hasty attempt to build a powerhouse that never worked. The failure of both chains is really another example of 2 companies that took their eye off the ball.
And Sears could have been Amazon, but like many other companies, the computer was considered an expense by management, not an asset. Lack of vision by entrenched management killed a lot of companies.
@@mrcryptozoic817 Re: Sears. We found out here in Rochester NY that Steve Jobs asked Kodak in 1984 to collaborate on digital photography and they declined, sticking with film.
i knew a # of employees that worked for kmart over the years and they were treated so poorly by the company that none of them had any loyalty to kmart. having a staff of unhappy workers definitely contributed to their downfall. myself personally, i hated how they shared their parking lot w/ 5 other businesses, making parking a constant hassle, not to mention they never updated their stores when their competition did.
I got a job at Kmart when I was 18 in the late 80's. I received no training and didn't know what to do when they put me on the layaway desk by myself. I remember customers being frustrated due to the fact I couldn't help them. After a couple more days of being yelled at. I quit. So lack of customer care would also be a contributing factor.
Comedian Blake Clark said it best about Kmart. "your best friend won't admit to shopping at Kmart. But sometimes they're the only solution to your problem. You have $8 and you need snow tires"
I worked there in the 80s for a few months. They would have us put together furniture for sale displays. Then when it went off sale they had us throw it in the garbage compactor. They. wouldn’t mark it down or let the employees take it. Just toss it .
Some people forget that Kmart had it's own warehouse membership club called PACE. At one time it was the second largest membership chain behind Sam's. Eventually Sam's would buy them out.
*Yep. You are 100% correct.* *_I definitely remember a 'Pace Warehouse' being built in Marietta, GA back in the early 1980s. It was one of the largest (or covered the most square footage) buildings in the metro Atlanta area at that time._*
One of our local Kmarts wasn't able to keep the A/C operating (Kentucky in July!). They got a bunch of 20" box fans out of inventory, set them up near the checkouts. Not long after, they closed.
I remember going to Kmart and they were selling a 32gb thumb drive for $30 I went to a Walmart, less than a 5 minute drive away, they were selling the exact same thumb drive (same brand and all) for $10
You forgot to mention Caldor as one of the competitors that went out of business, extending Kmart's life. For a time, Caldor was the "4th largest discount store" by sales. Although Caldor only had about half as many locations as Ames, they were much higher volume stores in the densely populated Northeast corridor, Caldor often had the most desirable locations in the more affluent areas around New York / Long Island / Connecticut / Northern New Jersey. (Another company mis-managed into bankruptcy, but that's another topic.)
A friend's brother was in charge of Caldor's sports and automotive line at the corporate level at Caldor's zenith. He passed away way too early both he and his brother were and are personal heros of mine.
I use to work for Kmart in my my late teens. Just a gig until I found something better. After the announcement that a lot of stores were being shut down, all the management just really let the place go to crap. While it was popular in the area I lived, Wal-Mart opened their Super Center down the road and killed it. But yes you're right, they never upgraded the store but kept it running until they closed it. I left before they closed it due to mistreatment of the employees by certain management. But overall was not a bad place to work.
I recall taking an economics class in the early 70's. The professor asked us for an explanation of a chart that showed items with decreased purchasing as income rose above a certain level. I volunteered "shopping at Kmart." He stated it was the purchase of inferior goods. Increasingly, the level at which you're not longer purchasing inferior goods seems to be climbing steeply and that's spreading to a larger area of stuff you buy.
Remember from the late 1950s to the late 1970s K-mart was essentially a side-project of SS Kresge, and it got the top management attention and middle management resources that would be expected of a side project to a major retailer at that time, SS Kresge was in every downtown large and small and making ham handed efforts to expand into the newly establishing- suburbs. K Mart was SUPPOSED to be a part, but not really the focus of that strategy. That was where it started to go wrong and it just ran farther and farther off the rails from there. Soooo they essentially started out with one hand tied behind their back next to WalMart and Target!
I worked with a KMART developer in the late seventies. My impression of their management was arrogance personalized. That's why their clock got cleaned.
K-Mart world headquarters campus (Troy, MI) is being demolished as of now. It's sad I used to drive by a lot. The buildings on that campus could've been renovated.
Straight to the point, not 45 minutes long, no long speeches about how the universe was formed and K-Marts founders early childhood... Honestly a damn good video!
Was Sears starting to lose their focus (if not outright THROWING 💩 AT THE WALL) right before most of GenX was ever born? I read in more than one retail oriented site or fb group that some point in the 70s, corporate basically took a “top-down” enough approach where store managers had increasingly less control of their particular store among other things that people who know next to nothing about how companies are ran could easily tell “OHH; they’re starting to f things up!” Them literally bailing on their catalog business THE VERY SAME YEAR that Amazon started selling its first books online was probably the beginning of the end. If Sears truly gave one iota at that point, they would’ve done the VERY obvious technological AND logistical investments and rebranded their paper catalogs VERY accordingly.
LOL Sears screwed themselves.....the PIONEER of catalog sales, dumped their catalog sales in 1993 (long before Lampert). Sears was driven under by online sales (Amazon), which is basically.....online catalog sales. In the 90's so many companies failed to do internet sales right. Amazon started by selling nothing but BOOKS online...but they knew the internet sales game....and look at them now.
@@7mileDem at least Eddie Lambert made BILLIONS selling off the real estate Sears and Kmart owned………. It’s as if that was his plan all along……MuHaHa…….
I follow a TikTok channel in Australia. She went into a K-Mart down there and it looked like a 1999 shopping mall on Black Friday! Wall to wall people and it was just a normal weekday.
Love the shot of the closed K-mart at 1:14. Look at the donuts someone did in the parking lot. Where I grew up, K-Mart had competition from Bradlees/Sears, JC Penney and Zales-Ames. Our Bradlees replaced Kings, if anyone remembers that store.
This is sad. There were plenty of KMarts in my area and I almost always found them more useful than Walmarts or Targets. Good memories of a department store only go so far, but it was the place my grandmother preferred to shop so I was in there alot, especially after Ames went under. I will say this though. As I grew into an adult I couldn't help but feel like the people working there never took it too seriously. I rarely needed assistance in a store, but when I did it was like pulling teeth. I was never treated rudely, but I also could tell it was a workplace that the workers didn't really respect.
Our local Walmart has clean restrooms. If we're in the area and I have to take a crap I'll stop there... otherwise I try my damndest to shop elsewhere... not always successful, but they're my last choice.
i knew of a guy who was obsessed with K-Mart. he drove a crown victoria, and wore k-mart employee clothes, and also collected tons of fixtures from the store. he was so obsessed, actually, that he walked in one day, told the manager he was supposed to start work today, and he just started working there.
Around 1990, they built a K-Mart in Acme, next to Traverse City. My parents ran a small town hardware store 20 miles away, and that K-Mart put a dent into not only our shop, but into other places in town, too. All of these shops in that town are long-gone; our hardware was the oldest continously-running store in the town, and the last time i visited in 2005, it had been converted into a little hobby shop. Wal-Mart and Sam's Club did the same thing to that K-Mart, which has also closed.
. . . . and today Walmart / Sam's are fighting to keep Amazon from doing the same thing to THEM! Its sad and bittersweet, but time marches on I suppose, can be quite fascinating to watch (unless you're one of the people who loses their livelihood in the wake of 'progress'.)
Having been born in 1948, I was able to experience shopping in some of the small-town family businesses before they slowly went away. That is a sad part of our commercial/retail history here in America. I miss the small, family-operated businesses and the quaint downtowns, like what I remembered Petaluma, California being like before its own "functional" downtown also succumbed to strip malls and big box stores. (In these old, small, downtown centers, how many antique stores and thrift shops do we need?)
South Minneapolis Minnesota just lost their Kmart a couple years ago. The city bought out their lease which would've ended in 2053 after a fire in the store.
KMART pioneered what I've come to call the "KMART answer." I'm sure you could get it in other stores, but it was a quintessentially KMART phenomenon. If you asked ANYONE in KMART, "do you carry electric can openers?" You'd get, "if we do, they'll be in our housewares department." ""Do you carry motor oil?" "If we do, it'll be in our automotive department." Total waste of breath.
"Your perspective sounds intriguing if that was based on the truth, Kmart wasn't just another retail chain; it was part of a bigger plan orchestrated by ESL Investments, a hedge fund led by Eddie Lampert. They acquired both Kmart and Sears intending to use their assets (liquidation), especially their valuable real estate, for various financial moves. Some critics saw this as stripping away assets for profit. This shows how complex corporate strategies can be and how they impact companies like Kmart in the retail world. It's important to look beyond the surface and understand the deeper financial dynamics at play."
The next big thing is Meijer, started in Michigan and is in 6 surrounding States. Walmart's are dumpy stores in comparison, Meijer has a far better meat selection and the Produce is much fresher.
I'm old enough to remember S. S. Kresge stores. (K-Mart evolved from them) I got my first fishing pole from K-Mart when I was a kid. I hated to see them go.
The outdated interior was a big issue for me. In the early 2000s, there was a K-Mart in Manhattan, but when you went inside, it felt like you had stepped back into the 70s. I went there out of necessity, but I was never excited to go there. Even with the competition, a little modernization and rebranding may have helped. I liked the modernized JC Penny’s in the Manhattan Mall. It had modern fixtures and vibrant colors and it didn’t feel like the typical anchor store that you find in suburban malls. I really enjoyed shopping there.
