Bye, Bye, Blue Light Specials

The 90,000-square-foot Kmart in Bridgehampton, N.Y., is closing, marking the last full-size bearer of that discount brand in the mainland United States, report a variety of publications, including The New York Times.

Kmart was once America’s biggest discount store chain, famous for its “Blue Light Specials” for in-store customers. Its “Attention Kmart shoppers!” also became a catchphrase, uttered by Johnny Carson and Beetlejuice.

But after decades of decline, Kmart has now largely disappeared. The closure of the Bridgehampton store on Long Island on Oct. 20 will leave just one small store in Miami, crammed into what was once the garden center of a much larger Kmart, and a handful on Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to the Times.

It’s taken more than a century to get to this point. The company’s roots go back to the S.S. Kresge variety stores that started in Michigan in 1899, with the first Kmart opening in 1962 in Garden City, Mich.

After a spectacular rise, Kmart fell victim to a variety of factors, the Times reported, including executive mismanagement, failure to compete with Walmart’s low prices and Target’s stylish branding and, most recently, the rise of Amazon.

Significant milestones in Kmart’s last decades include filing for bankruptcy in 2002, at which time it had 2114 stores. Three years later, it merged with Sears, also in rapid decline.

The move decimated both brands. Sears Holdings, the parent company, filed for bankruptcy in 2018, and Kmart continued shuttering its stores. (Editor’s note: Sears is down to just nine remaining full-line locales in the U.S., reports BroStocks. At its peak, the famed catalog retailer had 3500 stores.)