Attention, Kmart shoppers: On October 20, the last full-size Kmart location in the continental US, a store in Bridgehampton, New York, will close its doors.

That leaves alone a smaller Kmart in Miami and three stores in the U.S. Virgin Islands as the only remaining locations — a far cry from the more than 2,300 stores Kmart operated at its peak in the 1990s.

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“Kmart was part of America,” said US retail history author Michael Lisicky PBS. “Everybody went to Kmart whether you liked it or not.”

^{Kmart store in Bridgehampton, New York. Credit: Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

What happened? According to company websiteKmart had a promising start. It opened its first store in 1962, the same year as Walmart and Target. By 1966, sales exceeded $1 billion.

However, in January 2002, Kmart filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing competition and failed sales and marketing campaigns. At the time, Kmart closed about 600 stores and laid off 57,000 employees.

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According to a 2002 analysisalthough Kmart initially grew faster than its competitors, the company's lack of investment in technology stunted its growth. Its market position sandwiched between the trendier Target and the more price-competitive Walmart didn't help either, because Kmart was unable to define who its customers were.

Kmart appeared from Chapter 11 in May 2003 and acquired Sears about two years later for $11 billion. Meanwhile, sales continued to decline, falling from $37 billion in 2000 to 12.1 billion dollars in 2014. Neither acquisition went through: Sears filed for bankruptcy in October 2018, coming out of it in 2022, and now there are only about a dozen shops opened in the USA

“Sears should never have left; Kmart was in worse shape, but not fatally,” Mark Cohen, former CEO of Sears Canada and former director of retail studies at Columbia Business School, said PBS. “And now they're both gone.”

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