It’s funny to think that for almost my whole life, Kmart has been going out of business. But in all these years, nobody ever decisively pulled the plug. It’s strange to see what was once a great, gargantuan, all-American brand, with over 2,300 locations, slowly dwindle to a handful of straggling, struggling stores. (The chain’s former corporate headquarters, a vast fortress-like complex abandoned in 2006, was torn down only just last year.) It’s an undignified way for such a name to die.
Unlike Walmart, which remained in the Walton family, or Target, which handled its transformation from family-owned business to public corporation far better, Kmart underwent very early rapid growth and then began a long period of coasting and decline. The company’s founder, S. S. Kresge, died at the age of 99 in 1966. Emerging from the eponymous S. S. Kresge variety stores, the modern Kmart stores had debuted in early 1962. But Kresge’s company was already over half a century old by then, and its founder barely presided over its modern incarnation.
The late postwar years were strong, and Kmart exploded in what are now early, inner-ring suburbs—then-prime locations whose appeal would fade later in the century as America’s settlement patterns sprawled further and further out, and as big-box stores grew larger.
In 1990—two years after Walmart opened its first supercenter—Kmart was the country’s second-largest retailer after Sears. (For a hint of what happier times sounded like, check out this recording of the 90-minute in-store soundtrack that played on a loop in Kmarts around the country that summer.) In November of that year, Walmart finally overtook their number-two spot. Despite the chain’s dominance, by the time I was a kid in the early 1990s, long before the Sears acquisition and long before Eddie Lampert cheerfully drove the company into the ground, these stores were showing their age.
Compounding this natural aging was the company’s turn to acquisitions: They bought the bookstore chain Waldenbooks, the home-improvement warehouse Builders Square, and the sporting-goods chain Sports Authority. Kmart also had its own sporting goods stores. (Earlier, in the 1960s, it had fruitlessly dabbled in supermarkets.) And, of course, in 2005, a post-bankruptcy Kmart acquired Sears. There were Sears/Kmart hybrid stores; dollar stores; supercenters; and competing signage, themes, and store formats. The company was, not to put too fine a point on it, a mess.