kmart (original) (raw)

My mum and I were at Kmart today, and after she left, she asked me if the store was closing.

I've not heard that my particular location is, but she pointed out some things that I don't really pay much notice to at work, which kind of makes me think that perhaps the store I work at might close in the next few months:

  1. There's a whole lot on clearance. Granted, it's the end of summer and a lot of clothes are on clearance, but I saw a few racks full of sweaters and jeans on clearance as well. There's massive clearance racks in every department...whole aisles solely devoted to clearance items. Furthermore, I'm not sure about any other location, but we're having a 50% off sale on clearance clothes and 30% off sale on every other clearance item.

  2. With all the clearance aisles, there is a lack of seasonal/holiday items. The only Halloween stuff my location has is the bagged candy. There aren't any costumes, no candy pails for the kids, no decorations. I would assume that if there wasn't to be much Halloween stuff, there would be more autumn and Christmas/winter stuff, but....there isn't. No Christmas stuff is out yet. (Understandable...the only place in Roanoke I've seen Christmas stuff in is Dollar Tree, but they make most of their money on Christmas stuff, but I digress.) The seasonal area in my store only has a few boxes of random framed art, most seeming like springtime stuff, and the bagged Halloween candy. There's still a few aisles of back-to-school stuff they're trying to sell, but it's massively disorganised (as is most of our store, actually).

  3. Most of domestics and housewares consist of empty shelves. I'm not sure if those aisles were for clearance stuff, but I didn't see any clearance signs/stickers/tags anywhere near these aisles. The only bath towels I saw were Martha Stewart towels on the back "wall" of domestics and one aisle of Essential Home towels, which is randomly piled.

  4. All the signage looks old (one of the Garden Shoppe entrance signs is from probably the late 1970s or early 1980s), the floor is coming up in places, and the parking lot is, at best, atrocious. The garden shoppe wasn't even open most of the summer, and our AC was either out or barely working all summer. We won't even go into the condition of the public restrooms, and they have been disgusting for years. In my store, there are only three fully functioning registers out of nine available; all the rest have something broken. There are only three hand scanners, and the stands that the plastic bags hang on have no rubber ends anymore, which are beyond unsafe. (I nearly cut myself on one last weekend, and I have a large, deep bruise from it.)

  5. There are very few employees left, cashiers anyway. Most weekends, we have two or three cashiers at any given time, and most weekdays, there are one or two. The Little Caesars cafe that used to be in the front of the store was removed a few years ago as well. I haven't seen much effort into hiring people as there aren't any new people, and I'm asked to stay late every weekend.

Has anyone heard of any more Kmart stores closing?