Once more than 2,000 stores strong, the Kmart big box department store chain will soon be down to just three in the continental U.S. and a handful elsewhere, according to multiple reports, as retail giants Amazon, Target and Walmart dominate.
Years of falling sales, shifting consumer habits and the looming shadow of Walmart, which launched within months of Kmart in 1962, led to a steady decline punctuated with Kmart’s filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2002.
What’s left now are stores in Westwood, New Jersey; Bridgehampton on New York’s Long Island; and in the unincorporated Kendall neighborhood of Miami-Dade County.
– Jesse Scheckner, Florida Politics