Kmart

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KweenMart, yas!

Blue light specials? Or was it green light? Now I can't remember...

Blue light!

The smell of stale popcorn and those awful hoagies. Lots of house brand merchandise of poor quality

They sold hot ham on Sundays.

R5 The stale popcorn smell is also a Sears memory of mine. For some reason, it was the first thing you smelled when walking into a Sears. I don't remember actually seeing a popcorn machine!

The Martha Stewart towels were very good. I still have a MS bath mat that I proudly display.

Halston has a whole line of things, even though he's dead.

Seeing a big glob of puke or feces on the floor in the health & beauty isle. I almost stepped in it! Yuk!

R8 I forgot about the MS products. I still have my MS patio set - table and chairs. That was some good shit.

1974. I was on a camping trip with this girl who told me her father was the CEO of K-Mart. I’d never heard of it.

I worked there for a couple of years in high school and college.

Least favorite page: "Stockman to the front with a mop for a wet cleanup!" Always hoped for applesauce instead of baby/toddler poo.

These were olden days...if someone had a credit card, we had to look on a printed list to make sure the card hadn't been lost, stolen or revoked. Visa/MasterCharge (not MasterCard!) paid a reward if you would grab a "suspect" card and turn it in to them. I think it was a few hundred dollars. Not bad at that time.

Also...smoking? Yes, of course: "Due to state and store policy, we ask that you do not smoke on the sales floor. However, do feel free to smoke in the cafeteria (!) at the rear of the store." WTF?

I sold some of the first VCRs in the late '70s. Big ol' clunky things that cost about $2,500 (in 1979 dollars, at that).

Jaclyn Smith still has a line of clothing there.

K Mart is your savings store, where your dollar buys you more!

Businesses come and go. Nothing is forever.

Hot fudge sundaes with my sister as mom shopped. So grown up!

The Kmart Cafeteria was where my grandma used to take me for lunch every weekend. I loved their hot roast beef sandwich over mashed potatoes.

la lumière bleue

No one shoplifted like they do at Walmart.

R5 A frozen coke to go with the stale popcorn.

ohhh..and fill your mouth with popcorn and suck some coke to dissolve it.

[quote]What are your memories?

Shame.

It sucked. Lots of cheap house brand crap. The stale popcorn. The non-existent customer service and stores from the 60s they never updated until the 90s with drap, depressing decor. Most places had one or more better discount store chains--upscale-ish stores like Caldor or Gold Circle or blue collar stores that were cleaner and less awful like Hills and the various Cook United chains. Stores like Kings or Zayre were equally awful but in different ways. Imitators like Big N that were worse. Spartan-Atlantic was the absolute bottom of the barrel. No one would admit going there.

They moped their floors with a very strong smelling soap. I remember that mixed in with the popcorn smell.

Rosie O'Donnell and Penny Marshall did Kmart commercials.

I used my allowance money to buy aquarium fish and pet lizards from Kmart. The store near my house sold quite a few birds, fish and small animals.

My dad and uncle liked their sub sandwiches, but my mom and I thought they were nasty. I think they were 3/$1.00 on the blue-light special.

I secretly wanted to be an Aqua-smocker.

My mom used to take me to the soda fountain for a big milkshake when it used to be Kresge's.

r29 Kresge's was the five-and-dime/variety store that gave birth to Kmart, but they weren't the same store. (Same for Woolworth's-Woolco, W.T. Grant-Grant City, G.C. Murphy-Murphy Mart, et. al.)

A friend of mine worked as a Kmart store manager for many years. He passed away a while back, and I have a ton of his Kmart memorabilia that had been stored in my garage. I'm loath to throw it away--it seems like it must have some historical value.

"et. al."

Oh, dear x2!

They had a neat little pet department that always had dead fish in the tanks and a cafeteria offering Jell-O with spongy whipped cream on top. The old women working there wore lots of eye makeup, it was the '70s.

For household items and small appliances it was OK, but the clothing looked cheap and linty and the racks were so close together.

It is too bad it crashed and burned.

I remember the Jacqueline Smith Collection and the Rachel Hunter Swimsuit Line!