If you’re thinking of the Astor Place location, that thing stuck around until at least 2021. I last went in there in 2016 and it was very bizarre, especially the lower level. Got a decent pack of white t shirts there, though.
@@mustangthings The one I remember was somewhere around 34th St. I moved out of NYC in 2015, and I don’t remember if it was still there then. I just Googled and that JC Penny’s has closed. 😢
When a Home Depot and Walmart opened near my Sears store, our sales dropped and a nearby Kmart went out of business. Eventually my Sears closed as well.
I remember a K mart being built near us when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old and I don't think they ever updated that store. We're talking a lot of decades because I'm old. it eventually closed and now it's a Meijer grocery store. Meijer is the bomb
In 1988, I moved to a town east of the SF bay area (pop 25k). In my new home town, K Mart was the only so called discount department store here. When I lived in the SF bay area, I rarely shopped at K Mart. By the early 1990's we finally got a Walmart. Soon after that, we got a shopping Mall with a Target store. Not long after that, the K-Mart store was gone.
Living in Troy Michigan near the Headquarters of KMart. The executives were out of date. Their Computers technology was so outdated and IBM mainframes based. No way to quickly find out sales or inventory.
Before playing the video, I had already guessed the answer. I'm from Louisville, KY, and I vividly remember Walmart displacing Kmart. In my hometown, the change happened while I was in college in the late eighties. I came back home for the holidays, and suddenly my family were all shopping at the new Walmart location. In the area where I lived, there had been one nearby Kmart, maybe a mile away, and another somewhat farther away, maybe three miles, and no one seemed at all interested in going to either one ever again. The close one closed, remained vacant for a little while, and eventually turned into a bingo parlor. The farther one eventually turned into a Big Kmart, but I don't think that we ever went. Walmart just suddenly dominated the discount retail scene.
Around 2002 I worked for a telecommunications company. I installed a satellite system on the roof of their headquarters in Michigan. The place looked like Mission control at NASA or NORAD... curved desks in rows lined up in front of a huge wall of screens... Hard to believe all that failed.
Been documenting and making videos on Kmart for years. Been to hundreds of locations in my life. My family and myself grew up in the Detroit area. We remember seeing kressgees become Kmart and still remember the wooden floors in the original Kmart in garden city Michigan. Walmart didn’t create or build the first super center but rather while Kmart was building and planning their first super center in Medina Ohio they sent in spies to survey and steal the concept. They the. Built the first Walmart super center nearby. I despise Walmart and want my Kmart back.
This is ironic because Sam Walton in the early days copied what Kresge was doing with the big box stores. Kresge started K Mart and Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, operated Kresge stores. The student became the master.
Kmart seemed to pick highly populated areas in close proximity to malls. Walmart picked very rural areas with the largest community in a regional area being around 5000 people. The advantage of the Walmart strategy was it was the go to store for that town for nearly everything (groceries, clothing, electronics, car parts, pharmacy, photo development, basic car service, etc). The problem with Kmart's strategy was there were never the only game in town and nothing about them stood out other than having a couple items Walmart didn't have which was few and far between. The merger with Sears never made sense. If the strategy was to start learning from Walmart's strategy to expand in rural areas not reached yet by Walmart, be the go to location while selling craftsman, Kenmore, Die Hard, and other Sears brands for a rural community too small for Sears. I could see that possibly working, but the way they did it, never made sense to me.
The ONLY purpose of the Sears / Kmart merger I was for Eddie Lampert to gain control of all that real estate and the trademarks like Kenmore Diehard etc. so he could slowly sell it off to line the pockets of himself and the investors in his hedge fund. Lampert gained control of Kmart during the 2002 bankruptcy by buying up Kmarts outstanding debt for pennies on the dollar. Sears had been struggling for decades by that point, Kmart emerged from that bankruptcy with a clean balance sheet and Lampert was able to buy Sears on the cheap. Had Kmart (and Sears) not been financial trainwrecks to begin with, Lampert never would have got his foot in the door. I believe to my core that Lampert NEVER had any intention to operate Sears / Kmart as a going concern. He kept the stores open (never updating / remodeling) as long as they were cash flow positive . . . as competition intensified and they turned cash flow negative, he began shutting them down and selling off the assets, real estate, and trademarks. When the Board of DIrectors of Sears voted to sell the company to Kmart, it was the equivalent to throwing up their hands, saying "i give up" and selling it off for spare parts while it still had some value to salvage.
@@trevonpernell0814 Lampert picked the bones....Kmart was making STUPID decisions years before him, and the person who STARTED Kmart's downfall was Chuck Conaway (pre-bankruptcy). Kmart installed "self checking" long before Walmart, but none of them worked properly. In the decade before bankruptcy, Kmart was building a LOT of new stores.....across the street from Walmarts (sometimes in the same shopping centers). I shopped at a Sam's club, which was in the same shopping center as a Walmart and Kmart...which made ZERO sense any way you looked at from a Kmart or Walmart point of view. Kmart was also fudging their books with vendor/consignment inventory, and laying out millions in store and warehouse upgrades that never saw the light of day because of the impending bankruptcy. I worked at a Kmart Distribution Center pre and post bankruptcy (until 2003).... let me tell ya, Kmart was going down the toilet lonnnnggg before Lampert.
K-Mart's were once iconic and commonplace here in western Canada until 1992 when our local KM workers went on strike which lasted for over a month then the stores were boarded up for good with K-Mart pretty much removed from our lives.
I had an "old style" Kmart and Walmart in my medium sized Southern town. Worked at both from 1993-1997. In my opinion, Kmart cut their own throat with their severely outdated computer system. Walmart had the kind of computer set up where it a customer bought an item, it was automatically placed on "reorder". Kmart didn't have that type of set up. Also, the sale price downloads from Troy, MI were always incomplete, leaving the staff to have to manually change the prices. Pissed off customers to no end. Still using MS DOS in 1997. Need I say more?
I remember a Kmart in Astor Place in Manhattan in a train station and that was the only store that i ever visited before it went under: But there is a Kmart Still open in Bridgehampton Long Island.
My first real job was at Kmart in 1996. $4.85 an hour to start. But you could still get a McDonald’s value meal for $2.99. At the time, the Kmart where I worked was a fixture of our part of town. Busy on the weekends with long checkout lines. Too many a-holes still paying by personal check. The Walmarts nearest us were okay but much smaller, nothing like the Supercenter but they still held their own. The store where I worked changed to the Big Kmart concept in the year I worked there. They wanted to increase the grocery offerings and added a lot of refrigerators and freezers, which pinched out some of the offerings from other departments. For example you could no longer find spark plugs in automotive. Obviously didn’t work in the end, 90’s suburban soccer mom never showed up to buy the high margin limited grocery selection because she still had to go to the supermarket for everything else and dad got pissed and went to Walmart for spark plugs. The location where I worked only lasted a short time when a Walmart Supercenter opened a few miles away, replacing the previously small dumpy Walmart that was a few miles farther away. My last visit to Kmart was when we lived in Chicago in ‘17-‘18. That last location on W. Addison Street was a mess. Not organized at all, lots of empty shelf space. The cashier asked me for my phone number at checkout. I laughed. “No. I’m not giving it to you.”, I replied, as politely as possible.
so much copium in one post 😂😂. Walmart in the 90s have walmart auto and huge electronic section as well as acquired Sams clun.🙄. Meanwhile Kmart was about to acquire Sears in 10 years and about to declare bankruptcy twice in 2002 and 2012 😂😂😂.
@@zlonewolf You have the reading comprehension of a tiktok watcher. My post isn't propping up Kmart versus Walmart. Go back and reread. Also Walmart in the early to mid 90's the electronics section was a small square in the middle of the store, nothing like today. Certainly not spectacular compared to competitors of the time.
Man ! You take me back to a happier time ! The Kmart automotive department. Now, I never looked at the spark plugs or oil filters, but let me tell you about the... CAR AUDIO EQUIPMENT DISPLAYS ! It was dreamland for nineteen year old guys ! PIONEER receivers and tape decks. JENSEN 150 watt Triax speakers. 200 watt power boosters. Graphic equalizers. If I could only go back to those days and give myself just some of the money I have today...
I know: The cashier wanted your phone number to, at some point later, ask you out on a date! Am I right? I love your comment about the people paying by personal check. I used to be one of "those" irritating people back in the 1970s and 1980s, until, reluctantly, I got an ATM card. But I know what it is to get behind somebody who has to pay by check. It is a pain in the ass!
So many mistakes were made over the years at Kmart and Sears. I never understood why Sears didn't embrace the direct to consumer model of Amazon. Everything was in place with fulfillment centers all over the country, established methods of shipping products, ship to store or home options, beautiful catalogs that could have been digitized for the web... It was all right there within the grasp of Sears and Kmart executives..
I worked with Kmart, Walmart and Venture associates merchandising products for a otc division of a pharmaceutical company. The department managers of Kmart and Venture were not empowered. They had little ability to tailor their departments to local demand, Walmart could. Walmart could put a fast moving product on an endcap of an isle increase sales of that product. Venture was the least empowered and they failed first, Kmart was a little more empowered and they declined more slowly. Walmart won.
last time i was in a kmart in saint marys ohio the clerk took a credit card app. while me and several other customers waited some behind me left leaving full carts full of merchandise. someone had to put back on the shelve.
