End of an era: Last full-size Kmart store in US set to close next month

The last surviving full-size Kmart store in the mainland United States will finally close this fall following decades of bankruptcy and decline.

Store employees in Bridgehampton, New York, part of the Long Island area known as the Hamptons, confirmed to local broadcaster WJAR and to CNN that the branch will permanently shut down on October 20, 2024.

That will leave a convenience-store-style mini-Kmart in Miami and some full-size branches in Guam and the US Virgin Isles as only remnants of a once-iconic big-box brand.

Kmart was once one of America’s leading budget department stores, with more than 2,000 branches across the US and Canada at its peak.

Founded in Detroit in 1899 as the SS Kresge Company by a hardware salesman named Sebastian Kresge, it began expanding rapidly in the Sixties and end enjoyed its heyday in the Seventies and Eighties.

The chain was famous for its “Blue Light Specials”, in which managers would flash a blue light and announce “attention Kmart shoppers!” to signal a sudden 15-minute deep discount on specific items.

“Kmart was part of America,” the Baltimore journalist and retail historian Michael Lisicky told the Associated Press in 2022. “Everybody went to Kmart, whether you liked it or not. They had everything.”

But in time Kmart was displaced by other big-box stores such as Walmart, eventually declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2002 and closing hundreds of stores.

In 2005 it was bought out by Sears, but that company too went bankrupt in 2018, leading Kmart’s 202 remaining stores as well as the dregs of Sears to be bought by the hedge fund ESL Investments.