Tag Archives: Kmart

Attention Kmart shoppers … well, the few of you remaining … the last Kmart is closing

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I’m sure nobody else has used that “Attention Kmart shoppers” joke lately, huh?

Yes, news broke in the past couple of days that the last full-fledged Kmart store, on Long Island, New York, will close in October. That’s not surprising. The retailer has been on a steady path to oblivion since the mid-2000s, when the then-owner of both Kmart and Sears started stripping off parts and selling them. It was only a matter of time. Shopping trends and tastes have changed and mightier retailers than Kmart – at least mightier in recent decades – have passed away.

Trivia tidbit: 1962 was the year that Kmart – the discount version of longtime retailer S.S. Kresge – Target and Walmart opened their doors.

I come to praise Kmart, not to bury it. Well, I’m not sure I’ll be praising Kmart, but I will cite a couple of nostalgic feelings for it.

I grew up two miles out in the country from a couple of shopping centers, one of which included a Kmart. The stores – which also included W.T. Grant, a dime store when such things still existed – were the center of our shopping existence. Kmart was where we got a lot of our clothes and toys.

I was writing about business for the newspaper in the 2000s, when my town’s two Kmarts closed. For all their faults, they filled a void for local neighborhood retail that still hasn’t been filled.

I will always think of how my mom bought a vacuum cleaner from Kmart for my wife and me. It wasn’t a hint to clean our house! It was a much-needed tool.

A lot of people have waxed rhapsodically about Kmart’s sub sandwiches, its snack bar and most especially its Blue Light Specials, periodic moments during the store’s operating hours when a sales associate would wheel a blue light up to a particular area – next to a display of shirts, or candy, or hardware – and the announcement would be made of a limited time only special price. “Attention Kmart shoppers…”

Kmart was a good place for people to shop, especially poor people.

When I heard this unsurprising Kmart news, the first thing I thought of was the Calvin and Hobbes strip reproduced at the top of this post.

AAUUGHHHH! to the news.

Calvin, Kmart and the Blue Light Special

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For some of us of a certain age and with a good memory, that “Calvin and Hobbes” strip — in which Calvin’s dad tells him he came not only from a store, but from Kmart, where he was a Blue Light Special — is particularly funny. Because some of us grew up at least within earshot of the Blue Light Special.

For a kid growing up south of Muncie, the center of  my shopping universe was the Southway Plaza, where I bought comics and had my first — and only — shoplifting experience (a story for another time).

But right up there with the Southway — figuratively and geographically — was the nearby Kmart.

Considering the sad state of Kmart today — struggling financially and spurned by even discriminating Walmart shoppers — it’s hard to imagine that Kmart was once the retail powerhouse that it was.

But my whole family shopped there. My toys came from there, I bought records there — vinyl LPs — and a lot of our clothes came from there.

And if you went to Kmart often enough, you were familiar with the Blue Light Special.

At random times during the day, the management decided it was time to push some slow-moving product. An employee was assigned the task of rolling out the Blue Light Special, which was a metal cart with a pricing gun and a metal pole with, literally, a blue light at the top. The lights were not unlike those at the top of a police car.

Some store employee would get on the P.A. system and announce, for example, a Blue Light Special on baseballs in the sporting goods department. A special price on baseballs would be available for the next 15 minutes, they would note. Customers who wanted to buy baseballs — or ham sandwiches from the deli, or sneakers from the shoe department — would make their way there and fill their carts.

I don’t remember my family often buying Blue Light Specials and to this day it seems like a curious marketing strategy. While the promise of a Blue Light Special might draw shoppers to Kmart, there was little to attract them but the hope that sometime while they were there a random item might go on sale. It was kind of like an internal Kmart lottery.

Apparently the Blue Light Specials, introduced in 1965 — during my early Kmart shopping experience — held on until 1991. A couple of years ago, the retailer tried to appeal to Baby Boomer memories by referencing Blue Light Specials and adopting a blue lightbulb mascot. But it was a little like when KFC made Colonel Sanders a hip-hop granddad; it’s hard to imagine who they thought they were appealing to.