I worked at Target before and during Covid. Brian Cornell the CEO eliminated the floor sales staff so everyone is in the back doing stock. The customers were pissed, but the halved cost of employees makes Target stock jump now. Walmart lead the world to zero service and high margins extracted from the poor, Target is right there. These two are the dystopia. Target is virulently anti customer. For now, Meijers ROCKS
Our local Kmart had the most filthy, disgusting bathrooms on the planet. Overflowing toilets, filth on the walls and floors. You didn't even want to walk into them, much less use them. I also remember my Mom going to Kmart, choosing her purchases, then walking down the row of cashiers, searching for the dumbest looking ones in hopes that they would make mistakes ringing up her items. She kept a close eye on them to make sure that any mistakes were in her favor, and not in Kmart's. The cashiers didn't receive much training.
Oh hell..CDs and tapes were in these plastic protectors that a butter knife could cut through. Walkmans were a bit more difficult, needed scissors. One time, me and a friend made off with a pile of CDs and some teenagers who worked there came all the way out to our car (Why they did this is beyond me, given the potential danger) and asked for their stuff back. We also nabbed VHS tapes, those were easy.
I worked at #3735 from 1999-2003, I had the store down to where, when asked, I could tell a customer from my service desk the aisle, how far down, and the shelf to find their sought after item. In the time I worked, I learned every sales position, every operation, was sent to other stores, and saw the mismanagement of the keys to success. Cliques were created and self-promoted, major rules were overlooked for personnel, and in the end, I always felt that the #1 reason was disconnected management. The regional manager and up had no idea what they were doing, but they were yelling at us to fix things like we had any power to solve problems. My wife said it had to be bad as I had symptoms similar to PTSD. I can still recite the end of day announcements 20+ years later. 😅
My favorite name for this stre was "Came -Apart" They sold alot of junk tools that didnt last. For example; had reduced prices on tools that were made much cheaper by using a lot of plastics that were not very strong. Quality took a sideline for quantity. Walmart is heading that a way as well.
I bought the steel case desk used in the Kmart HR department located at the I 17 freeway and northern in Phoenix Arizona. The desk is in mint condition!
@mountaineernews2 Not anymore but originally it did. From 1968 to 78 it was the majority owner then in 78 minority owner then in 1994 it sold that stake to it's other partner Coles and Company later known as Cole Myer. Today Wesfarmers owns the chain.
If you go into the ones in the Melbourne area its like going back to the 80s! Same garbage they sold in the U.S is being sold there, even the deli is the same. The one in the Dandenong mall is 2 floors and it was actually crowded when I was there.
Our family was a Kmart faithful. Grew up right next door to Troy Michigan. My new husband worked there. It was sad how they didn’t see the progress around them. I used to like Sears too. Bought a lot of our appliances there too. I used to wonder who their buyers were. Sad
I worked at Kmart for 11 years in the mid 1980's thru mid 90's at their hdqtrs in Troy, mi.. Kmart's biggest problem was gross mis-management. When SS Kresege created Kmart he said that he would leave his hands out of the operations. He later said that was a mistake.
My last Kmart memory was I bought a small flat screen lcd TV with a DVD player built in. Excited to watch a DVD I put one in and it instantly scratched/destroyed it while pulling it in and then it wouldn’t let it back out. That was my last Kmart trip lol
K-Mart was a classic case of not being able to do it better than their competitors. I used to shop at a Super K-Mart back in the nineties. It was nice to be able to shop late and miss the crowds.
KRESGIES 5 and Dime, started it and it grew into one of the first big stores! They were in our neighborhoods, onstead of downtown, which was nice! I hated going down-town because of the traffic on 2 lane streets, one-way streets, parking meters, pickpockets, parking tickets, and just a pain in the butts
When Walmart came to my town, the decline of Kmart was immediate and hard. Then when Target came to town, it only took a few short years for Kmart to close. Before all that, Kmart was busy AF. Seems pretty simple to me, notwithstanding prior bad corporate decisions.
The real reason was because you knew you were never going to get to check out quickly because they would always have to do a price check on something for the person ahead of you.
Even today, when I look in my fishing tackle box, I see items with the Kmart logo. They had a sign back then that read, if we don't have it, you don't need it. Back in the late 80s or early 90s, they built a Super K right behind their current store, and then tore down the old one. It was an amazing store that included a grocery store and had a food court. I loved it. I'd often go in there for lunch. But when Walmart came town, I watched their slow decline and demise. Roses and Sky City also folded in short order.
Yoooo, if the image at 0:12 is where I think it is, that might be the Kmart I used to work at back in 2009-10. Worked there through high school and my first year of college. That's a blast from the past right there.
I'm from the Buffalo-area and remeber going into a Wal-Mart for the first time in my life. Prior to that we either went to Ames, Hills (unique to the Pittsburgh and Buffalo areas) or K-Mart. Our local Wal-Mart opened in 1996, but Toronto got its first Wal-Mart two years earlier, so I remember thinking that Wal-Mart was actually a Canadian company at first. Its humourous to look back on thinking that the most American place on Earth was Canadian, but it shows how these chains wern't always an omnipresent behemoth. The same thing happened with Home Depot and Lowe's.
I remember when Kmart and Albertson's left Texas. In both cases, the stores left because people here bought on prices, and neither chain wanted to compete on prices. Both chains left the Houston area within around the same time, if memory serves me correctly. On a related note, a number of restaurant chains that left Houston over the years, have come back. A representative for one of the chains said "If you can't compete in Houston, eventually, you can't compete, anywhere, ultimately".
I loved K-mart! I really hated to see its decline. I remember my mom taking us to K-mart when I was a kid and we all looked forward to it. The sights, the smell of popcorn, those great announcements and blue light specials, it was all great and fondly remembered. I tried to support them as an adult, but it got hard to find one.
K-Mart was awesome in the 1970s, especially if you were a boy. They had so many fishing lures, it boggled my mind whenever I went there with my grandmother. It was pretty much fishing heaven.
My Mother worked at KMart for some 15 Years, from the early 80's to the late 90's. She made a little over Minimum wage when she started to nearly double the Minimum wage when she 'Retired'. She could dictate her hours, as a Mother who worked, claimed Unemployment nearly every January when retail employees had their hours reduced, and the overall job wasn't too physically exhausting on her. She was offered $1,000 for every Year she worked there to leave the Company. My Father, who never made my Mother work, supported her and said to quit. KMarts thought was, we can get 2 employees for nearly the price of 1! Oh, the Older Housewives who did not need employment left in droves! The newer, Minimum Wage Employees of the late 90's and Early 2000's became a Constant Turnover. It never seemed the same to me without the Longtime Ladies who were always there growing up. Sadly, WalMart has taken over, Self-Checkouts and all!
Um, so what?
Walmart is trying to be Kmart now.
Getting unemployment while being employed? Wow, I have a lot of thoughts on that, none of them very positive. People who legitimately need it have to starve for 90 days before they will even take a look at your case.
i remember the housewife workers back in the day. good times. they would work part time for 20 years and always smiled.
The last Kmart still open in Kansas was 1/2 mile from me in Kansas City Ks. The store is vacant. I miss Kmart. There were things I thought were poor choices. 1) they added a food section to try to mirror Walmart, but it was a small food section with few selections. 2) They brought in seasonal plants which were kept outside in front of the store, and which were largely neglected. There were 2 hardware stores very close by with a much better selection of plants, and were not withering away. Why didn’t Kmart stop carrying something that wasn’t selling anyway?
After their 2002 bankruptcy, Kmart didn't have a vision for the feature. They made the big mistake of buying Sears instead of focusing on improving their stores
Yup! Once Eddie Lampert took over, the vision for the future was to slowly liquidate the companny for its real estate value.
Chuck Conaway began fleecing the company years before Lampert. He made loans to himself which he never repaid, and at one point was even investigated by the FBI. All sorts of shady dealings were happening during this time, one being reporting consigned (and not yet sold) inventory as profit, as a way to "cook the books". Fun fact: Eminem bought the mansion Charles Conaway owned when CEO of Kmart. The company was making VERY stupid decisions, and was hemorrhaging because of them. Eddie Lampert was an opportunist, who came in to cannibalize the company to keep it afloat (while enriching his investment company).
i was a stockholder then and it didn't set well with me that they filed bankruptcy, got rid of us stockholders and emerge from bankruptcy 6 months later with all kinds of money now that they could buy out sears but nothing to us stockholders and we got the shaft instead. I never shopped there again after that at least with my own money. not sure how it worked but they kept putting kmart cash on my rewards account i had with them that was supposed to build as you use it but i would refuse to shop there because of the bankruptcy and what they did to us. so to get me back in the store every little while they would add kmart cash to my account to intice me to shop there again. i would leave them build until right before expiring date and go find something for the $20.00 or whatever the amount built up to every time. i know i brought lots of my yellow straps there for my trailers or should say they gave me lots of free straps over the years until the store disappeared here but they still offered me reward points online(never used) but now i dont get nothing from them. I always wondered how many others just shop with the free rewards points they got just to get them back in the store besides me? that had to add up.
up until they filed bankruptcy, kmart was my to go to store. once they crapped on us stockholders, i avoided that place, my way of getting a little satisfaction back. did the same thing with that one new restaurant chain about the same time frame, they filed bankruptcy to get rid of us stockholders that built the new chain up and then reissued new stocks and was bigger than ever because they didn't have to pay for their own stores, we did so i never ate at that place ever again in the last 30 years or however long it has been and we ate there twice a week usually back then.. actually i think they are gone for good too now come to think of it, i havent seen any around anymore.
