Blue light goes out: Last full-sized US Kmart closes Sunday

BRIDGEHAMPTON, N.Y. — The era of Kmart is ending this weekend.

The final full-sized Kmart on the U.S. mainland will flip off the blue light and lock the doors on Sunday.

Kmart store No. 9423 was located in Bridgehampton, New York, The Wall Street Journal reported.

“This is the only place normal people can afford to shop in the Hamptons,” Neide Valiera told The Wall Street Journal. She lives in a nearby town in an area that caters to luxury and the rich.

The average home price is $3 million. The Kmart that is closing was the anchor of a shopping center on the only road in and out of the Hamptons.

The closest big box store — Walmart or Target — are 45 minutes away now, The New York Times reported. Those were the same chain stores that helped the demise of Kmart.

The first Kmart opened in Michigan in 1962 and sold everything from food to fashion, a former executive told the Times.

It was the largest discounter and second-largest retailer in 1986.

But between mismanagement by company executives and Walmart’s low prices or Target’s branding, and don’t forget the online juggernaut Amazon, became, according to the Times, “understocked, understaffed and neglected.”

Kmart filed for bankruptcy in 2002 when it had 2,114 stores and 240,000 employees. Sears and Kmart merged and eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2018, with Kmart closing more and more stores.

The closing of the Bridgehampton location was announced last month.

Eddie Lampert, the financier who bought Kmart from bankruptcy and then bought Sears, at one point said that those who lived in the Hamptons could buy Kmart’s $15 folding chairs and just toss them in the garbage after a party. If purchased from other Kmart locations, the chairs would be in the family for decades, former Sears Executive Michael Ryan once said, the Journal reported.

The store would have normal people and celebrities — Jimmy Fallon, Martha Stewart and Jimmy Fallon — shopping side-by-side, the newspaper said.

Some shoppers made a trip to say goodbye to the former consumer mecca. One woman drove from Staten Island to reminisce about buying toys with her grandmother at a Kmart location that is no longer around.

“This is something sentimental,” Torres told The Wall Street Journal. “You look at your childhood and you remember all the stores you used to go to and how things are changing as the years pass.”

Sisters Chrissy Economos and Gloria McCourtney drove more than 1,300 miles, to say goodbye to a piece of American history, The New York Times reported.

They remembered their grandmother writing poetry at their Minnesota Kmart Cafe and running away to the store together once they had their own children for “mom breaks.”

“Walking the aisles of Kmart just made me so calm and happy,” McCourtney told the Times as she looked at her sister, adding, “Probably because I was always doing it with you.”

Once the doors are locked on Sunday, there will be a small Kmart, not a normal-sized store, still open in Miami. The store is in what was once the retailer’s garden center. There are also some full-sized stores in operation in Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Times reported.

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