Posted on 02/23/2022 3:16:59 PM PST by algore
Kmart, a once-popular discount chain with more than 2,000 stores throughout the United States, has become the latest victim of the retail apocalypse, with just four stores still in operation.
The once retail giant recently announced that it is closing two more of its locations - leaving just two in New Jersey, one on Long Island, New York, and one in Miami, Florida, according to the Oregonian.
The announcement came after decades of the discount retail chain failing to keep up with Walmart and Target's low prices, a problem that was only exacerbated by the rise of the Internet and the store's inability to properly brand itself.
It was supposed to be 'so bland that it nobody felt it was uninviting,' said Ben Schultz, a graduate student in public history at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee who has been studying the decline of the retail chain. 'It was a place that could be common to everyone.'
But 'when they tried to change their image, they didn't have an image
Kmart has filed for bankruptcy twice since the turn of the century, as its global profit margins fell from $49 billion in 2005 to just $3.26 billion in 2020. It continues to do well in Australia.
And shares for Kmart - which merged with the now defunct Sears department store in 2005 under the conglomerate Sears Holdings - have stagnated since October 2021 at less than one cent.
Target's stock price, meanwhile, was at $194 on Wednesday, and Walmart's was at $136.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
All they had to do is re-brand as a Made in the USA=only store, and they could have curb-stomped Wally Mart and Commie Target.
Idiots.
You beat me to it!
https://www.dontwasteyourmoney.com/guam-popular-kmart-world/
SS KRESGE 5 and Dime. Big in the 50s
Nowhere to go but up.
I’d like an alternative to cucked WalMart and Target.
SS Kresge’s was a competitor of Woolworth’s 5 and Dimes. They were smart enough to shift to K-Mart stores in the Sixties and avoid the fate of Woolworth’s, Kress’s and Green’s. JC Penney made the same switch to big suburban stores with big parking lots and survived. Now both of them are bankrupt and not likely to last long.
I LIKE Target too, but haven’t shopped there since the sexual predators allowed in the changing rooms thing. Won’t support them.
I LIKE Walmart and but there is none nearby me and they are sold out to the CCP as far as I know.
SS Kresge was the name for K-Mart on the NYSE into the late seventies. They were a big stock at one time. Part of my job was to read the daily stocks on the radio back then.
Because Eddie Lampert didn't share financial interests with his stockholders. His personal real estate firms ended up with the underlying properties so he's rich.
If you need a resistor, a capacitor, or a random transistor on a saturday afternoon, who you gonna call?
I am maybe lucky there is an extremely overpriced store 30 miles from me that has such things, but not everyone is so lucky.
One Sunday evening I carved a pencil into a resistor for something and some reason I now forget
I think what was a small fish in the cheap stuff store, the Ben Franklin 5 and Dimes were a pretty big fish at one point. Geez there were so many shopping options back in the day.
Years later, having just moved to a town in the Rust Belt, I was surprised to see one co-anchoring a shopping center, along with a Kroger. A few years later the Kroger moved to fancier digs maybe a mile away, replaced by a Dollar General. The Kmart eventually closed, and the Dollar General didn’t hold out much longer.
Last I was there the center was still there, but with no stores. The parking lot was being used by truckers to spend the night, since it was so close to an interstate,
The new does away with the old.
Wasn’t Realistic and Tandy RS’s house products?
“Fast Eddie Lampert destroyed the one great American icon Sears.”
Exactly.
The man who raided Sears for its real estate riches
For almost a century, Sears was the most iconic retailer in North America. The company started life as an innovator, a direct-to-consumer catalog that allowed it to hawk its wares (mostly watches and jewelry) as far as the post would take them. A few decades later, the company decided to open its own stores. Quickly its retail sales surpassed its catalog revenue. Over the next six decades, Sears built itself up to be a retail giant, a conglomerate of brands, and the anchor tenant of choice for middle class malls across the country.
We all know that this story does not end well. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when the department store started its descent into obscurity and insolvency. Some would pinpoint when they decided to discontinue their mail-order catalog in the 1990s, mere years before the internet’s jolting rise to popularity. Others would mark 2004 as the beginning of the end. That is when Sears merged with its low budget rival Kmart, led by Kmart’s chairman at the time, a man by the name of Eddie Lampert.
Eddie is a bit infamous in the retail and investment world. He attended Yale and upon graduation went to work in the risk arbitrage department at Goldman Sachs (in part, no doubt, thanks to his college roommate Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, whose father was a senior partner at the firm). He eventually started his own firm, ESL Investment and landed high profile investors like film-studio exec David Geffen, technologist Michael Dell, and Goldman Sachs bigwig Richard Rainwater.
From the onset, Eddie did nothing but win. He smashed records, both with the returns he was able to get his investors and what he was able to make for himself thanks to his hefty management fees. He is thought to be the first fund manager to make over $1 billion annually. Entertainment mogul David Geffen once boasted to Fortune magazine that he had made more money as an ESL investor than in “all the businesses I’ve created and sold.” His notoriety even made him a target of a kidnapping. But even that seemed no problem for Eddie. He was released after he promised to pay $5 million but ended up paying nothing and having his assailant arrested shortly after.
The fact that Eddie was able to make returns on his investments was not up for question. What was a bit of a controversial subject was how he was able to do it. The former CEO of Sears Canada, Mark Cohen, once said that he “takes an axe to the company’s operating expense and capital expense, and for the first year and a half he looks like a genius because free cash flow explodes, and the Street is calling him the next Warren Buffett.”
Eddie always had an eye for ways to leverage the market. He sold 51 Kmart stores to Sears for $605 million in cash. This caused the stock price of Kmart to skyrocket since many could make the case that each location was worth just over $11 million. Eddie then used that new market valuation to raise enough cash to buy Sears for $11 billion. At the time, there were around 3,500 locations between the two retailers. Over the next few years, Lampert would buy back over $5 billion dollars worth of Sears stock, spending over double what the company’s expenditures at the time to do so. Then, the housing market crashed. To keep the company profitable, Lampert sold off many of the ancillary brands, oftentimes to his own investment groups. But even that wasn’t enough. The real estate for more than 200 Sears locations were sold to a REIT and leased back to the retailer. The REIT is called Seritage and the chairman at the time was none other than Mr. Lampert.
None of this worked and eventually, Sears filed for bankruptcy. Bankruptcy court looked for suiters to buy up the remaining 425 stores. The higher bidder at $5.2 billion was, you guessed it, Eddie Lampert. Now Eddie holds what remains of Sears in a new company called Transformco. By some people’s count, there are now less than 40 Sears locations. The other pieces of real estate are being leased out to other retailers and being converted into new usages.
Sears will now forever be a symbol of a dead era. One where department stores reigned as the go to place to shop and malls were the commercial centers of our cities. As our shopping habits moved online, all retailers have struggled but few more than Sears. A combination of shortsightedness and corporate raidership were too much for even this iconic brand to overcome. But from the ashes of Sears will rise the flames of another type of retail. And there to stoke the fire for his own benefit will be Eddie Lampert.
Well Kroger is unionized and Aldi is owned by Germans, Food Lion is Dutch, Albertsons is owned by Cerberus, so unless you live in the SE and can go to Publix, there’s not a lot of good alternatives.
I remember a plan to convert Sears Auto centers into localized Datacenters cause the land was Sears owned änd they already had high power lines running to them, and they were plentiful
Also known for "You Broke My Mood Ring" and "Dare to be Fat".
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