@@irefusetoaskmydoctorifyour6401 Yes, private equity never bodes well for a company.
Kmart was a part of my childhood, as an 80's and 90's kid. The store was never anything worth bragging about, BUT it will always hold a place in my heart due to the fact that their offering of Lay-A-Way saved by parents many Christmases.
You were never anything worth bragging about.
Still ain't. Pssssh.
@@TheBatugan77eat shit
JerseyJeff84 - You're absolutely right, like Ames it holds fond memories for many of us who shopped and worked there.
Their cost structure helped the middle class tremendously.
@@TheBatugan77bye.
I never understood the concept of layaway, unless it's for people who know they live in a house full of thieves: otherwise, why don't you "lay away" the money in your sock drawer until you can afford your desired purchase? I once worked in a cigarettes-lottery-newspaper-magazine store in a blue collar, alcoholic neighborhood. The owner decided we might have more luck selling the VCRs, walkman's, police scanners and disc cameras [guess the era?] in the electronics case if we instituted a layaway plan. It started out as a roaring success. I had a notebook full of customers with deposits on stuff, but then Saturday night rolled around and most of these people asked for their money back so they could go out and drink. I was doing a lot of extra work keeping track of this for nothing. We stopped the program.
I was softlines manager at KMart In late 1970s. In the mid 1980s KMart changed to become more like JCPenneys -- lots of name brand young women's clothing, Martha Stewart dishes, glasses and cookware. They quit carrying the household goods most people depended on. It was downhill from there.
That's what I always thought. As soon as they started bringing in the big name brands, like the Jaclyn Smith line, the prices soared.
In KMart's final years, I'd still go there once in a while, but they never carried the items I was looking for, at any price.
I see Target going down the same path
I worked as a softlines manager in the late 80's. The big problem was Antonini who doubled his salary and doubled the homeoffice. Draining the profits. He started to upgrade to compete with the Targets popping up in Michigan but then couldn't complete in price with the Walmarts popping up in the south till Kmart just became a big mishmash of cheap low price stuff mixed with some higher end stuff. They also didn't keep up with the electronics dept. which was a money maker. There are other reasons too.
Kmart buying Sears was like slamming two clunkers together and expecting a shiny new Mercedes-Benz to emerge out of the debris.
Sears should have restarted their catalog business. Look what Amazon did using the old Sears model.
That merger was actually an act of vulture capitalism designed to strip both companies like a chop-shop strips a car. It was VERY profitable for the vultures, saddling the stores with huge unserviceable debt and putting the cash from taking out that debt into their own slimy pockets. Same with Interstate Bakeries (hostess) and many others also. Many of those vulture practices were illegal until banking and financial rules were changed under Reagan, as well as Reagan (and later Presidents) no longer enforcing the various anti-trust acts which would have blocked such mergers.
Sears SHOULD HAVE been turned into Amazon. But poor management had no vision
Two drunks helping each other across the street
Like Packard and Studebaker
@@Thrunabulax10 Eddie Lampert tried to do an online site called ShopYourWay... it obviously failed
Don’t forget the Former CEO spending millions of the company’s money on his self.. That didn’t help Kmart either..
Yeah. I had the unfortunate experience of being a vendor to Kmart. I was full of bad attitudes and horrible executives. On the upside I did meet my wife at Kmart. She was a vendor there too.
Yup the (((CEO))).
@@johnkozlovich5519
And then those corporate knuckleheads went to others chains
@@johnkozlovich5519- *It?
Yes, he moved to Miami and bought a 60’ yacht with a helipad. I think this was deliberate to fail these companies.
I loved how k mart had a food Court where u could get hot dogs, corn dogs,. nachos, ice cream and icee .. good old days
The Kmart I went to as a kid had a cafeteria at the back of the store where you slid your tray down the rail to choose things already on display or you could order a burger and fries at the front of the line and it would be ready at the end where you paid for it. This was also where I had my first experience with a self-serve soda pop fountain. Had Coke and Sprite and all the assorted Fanta flavors, including root beer. Now this is quite commonplace, but I heard McDonald's is talking about removing their self-serve fountains and eliminating free refills. Most likely others will follow. Hope Circle K don't take out their Polar Pop fountains.
@@longagoandfaraway7868All the Circle K stores in my area still have their self-service soda fountains.
Kmart always smelled like fresh buttered popcorn.
@@jimfinigan1681 i swear u ain't lying.. man that popcorn was One of the best popcorns i ever bought.. I rather have their popcorn than theater popcorn... I'm pissed now, I want k mart popcorn.. we should go find Those k mart bastards and Tell them they're gonna reopen k mart yesterday 😂
@@cjempire1188 That Kmart popcorn was the best! You could get a popcorn and an Icee for less than a dollar.
Fun fact: Guam has long been home to the world’s biggest K-Mart. I think it’s still open. It helps that there’s no competition from Walmart or Target.
If only I had $$$$$$ to move to Guam and rid myself of the Walmart overlords 🤣🤣🤣
Built after I left. Would have been nice.
Yes it's open in Guam
K-Mart is also open in Australia as well.
@@Jennifer_Lewis_Beach_Living that's a different company entirely, just same name and logo
In '93, Kmart did away with employees selling certain merchandise for a commission, such as electronics. Consequently, the employees generating the most sales, left the company and sales took a major hit. 16 year old girls were trying to sell shotguns and senior citizens had to explain electronics. Then staff was slashed, which is another way of saying customer service was slashed. Furthermore, Kmart was incapable of competing with Walmart and Target. It takes truly incompetent management to destroy a successful company, yet it happens constantly.
Many CEO's come from America's ownership class, that club we can't join, as George Carlin said.
"Buffy needs something to do. Let's put him in charge of X."
"X is tremendously successful. But isn't Buffy an idiot?"
" Yes, but he must do something. He keeps getting underfoot."
"Very well, then. Another martini?"
The True Plague of the corporate world is Micromanagement!!! 🤠👍
To put it in today's corporate lingo...'Their main competency was incompetence....box checked'
I busted a Sears store because of the sales people was writing up sales to peoples sears account for the commission . 99% of the people did not know until I called regarding their warranties on those products and the service contract.
Didn’t Walk-Mart embrace technology much faster than K-Mart? By that I mean using computers to track sales and restock items automatically? I read that K-Mart continued to rely on managers making these stocking decisions and using paper for orders.
I worked at a KMart in my teenage years and the store manger spent 4 hours a day in the on floor cafeteria smoking with the other 30 year employees of the store. Many teenagers ran the store multiple hours a day. I knew way back then in the late 80's they were doomed even before I even heard the word Walmart.
Exactly right. It was not old stores, it was poor personnel management.
Being desperate for work after I left the army as an officer, I already had my BA degree from UC Santa Barbara. I joined the Kmart management training program. The managers I saw were the bottom of the barrel. Suckers who couldn't make it anywhere else. No ambition or higher education, just a bunch of cow college losers. I left after about 9 months for another retailer. I left that after about a year. Sent to law school and never looked back.
Were you an 01? :( I worked for K-Mart in the Little Caesars to help pay for college. Not much of a set schedule, they called me in at random times like at 9AM on a Sunday. I took the hours, sure why not I needed the $$$, they overworked me and threatened to fire me if I did not "WORK FASTER! WORK FASTER!". After two and a half weeks, they let me go. Maybe they mistook me for a robot. Manager should have bought a few from Tyrell Corp.
that also happens at Walmart
I saw that too at the Kmart I worked at in 1990. Those veteran employees who had been there for decades were mean.
I remember once one of them made me work in the women’s section as punishment and reported me when I told her that I grew up with 4 sisters, so the women’s section did not bother me.
I grew up in Michigan and worked at Kresge, K Mart's parent company. Yes, the K stood for Kresge! I remember going to one of the first K Marts. This is sad for me, but I realize life goes on.
Eddie Lambert was there to slowly liquidate two brands...I worked there 10 years and saw it first hand..
😢😢😢
Yep....loaning them money with unmanageable rates with undervalued property as collateral.
I bought my first firearm at a K-Mart. A Marlin model 60 in .22LR with a 4X scope for around $65.00 new that I saw in one of their local ads in my hometown paper. I still have that rifle and I'm 67.
Mine cost $34 at K-Mart in 1976.
I'm 58 and my 1st gun was a Marlin Model 60 .22LR. I got it for Christmas when I turned 12 and was old enough to get a small game license and hunt squirrels with my dad. He bought the same gun for himself so we could hunt together. They were bought at Kmart and I have both mine and my dad's. He passed away in 2004. I have great memories of our hunts together. I also worked at Kmart from 1984-2002 when our store closed.
