Over this last holiday weekend, an announcement, long coming, heralded an end of a dynasty in my home state: the last of the K-Mart stores would face the chopping block this year.
For the moment, at least, this closing of the last store in the Salt lake Metro area will leave one final K-Mart in the southern end of the state, in St. George. As I’m writing, I don’t think it’s closing has been announced yet.
I’ve talked about this in articles previously, of course, but it does bare a little repeating: if one were to go back even 15 years, you would find 20 K-Mart stores within about 100 miles, and around 30 statewide. Going from 20 to 0, 30 to 1, in less than a generation would be jarring for just about any business, but for what was the #2 retailer in the United States, it is staggering.
Where the hell did this go so wrong so fast? The saga of K-Mart is a somewhat hot topic among analysts, YouTubers, and pop-history buffs, so there’s lots of decent theories and information around. Definitely, there’s some good videos chronicling their rise and fall — I recommend This Is Dan Bell and Retail Archeology in particular. But for brevity’s sake, it’s clear this pattern started in the 1990s and hit hard in the 2000s.
K-Mart went through a bullish period of expansion and acquisition during the 1980s and early ’90s. They opened hundreds of locations, many in smaller towns and suburbs, and launched their “Big K” and “Super K” platforms. And for some places, these were no doubt the biggest department stores in their area for decades. During the ’90s, K-Mart went on a bit of a spending spree, buying Sports Authority, large portions of Office Max, and even Borders Bookstores, and if those names are familiar, or worse unfamiliar, you can see where that was trouble. They then divested a great deal of these by the end of the decade, only to declare Chapter 11 in 2003. During this restructuring, K-Mart acquired Sears in 2004, making the merger of what were, just a decade prior, the two biggest retailers in the country. And the fact that this merger was completely unimpeded by anti-monopoly statutes says a great deal about how bad things already were inside those companies.
In pretty raw terms, K-Mart started a contraction period beginning in the 1990s, and that really hasn’t changed since. There were around 1,400 stores in 1995, and that shrunk to less than half by 2015, and their earnings went right with them. Their debt-to-equity ratio has gone from questionable to absolutely terrifying. For the last six-seven years, K-Mart has posted negative earnings, so if they all closed tomorrow, and all assets were sold, they would still be in debt — in millions. Leadership under former CVS CEO Chuck Conaway didn’t help either. In addition to his alleged liberal spending of company assets on things like boats and planes, he was later fired, fined by the SEC, and found guilty of willfully misleading investors and vendors prior to their bankruptcy filing.
But that’s all numbers and business soap-drama. When you want to see what went wrong, all you need to do is walk into a store, if there’s any left. It can often be difficult to discern whether they are closing or not. This K-Mart nearest to me is kind of inexplicably the last of the line, staying open when a lot of other locations, many much more profitable with less direct competition. And honestly, it’s never been much of a looker. While most K-marts in the western U.S. have sported the same design and decor as they have through the 1990s, some made genuine efforts to keep things clean and stocked. This particular one probably should have began its “going out of business” sale a decade ago; it would at least have given them an excuse.
I had somewhat glibly commented in another article that I didn’t have many recent “good” memories of K-Mart. On reflection, though, I realize that’s not entirely true. During the heyday of DC Universe Classics, K-Mart was in very good standing with Mattel, getting exclusives for this and the WWE line. I spent many toy runs looking to support “The Network” — Veebs, Prod, Benty, MattK, Canon, and occasional others — grabbing up any extras I could find to fill out our sets. And there was a little bit of that old magic there: turning the aisle to see three full pegs of Series 15 comes to mind, and even a few early Star Wars Black Series runs in the last four-five years, as the stores gradually became fewer and farther between.
When that idea settled in, I recognized that, inadvertently, K-Mart had been part of the twilight of the “toy hunting” era. It was essentially the third in the retail-trifecta that made up most trips out here for me, right after Walmart and Target. For a time, there were just as many, if not more, stores around, and being a little less traveled than the other two, there were occasional big scores. While not directly related to K-Mart’s decline, there is a parallel in the reduction in toy hunting I have done that is very proportionate to the amount of stores they closed. Definitely not a correlation-equals-causation thing, but an interesting optic nonetheless.
In an odd twist of fate, many of the buildings these K-Marts occupied remain empty across the country, with several here in the city. It speaks of several things: one being that even the buildings themselves aren’t considered viable for “modern retailers” — be it the location, or the literal bricks and tiles that make them up. But there is almost a strange sense of memorial in these big empty shells, like grand monuments to a place that never quite made it back to the “grandeur” of their good old days. K-Mart had an impressive history that spanned back long before they became synonymous with “Sears” and “bankruptcy,” but sadly that will likely be swept up in the spectacle of another retail titan biting the dust, not unlike my own memories of the place getting lost in looking at its decay.
So thanks for joining me here as I put them in writing. Hopefully some of you might have a few to share as well in the comments. And if you find yourself wanting to spend some more time in the subject, please check those YouTube channels I mentioned above.
