Kmart Elegy
A formerly dominant American retail chain nears extinction.
LAST AUGUST, NorthJersey.com broke a story that was at once a bit of local retail news and a major national development. New Jersey’s last Kmart—in a typical 1970s strip plaza in a densely populated Bergen County community—was closing. Its shuttering last September meant there were only two Kmart stores left in the nation: one on Long Island and one in Miami.
I have no particular affection or nostalgia for Kmart. My parents always described it as a dingy, run-down Walmart; I think the first time I ever stepped foot in one was in college, and that was for a going-out-of-business sale. My wife and I shopped in them a few times. We got a deal on a nice sturdy cooler at one of them; we picked up spare toothbrushes on a long weekend trip. In one Kmart, the music and video section was stocked with pillows and large appliances (which other big-box discount store sold refrigerators?), and the electronics section still carried VHS-C camcorder tapes, which may well have been discontinued by that point. Another Kmart we visited had an empty and seemingly abandoned customer service desk by the garden center.
Every store seemed to have the same textured concrete front, stained fluorescent-fixture-lined drop ceiling, and general sense of being worse for wear. Even in their fully functioning state, these stores seemed half-dead. They exuded a level of dishevelment that no thriving chain would permit.
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.
WHILE KMART HAS LONG BEEN VIEWED as a sort of downmarket Walmart clone, it’s worth noting that Kmart came first—not just because the company that became Kmart goes back to 1899, but because the opening of the first modern Kmart in 1962 beat the opening of the first Walmart by a few months. It was not until the 1990s that Walmart became a major national player in the discount department store industry. It’s more accurate to say that Walmart beat Kmart at its own game than that Kmart failed to properly imitate Walmart.
But while Walmart is the obvious benchmark for Kmart, the latter resembles another American brand, in a different industry, much more closely. I’m thinking of the Howard Johnson’s restaurant chain.
Founded in 1925, the restaurant chain (which later grew to include hotels) had, at its peak in the 1970s, more than a thousand restaurant locations. It was a fixture of the American roadside, the “host of the highways,” enjoying an illusion of permanence.
Like Kmart—and unlike Walmart—Howard Johnson’s saw most of its growth in an era that was almost, but not quite, our own. It was conceived in a different world, grew in a different pattern, and discovered that all the geographic ubiquity and brand recognition in the world was not enough to insulate a rudderless company from changing consumer preferences, economic conditions, and settlement patterns. It faded into the prehistory of our commercial present.
Like Kmart, Howard Johnson’s locations predominated in early suburbs and highway stretches. The 1970s oil crunch and the resulting decline of the road trip hurt the chain’s business particularly, but so did the fact that newer, shinier suburbs simply had fewer of their restaurants.
Like Kmart, Howard Johnson’s made several attempts to revitalize its business. A parade of managers who had none of the personal investment of the chain’s founder, Howard Deering Johnson, successively took the reins. The company began to introduce new restaurant concepts, and it underwent a series of acquisitions as well as the division of its hotel and restaurant businesses. All of this flux and churn depressed morale, eroded managerial continuity, and left the once-great restaurant half of the company to fend for itself as its numbers dwindled.
Like Kmart, Howard Johnson’s was effectively going out of business for decades. For years, articles not unlike this one counted how many remained. The last true Howard Johnson’s restaurant, with a direct connection to the old company, closed in 2016; the last restaurant sporting the name, through a quirk of corporate law, shuttered in 2022. But whether even the former was really a “real” Howard Johnson’s anymore was debatable. The famous ice cream plant closed years ago; the central commissary, once overseen by Jacques Pépin, seems to have closed in the 2000s.
Throughout this long, slow decline, nobody seriously attempted a “reboot” of the company; nobody bothered to attempt monetizing whatever goodwill the name still held, by, say, bringing back the real recipes of the famous 28 flavors of ice cream. That kind of investment or passion or capital was gone.
A REMARKABLE FACT: Despite the former ubiquity of both Howard Johnson’s and Kmart—and notwithstanding the nostalgia of their small communities of fans—both chains have left hardly a trace in the popular culture. In business, as in life, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
The demise of Howard Johnson’s, and likewise that of Kmart, is a cautionary business tale. But it’s also a humbling and almost spooky story. The orange-roofed, sharply angled roadside structures you’ll still occasionally notice along the highway have become something like artifacts; those big empty stores, many of them too dated or distressed to ever be occupied again, are our moss-covered ruins. Their big empty parking lots testify to something that once was—something that drew people by the thousands.
Apart from historians of retail or of the culture of the twentieth-century American roadside, few will care about these chains or their stories. And why should they, really? Without the nostalgic ties of personal memories to create a context for these places, they’re just buildings in a sea of others like them. But I find they have an almost spiritual use as reminders that nothing is permanent and nothing is guaranteed. Even companies some would call “too big to fail” come to look very small indeed when they lose the vision of a founder or the dedication of long-serving managers. Bankruptcy is a species of death, and success is a struggle against that virtually inevitable conclusion.
Is a commercial memento mori a bit much to take away from a shuttered Kmart? Perhaps. But the doors are locked now, so I’m not going to be leaving with anything else.