My first gun was a Marlin .22 from K Mart. No scope. You can't hide money.
You could buy a gun at Kmart??!!
That’s the most American thing I’ve ever heard 😂
Do you remember JC Penneys and Montgomery Wards selling guns? Ah the good ol days
Growing up in California in the 80s there were no Walmarts there as the video showed. My first experience with Walmart was when I visited relatives in Kansas City, and they called it Hypermart which I guess was the first version of a super center. My family shopped at Kmart. My mom liked the blue light specials and the fact that you could order a sub sandwich and an Icee while you shop.
Sometimes they had a Pizza Hut in the store!
We always got the "cheeper" bag of popcorn!
Yes! First Hypermart was in my neighborhood in KC. They had @ 30 checkout lanes or something, but only 5 or 6 lanes open at a time. There were no more options for products, but if you wanted 100 of something, you were in the right place. And, the noise! Huge ceilings, no sound buffering, just noise bouncing around a great big barn. Took about an hour to even locate a few item you’d come for and at least another hour or hour-and-a-half to check out. Then you transported your purchases across an enormous parking lot. Sucked!
Yeah, being a Washingtonian, my cousin used to make fun of Walmart commercials since we didn't have one in our whole state. My first Walmart experience was actually in Anchorage, Alaska.
@@DugrozReports Little Ceasars
I worked for Kfart as a Manger in the 80's and they treated everyone poorly. I knew when I left after 5 years of insanity, it would fail. They came out with Mini/ Max and they thought this would save the empire. Ordering was very tedious and ads were another headache. Always moving stuff around which ate up labor hours and no time to keep the place fresh looking.
My uncle was a store GM starting in the 1960’s until his retirement. He really was a “company man”, until he wasn’t. He carries a lot of bitterness about how he was treated at the end, how the company was run into the ground and he probably had too much of his retirement fund invested in the company.
We used to joke with him, disparaging the company to get a rise out of him. Other times he would ask me if I shopped at Kmart, or Target, in a mocking way. I think he was an honest, hard working guy that did his best for the company, too bad they didn’t stay profitable.
We will always remember K-Mapart
“Kfart” 😭💀
On a recent "bucket list" trip to Australia, I visited a Kmart in a small mall in the city of Cairns. It was modern and quite popular. I can only assume that it is some kind of franchise agreement that allows the name to be used overseas. As it turns out there are over 300 Kmarts in Australia/New Zealand. They started as a join venture between Kmart and Coles a mega grocery store chain there. Eventually Kmart corporation divested themselves of the partnership, but it seems as though these stores are prospering. I made two trips to the store in Cairns, and it was modern with good customer service.
My brother lives way up north near cairns, I am way down in North eastern Victoria and there has been a Coles/Kmart as one building although now 2 seperate entities. In the early 80's they were as 1 and Kmart here does well and the supermarket is always busy. They in fact ripped up and re-did the car park and that must have cost a lot of coin.
Kmart in Australia and the us are two different companies
Kmart in Australia is totally different than us they are not the same
Australia has many what could be considered fossil brands. They still have Whoolworth's in Australia. The last Whoolworth in America closed 30 years ago but they are still hanging on in Australia.
@@Novusod yes they are famous in Australia
For every employee who who cared, there were three who didn’t. Additionally, price tags were frequently missing resulting in 15 to 20 minute delays checking out. Lousy customer service killed Kmart.
Eddie Lampert. There's your reason.
Eddie was the final blow. The video says the true killer happened 2 decades before Eddie, or certainly from the bankruptcy in 2002.
Eddie seeing the real estate that the stores sat one being more valuable than the stores. So he decided to purposely kill the company
@@realSamAndrewThat's just the person's opinion. For that was the start of the DECLINE of Kmart. What and who killed Kmart and sears was Eddie lampert. With his blue star tactics. Kmart without Eddie could've survived much longer. And had Kmart found a genuine investor who wanted the company to succeed they could've came out of bankruptcy and made some changes.
Plain and simple
The real estate yes. As Sears owned most of their properties. Eddie wanted to sell off the brands as well
Bro, Kmart was my first job back in 2004. I loved working there. It was so laid back. Then the whole Sears-Kmart thing happened and it was all downhill from there. Sears Essentials had all the weaknesses of both but none of the strengths.
The last thing I bought from Kmart was a can of dill pickle Pringles, this was...I don't know, 2008? Now it's a plasma donation center.
In the 1980's, Kmart focused on merchandising; hiring "merchants" to run the company, Walmart focused on logistics, hiring 'tech' people to make sure the merchandise flowed quickly to the stores. Also Kmart lost its focus, buying up specialty chains like Borders Books, Sports Authority while Walmart stayed focused on its discount stores and Sam's Club.
Also, Kmart had a CEO named Joseph Antonini (sp?) - - from what I read in trade publications at the time, he was one to explode in anger upon being given bad news, so his underlings became afraid to tell him bad news he would NEED to be aware of as CEO.
Joseph E. "Joe" Antonini was a disaster as CEO of Kmart. He was an uneducated very poor choice as CEO.
Wonder where they found that Antonini clown...maybe at The State Home For The Mentally Spent Managers?
Agreed. Lack of investment in technology made it a dinosaur.
My local Kmart was offered a buy out by local investors who didn't want the workers to lose their jobs. Kmart said no and went out of business anyway with 3 months prepaid yet on their contract with the mall.
I remember thinking how dated Kmart looked in the early eighties.
Ah, but who could forget their legendary ''flashing blue light specials?"
Funny you mention that. I liked how all the K-mart's i've been to had that old-fashioned 'feel' about them. As in, walking around a k-mart made it easy for me to imagine how department stores were 30 or so years earlier. Going to a K-mart right after visiting a something like a target, was like taking a trip in a time machine.
It gave K-mart a more, "down to earth" vibe.
Has nothing to do with it.
When he was looking to establish his business, a chain of low cost department stores, Sam Walton went to New England and got advice from the head of a chain of stores called Ann & Hope, which had started out in the old Ann& Hope textile mill building in Rhode Island, a Mr. Chase. There was a gentleman's agreement that, for his advice and help, Walmart would not expand into the New England area, an agreement which held true until after Sam Walton died. Once Walmart DID expand into the area, it spelled the death knell of Ann & Hope, which is very sad, because they were great stores.
@marilynwillett804 I shopped there but always liked the ORIGINAL in the old mill up in Cumberland, RI. They had so much great stuff at extremely reasonable prices. My family bought most of my clothes there when I was a kid.
So many changes (NOT for the better) happened to Walmart after Sam Walton died. His kids inherited the corporation and they sold it as soon as they could. I remember how Walmart used to have banners hanging from the ceiling declaring that they sold only goods that were made in the USA. That was in the 80s. Now, you would be hard pressed to find ANYTHING in a Walmart that is NOT MADE IN CHINA. Sam Walton would be livid.
I used to work at the Kmart in Forest Park, IL. Inventory was kept in a large basement that also led to a series of underground tunnels (not owned by the company) that appeared to also double as some kind of long-abandoned military barracks. Creepy stuff that’s prime content for RUclips urban explorers 😉
I think forest park was a old venture store
Where was this store? I grew up near Forest Park and can’t recall where it would have been.
@@bobr511 How old are you? Do you remember the Venture?
In my seventh decade. I do remember Venture but again not in Forest Park. There was one by Harlem and Irving and on by Harlem and Foster. On what street was the Kmart in Forest Park?
@@bobr511 Des Plaines and Roosevelt.
The snack bar in K Mart was the first time I ever saw a self serve Coke fountain. How cool it was to fill your own cup.
At one time, there were 4 K Mart stores here. One that opened in the early 90s, then a Wal-Mart was built about a half mile down the road in the late 90s, which sealed that K Mart's fate. All 4 buildings still stand today, repurposed as a movie theatre, a grocery store, a divided building that is several businesses, and the last one to close in 2018 was renovated into an Amazon warehouse in 2020, but has not opened for some reason. Congratulations on 50k subscribers, love this channel
I never understood the merger of KMart and Sears. The two chains really didn't have that much in common - KMart was the "pre-Walmart" big box discount store while Sears was a mid-market, middle-America everyman store which had its strengths in hardline goods like tools and appliances. On paper, the merger might have made sense but the two chains didn't need each other and it really just seemed like a hasty attempt to build a powerhouse that never worked. The failure of both chains is really another example of 2 companies that took their eye off the ball.
on paper it made sense for there real estate value that they could liquidate after
And Sears could have been Amazon, but like many other companies, the computer was considered an expense by management, not an asset. Lack of vision by entrenched management killed a lot of companies.
@@mrcryptozoic817 Sears originally sold mail order from their catalog so in many ways they were the Amazon in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
@@mrcryptozoic817 Re: Sears. We found out here in Rochester NY that Steve Jobs asked Kodak in 1984 to collaborate on digital photography and they declined, sticking with film.
Sears failed because they never grew out of blue collar mold. Their prices also could not complete with other brand name.
i knew a # of employees that worked for kmart over the years and they were treated so poorly by the company that none of them had any loyalty to kmart. having a staff of unhappy workers definitely contributed to their downfall.
myself personally, i hated how they shared their parking lot w/ 5 other businesses, making parking a constant hassle, not to mention they never updated their stores when their competition did.
I got a job at Kmart when I was 18 in the late 80's. I received no training and didn't know what to do when they put me on the layaway desk by myself. I remember customers being frustrated due to the fact I couldn't help them. After a couple more days of being yelled at. I quit. So lack of customer care would also be a contributing factor.
No access to the cash register. But looking back I could have given them a hand written receipt and stapled the money to the item.
Comedian Blake Clark said it best about Kmart. "your best friend won't admit to shopping at Kmart. But sometimes they're the only solution to your problem. You have $8 and you need snow tires"
I once worked in a Penske that was attached to a K Mart, we sold tires, oil changes repairs etc.
I paid my rent and all my bills for years just dumpster diving behind their store. Kmart threw away perfectly good merchandise for decades. Insane.
I worked there in the 80s for a few months. They would have us put together furniture for sale displays. Then when it went off sale they had us throw it in the garbage compactor. They. wouldn’t mark it down or let the employees take it. Just toss it .
@@randomtask26 they do the same at home depots
I worked at the K for a few years and saw so much merchandise thrown away it would make you sick 🤮!
Some people forget that Kmart had it's own warehouse membership club called PACE. At one time it was the second largest membership chain behind Sam's. Eventually Sam's would buy them out.
*Yep. You are 100% correct.*
*_I definitely remember a 'Pace Warehouse' being built in Marietta, GA back in the early 1980s. It was one of the largest (or covered the most square footage) buildings in the metro Atlanta area at that time._*
One of our local Kmarts wasn't able to keep the A/C operating (Kentucky in July!). They got a bunch of 20" box fans out of inventory, set them up near the checkouts. Not long after, they closed.
I loved the vintage look of Kmart and was disappointed when they changed it in the 1990's. Wal mart is a dump compared to what Kmart was.
I remember going to Kmart and they were selling a 32gb thumb drive for $30 I went to a Walmart, less than a 5 minute drive away, they were selling the exact same thumb drive (same brand and all) for $10
yeah basicly any thing electronic was more expensive at kmart's i noticed that even as a kid
I remember buying something like a 32mb ridata thumb drive from circuit city back in '06. It was purple.
You forgot to mention Caldor as one of the competitors that went out of business, extending Kmart's life. For a time, Caldor was the "4th largest discount store" by sales. Although Caldor only had about half as many locations as Ames, they were much higher volume stores in the densely populated Northeast corridor, Caldor often had the most desirable locations in the more affluent areas around New York / Long Island / Connecticut / Northern New Jersey. (Another company mis-managed into bankruptcy, but that's another topic.)
Venture down fall help
I loved Caldor. I got my school clothes there. I also bought a bad ass super soaker with my birthday money. 😄
A friend's brother was in charge of Caldor's sports and automotive line at the corporate level at Caldor's zenith. He passed away way too early both he and his brother were and are personal heros of mine.
And Jamesway.
I use to work for Kmart in my my late teens. Just a gig until I found something better. After the announcement that a lot of stores were being shut down, all the management just really let the place go to crap. While it was popular in the area I lived, Wal-Mart opened their Super Center down the road and killed it. But yes you're right, they never upgraded the store but kept it running until they closed it. I left before they closed it due to mistreatment of the employees by certain management. But overall was not a bad place to work.
I grew up with Ames and K-Mart nearby. Well, before Ames, the building was occupied by Zayre.
Same where I live. And before Zayre, the store was a Grand Way.
I recall taking an economics class in the early 70's. The professor asked us for an explanation of a chart that showed items with decreased purchasing as income rose above a certain level. I volunteered "shopping at Kmart." He stated it was the purchase of inferior goods.
Increasingly, the level at which you're not longer purchasing inferior goods seems to be climbing steeply and that's spreading to a larger area of stuff you buy.
Remember from the late 1950s to the late 1970s K-mart was essentially a side-project of SS Kresge, and it got the top management attention and middle management resources that would be expected of a side project to a major retailer at that time, SS Kresge was in every downtown large and small and making ham handed efforts to expand into the newly establishing- suburbs. K Mart was SUPPOSED to be a part, but not really the focus of that strategy. That was where it started to go wrong and it just ran farther and farther off the rails from there.
Soooo they essentially started out with one hand tied behind their back next to WalMart and Target!
I worked with a KMART developer in the late seventies. My impression of their management was arrogance personalized. That's why their clock got cleaned.
K-Mart world headquarters campus (Troy, MI) is being demolished as of now. It's sad I used to drive by a lot. The buildings on that campus could've been renovated.
On Big Beaver Road!
@@mls515 🎯
That is sad to hear. But I shouldn't be surprised.
@@mls515 I used to work at Oakland Mall. How is that doing?
@@hildeschmid8400 It's not what it used to be! Macy's and JC Penny is still there.
Straight to the point, not 45 minutes long, no long speeches about how the universe was formed and K-Marts founders early childhood... Honestly a damn good video!
What pisses me off is that Kmart dragged Sears down with it, strangling it of whatever life it had left…
Eddie Lampert did most of the cause.
I miss Sears! They had nice deals on there Tools and Appliances.
Was Sears starting to lose their focus (if not outright THROWING 💩 AT THE WALL) right before most of GenX was ever born?
I read in more than one retail oriented site or fb group that some point in the 70s, corporate basically took a “top-down” enough approach where store managers had increasingly less control of their particular store among other things that people who know next to nothing about how companies are ran could easily tell “OHH; they’re starting to f things up!”
Them literally bailing on their catalog business THE VERY SAME YEAR that Amazon started selling its first books online was probably the beginning of the end. If Sears truly gave one iota at that point, they would’ve done the VERY obvious technological AND logistical investments and rebranded their paper catalogs VERY accordingly.
LOL Sears screwed themselves.....the PIONEER of catalog sales, dumped their catalog sales in 1993 (long before Lampert). Sears was driven under by online sales (Amazon), which is basically.....online catalog sales. In the 90's so many companies failed to do internet sales right. Amazon started by selling nothing but BOOKS online...but they knew the internet sales game....and look at them now.
@@7mileDem at least Eddie Lambert made BILLIONS selling off the real estate Sears and Kmart owned………. It’s as if that was his plan all along……MuHaHa…….
I follow a TikTok channel in Australia. She went into a K-Mart down there and it looked like a 1999 shopping mall on Black Friday! Wall to wall people and it was just a normal weekday.
Love the shot of the closed K-mart at 1:14. Look at the donuts someone did in the parking lot. Where I grew up, K-Mart had competition from Bradlees/Sears, JC Penney and Zales-Ames. Our Bradlees replaced Kings, if anyone remembers that store.
That's like the Kmart near me in Miami. It is on Tamiami Trail.
Desert Storm joke:
"Did you hear that there are no more K-Marts in Baghdad?"
"Really?"
"Yeah, they're all Targets now."
😂😂😂
This is sad. There were plenty of KMarts in my area and I almost always found them more useful than Walmarts or Targets. Good memories of a department store only go so far, but it was the place my grandmother preferred to shop so I was in there alot, especially after Ames went under. I will say this though. As I grew into an adult I couldn't help but feel like the people working there never took it too seriously. I rarely needed assistance in a store, but when I did it was like pulling teeth. I was never treated rudely, but I also could tell it was a workplace that the workers didn't really respect.
I went into a Walmart for the first time in a long time fairly recently and hated the experience. I'll never go in one again.
Our local Walmart has clean restrooms. If we're in the area and I have to take a crap I'll stop there... otherwise I try my damndest to shop elsewhere... not always successful, but they're my last choice.
i knew of a guy who was obsessed with K-Mart. he drove a crown victoria, and wore k-mart employee clothes, and also collected tons of fixtures from the store. he was so obsessed, actually, that he walked in one day, told the manager he was supposed to start work today, and he just started working there.
Around 1990, they built a K-Mart in Acme, next to Traverse City. My parents ran a small town hardware store 20 miles away, and that K-Mart put a dent into not only our shop, but into other places in town, too. All of these shops in that town are long-gone; our hardware was the oldest continously-running store in the town, and the last time i visited in 2005, it had been converted into a little hobby shop. Wal-Mart and Sam's Club did the same thing to that K-Mart, which has also closed.
. . . . and today Walmart / Sam's are fighting to keep Amazon from doing the same thing to THEM! Its sad and bittersweet, but time marches on I suppose, can be quite fascinating to watch (unless you're one of the people who loses their livelihood in the wake of 'progress'.)
Having been born in 1948, I was able to experience shopping in some of the small-town family businesses before they slowly went away. That is a sad part of our commercial/retail history here in America. I miss the small, family-operated businesses and the quaint downtowns, like what I remembered Petaluma, California being like before its own "functional" downtown also succumbed to strip malls and big box stores. (In these old, small, downtown centers, how many antique stores and thrift shops do we need?)
South Minneapolis Minnesota just lost their Kmart a couple years ago. The city bought out their lease which would've ended in 2053 after a fire in the store.
I live in the Northern VA area and there was no Walmart or Target until the early 2000s. Kmart was everywhere though and very popular. Such a shame.
When Kmart opened a store in my city in 1962 it was huge. When it closed, it was small compared to Walmart and Target.
KMART pioneered what I've come to call the "KMART answer." I'm sure you could get it in other stores, but it was a quintessentially KMART phenomenon. If you asked ANYONE in KMART, "do you carry electric can openers?" You'd get, "if we do, they'll be in our housewares department." ""Do you carry motor oil?" "If we do, it'll be in our automotive department." Total waste of breath.
"Your perspective sounds intriguing if that was based on the truth, Kmart wasn't just another retail chain; it was part of a bigger plan orchestrated by ESL Investments, a hedge fund led by Eddie Lampert. They acquired both Kmart and Sears intending to use their assets (liquidation), especially their valuable real estate, for various financial moves. Some critics saw this as stripping away assets for profit.
This shows how complex corporate strategies can be and how they impact companies like Kmart in the retail world. It's important to look beyond the surface and understand the deeper financial dynamics at play."
The next big thing is Meijer, started in Michigan and is in 6 surrounding States. Walmart's are dumpy stores in comparison, Meijer has a far better meat selection and the Produce is much fresher.
I'm old enough to remember S. S. Kresge stores. (K-Mart evolved from them) I got my first fishing pole from K-Mart when I was a kid. I hated to see them go.
The outdated interior was a big issue for me. In the early 2000s, there was a K-Mart in Manhattan, but when you went inside, it felt like you had stepped back into the 70s. I went there out of necessity, but I was never excited to go there. Even with the competition, a little modernization and rebranding may have helped. I liked the modernized JC Penny’s in the Manhattan Mall. It had modern fixtures and vibrant colors and it didn’t feel like the typical anchor store that you find in suburban malls. I really enjoyed shopping there.
I think that was the same K-Mart that U2 had a press conference to announce their PopMart tour? It was all tongue-in-cheek.
If you’re thinking of the Astor Place location, that thing stuck around until at least 2021. I last went in there in 2016 and it was very bizarre, especially the lower level. Got a decent pack of white t shirts there, though.
@@mustangthings The one I remember was somewhere around 34th St. I moved out of NYC in 2015, and I don’t remember if it was still there then. I just Googled and that JC Penny’s has closed. 😢
When a Home Depot and Walmart opened near my Sears store, our sales dropped and a nearby Kmart went out of business. Eventually my Sears closed as well.
I remember a K mart being built near us when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old and I don't think they ever updated that store. We're talking a lot of decades because I'm old. it eventually closed and now it's a Meijer grocery store. Meijer is the bomb
Does Meijer still have that funky radiation sterilized ground beef?
In 1988, I moved to a town east of the SF bay area (pop 25k). In my new home town, K Mart was the only so called discount department store here. When I lived in the SF bay area, I rarely shopped at K Mart. By the early 1990's we finally got a Walmart. Soon after that, we got a shopping Mall with a Target store. Not long after that, the K-Mart store was gone.
Living in Troy Michigan near the Headquarters of KMart. The executives were out of date. Their Computers technology was so outdated and IBM mainframes based. No way to quickly find out sales or inventory.
Seriously, you're right.
Walmart is in the movie "Christmas Vacation" (1989), and in Pennsylvania we thought it was a made-up store.
Now I'm 1:56 picturing William F Buckley on a road trip in the Griswolds wagon to go shopping at Wally World.
*lightbulbs in cart* *Ol' Roy dog food on top of them*
Before playing the video, I had already guessed the answer. I'm from Louisville, KY, and I vividly remember Walmart displacing Kmart. In my hometown, the change happened while I was in college in the late eighties. I came back home for the holidays, and suddenly my family were all shopping at the new Walmart location. In the area where I lived, there had been one nearby Kmart, maybe a mile away, and another somewhat farther away, maybe three miles, and no one seemed at all interested in going to either one ever again. The close one closed, remained vacant for a little while, and eventually turned into a bingo parlor. The farther one eventually turned into a Big Kmart, but I don't think that we ever went. Walmart just suddenly dominated the discount retail scene.
Walmart was built on so many lies, as they say, it isn't funny.
Around 2002 I worked for a telecommunications company. I installed a satellite system on the roof of their headquarters in Michigan. The place looked like Mission control at NASA or NORAD... curved desks in rows lined up in front of a huge wall of screens... Hard to believe all that failed.
Been documenting and making videos on Kmart for years. Been to hundreds of locations in my life. My family and myself grew up in the Detroit area. We remember seeing kressgees become Kmart and still remember the wooden floors in the original Kmart in garden city Michigan. Walmart didn’t create or build the first super center but rather while Kmart was building and planning their first super center in Medina Ohio they sent in spies to survey and steal the concept. They the. Built the first Walmart super center nearby. I despise Walmart and want my Kmart back.
This is ironic because Sam Walton in the early days copied what Kresge was doing with the big box stores. Kresge started K Mart and Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, operated Kresge stores. The student became the master.
I tthought Waltons were 5 and 10 cent stores.
Kmart seemed to pick highly populated areas in close proximity to malls. Walmart picked very rural areas with the largest community in a regional area being around 5000 people. The advantage of the Walmart strategy was it was the go to store for that town for nearly everything (groceries, clothing, electronics, car parts, pharmacy, photo development, basic car service, etc). The problem with Kmart's strategy was there were never the only game in town and nothing about them stood out other than having a couple items Walmart didn't have which was few and far between. The merger with Sears never made sense. If the strategy was to start learning from Walmart's strategy to expand in rural areas not reached yet by Walmart, be the go to location while selling craftsman, Kenmore, Die Hard, and other Sears brands for a rural community too small for Sears. I could see that possibly working, but the way they did it, never made sense to me.
I always the Sears/Kmart merger made sense. It was the execution of it (LAMPERT!) that killed it.
The ONLY purpose of the Sears / Kmart merger I was for Eddie Lampert to gain control of all that real estate and the trademarks like Kenmore Diehard etc. so he could slowly sell it off to line the pockets of himself and the investors in his hedge fund. Lampert gained control of Kmart during the 2002 bankruptcy by buying up Kmarts outstanding debt for pennies on the dollar. Sears had been struggling for decades by that point, Kmart emerged from that bankruptcy with a clean balance sheet and Lampert was able to buy Sears on the cheap. Had Kmart (and Sears) not been financial trainwrecks to begin with, Lampert never would have got his foot in the door.
I believe to my core that Lampert NEVER had any intention to operate Sears / Kmart as a going concern. He kept the stores open (never updating / remodeling) as long as they were cash flow positive . . . as competition intensified and they turned cash flow negative, he began shutting them down and selling off the assets, real estate, and trademarks.
When the Board of DIrectors of Sears voted to sell the company to Kmart, it was the equivalent to throwing up their hands, saying "i give up" and selling it off for spare parts while it still had some value to salvage.
@@trevonpernell0814 Lampert picked the bones....Kmart was making STUPID decisions years before him, and the person who STARTED Kmart's downfall was Chuck Conaway (pre-bankruptcy). Kmart installed "self checking" long before Walmart, but none of them worked properly. In the decade before bankruptcy, Kmart was building a LOT of new stores.....across the street from Walmarts (sometimes in the same shopping centers). I shopped at a Sam's club, which was in the same shopping center as a Walmart and Kmart...which made ZERO sense any way you looked at from a Kmart or Walmart point of view. Kmart was also fudging their books with vendor/consignment inventory, and laying out millions in store and warehouse upgrades that never saw the light of day because of the impending bankruptcy. I worked at a Kmart Distribution Center pre and post bankruptcy (until 2003).... let me tell ya, Kmart was going down the toilet lonnnnggg before Lampert.
K-Mart's were once iconic and commonplace here in western Canada until 1992 when our local KM workers went on strike which lasted for over a month then the stores were boarded up for good with K-Mart pretty much removed from our lives.
I had an "old style" Kmart and Walmart in my medium sized Southern town. Worked at both from 1993-1997. In my opinion, Kmart cut their own throat with their severely outdated computer system. Walmart had the kind of computer set up where it a customer bought an item, it was automatically placed on "reorder". Kmart didn't have that type of set up. Also, the sale price downloads from Troy, MI were always incomplete, leaving the staff to have to manually change the prices. Pissed off customers to no end. Still using MS DOS in 1997. Need I say more?
I remember a Kmart in Astor Place in Manhattan in a train station and that was the only store that i ever visited before it went under:
But there is a Kmart Still open in Bridgehampton Long Island.
My first real job was at Kmart in 1996. $4.85 an hour to start. But you could still get a McDonald’s value meal for $2.99. At the time, the Kmart where I worked was a fixture of our part of town. Busy on the weekends with long checkout lines. Too many a-holes still paying by personal check. The Walmarts nearest us were okay but much smaller, nothing like the Supercenter but they still held their own. The store where I worked changed to the Big Kmart concept in the year I worked there. They wanted to increase the grocery offerings and added a lot of refrigerators and freezers, which pinched out some of the offerings from other departments. For example you could no longer find spark plugs in automotive. Obviously didn’t work in the end, 90’s suburban soccer mom never showed up to buy the high margin limited grocery selection because she still had to go to the supermarket for everything else and dad got pissed and went to Walmart for spark plugs. The location where I worked only lasted a short time when a Walmart Supercenter opened a few miles away, replacing the previously small dumpy Walmart that was a few miles farther away. My last visit to Kmart was when we lived in Chicago in ‘17-‘18. That last location on W. Addison Street was a mess. Not organized at all, lots of empty shelf space. The cashier asked me for my phone number at checkout. I laughed. “No. I’m not giving it to you.”, I replied, as politely as possible.
so much copium in one post 😂😂.
Walmart in the 90s have walmart auto and huge electronic section as well as acquired Sams clun.🙄.
Meanwhile Kmart was about to acquire Sears in 10 years and about to declare bankruptcy twice in 2002 and 2012 😂😂😂.
@@zlonewolf You have the reading comprehension of a tiktok watcher. My post isn't propping up Kmart versus Walmart. Go back and reread. Also Walmart in the early to mid 90's the electronics section was a small square in the middle of the store, nothing like today. Certainly not spectacular compared to competitors of the time.
Man ! You take me back to a happier time ! The Kmart automotive department.
Now, I never looked at the spark plugs or oil filters, but let me tell you about the...
CAR AUDIO EQUIPMENT
DISPLAYS !
It was dreamland for nineteen year old guys ! PIONEER receivers and tape decks. JENSEN 150 watt Triax speakers. 200 watt power boosters. Graphic equalizers.
If I could only go back to those days and give myself just some of the money I have today...
I am a present day A Hole because you take my check or you dont get my business.
I know: The cashier wanted your phone number to, at some point later, ask you out on a date! Am I right? I love your comment about the people paying by personal check. I used to be one of "those" irritating people back in the 1970s and 1980s, until, reluctantly, I got an ATM card. But I know what it is to get behind somebody who has to pay by check. It is a pain in the ass!
So many mistakes were made over the years at Kmart and Sears. I never understood why Sears didn't embrace the direct to consumer model of Amazon. Everything was in place with fulfillment centers all over the country, established methods of shipping products, ship to store or home options, beautiful catalogs that could have been digitized for the web... It was all right there within the grasp of Sears and Kmart executives..
I worked with Kmart, Walmart and Venture associates merchandising products for a otc division of a pharmaceutical company. The department managers of Kmart and Venture were not empowered. They had little ability to tailor their departments to local demand, Walmart could. Walmart could put a fast moving product on an endcap of an isle increase sales of that product. Venture was the least empowered and they failed first, Kmart was a little more empowered and they declined more slowly. Walmart won.
last time i was in a kmart in saint marys ohio the clerk took a credit card app. while me and several other customers waited some behind me left leaving full carts full of merchandise. someone had to put back on the shelve.
do you think Walmart will eventually out live Target?
I worked at Target before and during
Covid.
Brian Cornell the CEO eliminated the floor sales staff so everyone is in the back doing stock.
The customers were pissed, but the halved cost of employees makes Target stock jump now.
Walmart lead the world to zero service and high margins extracted from the poor, Target is right there.
These two are the dystopia.
Target is virulently anti customer.
For now, Meijers ROCKS
Our local Kmart had the most filthy, disgusting bathrooms on the planet. Overflowing toilets, filth on the walls and floors. You didn't even want to walk into them, much less use them. I also remember my Mom going to Kmart, choosing her purchases, then walking down the row of cashiers, searching for the dumbest looking ones in hopes that they would make mistakes ringing up her items. She kept a close eye on them to make sure that any mistakes were in her favor, and not in Kmart's. The cashiers didn't receive much training.
Not to mention it was a well known fact that you could shoplift very easily out of any Kmart
That's how they earn the nickname of Crime-Mart!!! 🤠👍
Oh hell..CDs and tapes were in these plastic protectors that a butter knife could cut through. Walkmans were a bit more difficult, needed scissors. One time, me and a friend made off with a pile of CDs and some teenagers who worked there came all the way out to our car (Why they did this is beyond me, given the potential danger) and asked for their stuff back. We also nabbed VHS tapes, those were easy.
I worked at #3735 from 1999-2003, I had the store down to where, when asked, I could tell a customer from my service desk the aisle, how far down, and the shelf to find their sought after item. In the time I worked, I learned every sales position, every operation, was sent to other stores, and saw the mismanagement of the keys to success. Cliques were created and self-promoted, major rules were overlooked for personnel, and in the end, I always felt that the #1 reason was disconnected management. The regional manager and up had no idea what they were doing, but they were yelling at us to fix things like we had any power to solve problems. My wife said it had to be bad as I had symptoms similar to PTSD. I can still recite the end of day announcements 20+ years later. 😅
My favorite name for this stre was "Came -Apart" They sold alot of junk tools that didnt last. For example; had reduced prices on tools that were made much cheaper by using a lot of plastics that were not very strong. Quality took a sideline for quantity. Walmart is heading that a way as well.
yes K-Mapart
I bought the steel case desk used in the Kmart HR department located at the I 17 freeway and northern in Phoenix Arizona. The desk is in mint condition!
Kmart is still alive and kicking in Australia and NZ. Although I think that company is no relation to the one in the US and Canada
It doesn’t have any affiliation with the US company. The international ones are completely separate.
it used to@@mountaineernews2
@mountaineernews2 Not anymore but originally it did. From 1968 to 78 it was the majority owner then in 78 minority owner then in 1994 it sold that stake to it's other partner Coles and Company later known as Cole Myer. Today Wesfarmers owns the chain.
@@stephenholloway6893 the aus k mart logo loooks like the older logo but the k is huge
If you go into the ones in the Melbourne area its like going back to the 80s! Same garbage they sold in the U.S is being sold there, even the deli is the same. The one in the Dandenong mall is 2 floors and it was actually crowded when I was there.
Our family was a Kmart faithful. Grew up right next door to Troy Michigan. My new husband worked there. It was sad how they didn’t see the progress around them. I used to like Sears too. Bought a lot of our appliances there too. I used to wonder who their buyers were. Sad
I worked at Kmart for 11 years in the mid 1980's thru mid 90's at their hdqtrs in Troy, mi.. Kmart's biggest problem was gross mis-management. When SS Kresege created Kmart he said that he would leave his hands out of the operations. He later said that was a mistake.
My last Kmart memory was I bought a small flat screen lcd TV with a DVD player built in. Excited to watch a DVD I put one in and it instantly scratched/destroyed it while pulling it in and then it wouldn’t let it back out. That was my last Kmart trip lol
… i always wanted to wow a date with a trip to the K-Mart food court. Oh that lemonade churning around in the juice display. Looked so enticing!
K-Mart was a classic case of not being able to do it better than their competitors. I used to shop at a Super K-Mart back in the nineties. It was nice to be able to shop late and miss the crowds.
Dustin Hoffman is why K-Mart failed. When he said "K-Mart sucks" as Rain Man, it was all down hill...
KRESGIES 5 and Dime, started it and it grew into one of the first big stores! They were in our neighborhoods, onstead of downtown, which was nice! I hated going down-town because of the traffic on 2 lane streets, one-way streets, parking meters, pickpockets, parking tickets, and just a pain in the butts
When Walmart came to my town, the decline of Kmart was immediate and hard. Then when Target came to town, it only took a few short years for Kmart to close. Before all that, Kmart was busy AF. Seems pretty simple to me, notwithstanding prior bad corporate decisions.
The real reason was because you knew you were never going to get to check out quickly because they would always have to do a price check on something for the person ahead of you.
I remodeled a kmart after a flood early 2000. It was open maybe 5 years at the most before it was turned into a uhaul super stoage center.
Thats sad
Our Kmart got subdivided. North end...Hobby Lobby. South end...Planet Fitness.
Even today, when I look in my fishing tackle box, I see items with the Kmart logo. They had a sign back then that read, if we don't have it, you don't need it. Back in the late 80s or early 90s, they built a Super K right behind their current store, and then tore down the old one. It was an amazing store that included a grocery store and had a food court. I loved it. I'd often go in there for lunch. But when Walmart came town, I watched their slow decline and demise. Roses and Sky City also folded in short order.
Yoooo, if the image at 0:12 is where I think it is, that might be the Kmart I used to work at back in 2009-10. Worked there through high school and my first year of college. That's a blast from the past right there.
I'm from the Buffalo-area and remeber going into a Wal-Mart for the first time in my life. Prior to that we either went to Ames, Hills (unique to the Pittsburgh and Buffalo areas) or K-Mart. Our local Wal-Mart opened in 1996, but Toronto got its first Wal-Mart two years earlier, so I remember thinking that Wal-Mart was actually a Canadian company at first. Its humourous to look back on thinking that the most American place on Earth was Canadian, but it shows how these chains wern't always an omnipresent behemoth. The same thing happened with Home Depot and Lowe's.
I remember when Kmart and Albertson's left Texas. In both cases, the stores left because people here bought on prices, and neither chain wanted to compete on prices. Both chains left the Houston area within around the same time, if memory serves me correctly.
On a related note, a number of restaurant chains that left Houston over the years, have come back. A representative for one of the chains said "If you can't compete in Houston, eventually, you can't compete, anywhere, ultimately".
I loved K-mart! I really hated to see its decline. I remember my mom taking us to K-mart when I was a kid and we all looked forward to it. The sights, the smell of popcorn, those great announcements and blue light specials, it was all great and fondly remembered. I tried to support them as an adult, but it got hard to find one.
Purgatory is what check out line at Kmart felt like at 5pm Xmas Eve. All registers open and 20 deep.
K Mart is still doing well in Australia and New Zealand with 300 or so stores operating there.