I remember the former K-mart in Oakland Park (next to Wilton Manors). Forget faux-upscale "Big K" stores... THIS one was a hardcore, oldschool, NASTY-ASS ghetto K-mart. Kind of scary, but it brought back childhood memories of what K-mart was like back in the 70s and 80s.

If you hung out at a K-mart store long enough, it was only a matter of time before you got to watch a fat lady in a tube top beating the crap out of her child for touching a bag of candy...

I was the K Mart Kween back in the day! Cruising the toilets for ANY dick. My asshole is like a black hole when it comes to dick and jizz. The more the merrier, just put that DNA inside my ass!

The Sunday Swiss Steak dinner for $1.49.

I wish I could remember K-Mart more clearly. My hometown had one that stayed open into the early 2000s. It was the only department store of any kind we had until a Walmart opened in the late 90s, and my family shopped there plenty while I was growing up. In fact, I still have a cheap set of dishes somewhere in the basement that we bought there for my first college apartment.

But really, the store feels very nondescript in my memories. I don't know if ours had a cafeteria; I don't remember there ever being food there, although for some reason hot dogs come to mind when I think about it. Was that a thing at K-Mart? Visually, it looked a lot like Target, I think, just with different product lines?

We used to drop off our Kodak instamatic 110 and 126 film cartridges at the Kmart film service drop box, and pick up the prints 2 days later. I think that was the turn around time.

R42 Reminds me of Photo-Mats...those little stand-alone booths in shopping centers.

Bjork + Kmart

It was exactly what we needed at the time. Now we have targets and walmart for in store shopping. And Amazon for delivery. I'm fine with that. I guess when I really and stop and think, I don't care too much about Kmart one way of the other.

R31 -- it is totally worth keeping. Actually, there's a community of people on Facebook and YouTube that obsess over Kmart memorabilia - sharing some of it in memory of your friends would be nice :)

I remember the ICEE machine next to the first checkout line. I liked red.

I worked at the Kmart on Lake Street in Minneapolis for about 6 weeks circa 1985 or so. I don't remember much except we got paid in cash. And, I learned all about successful shoplifting techniques from videos we had to watch as part of training. I worked in the Garden Department and then they moved me to Cashier which is an AWFUL job...standing on your feet for hours chained to one spot is ghastly.

Oh, and I learned my lesson about being a smart mouth. Another female clerk got pulled off the floor to take a call and when she came back she looked funny and I wisecracked, "What happened? You look like someone just died or somethin'!" and it turned out her grandpa HAD just died.

Yikes.

I went to Kmart for years because our Walmart sucked, and they were also open 24 hours just before Christmas, so I was able to go in and get my mom some Christmas presents the year my dad got sick and died right before the holidays. I didn't have time to go to a regular store. They weren't great but for a while their Martha Stewart brands and some of the men's work clothes were superior to anywhere else in town.

A few years before they closed, however, something went wrong in that building. You couldn't be in there more than a few minutes without feeling sick. Kind of lightheaded, a little nauseous, you'd always get a headache. I thought it was just me but then I went with my now-partner and he said the same thing. Mentioned it at work and a co-worker said so too, she said she assumed there was something wrong with the air handling unit.

Now somehow Kmart + Nicki Minaj seems just right.

Consistent!

KMart actually was a lot like Kresge's only bigger. In the beginning they promoted named brand merchandise, but then discovered no one wanted to buy stuff like Frigidaire appliances from them and they doubled down on the house brand merchandise, much of it the same cheap stuff sold at Kresge's with same price tags. Some things like house paint were K Mart branded and exclusive to them, not that you'd want to paint your house with that drek. The goldfish, gerbils, etc. were holdovers from Kresge. The brooms that fell apart and other junky housewares were Kresge lines, too. The Martha Stewart stuff came much later and because it was expensive for them, they never exploited as much as they should have.

Kresge's was the most generic of the variety store chains. They never staked out slightly better lines of merchandise like Grant's which had somewhat better clothing. Woolworth developed their own brands and was well known from having good value stationary items (their "Herald Square" line) and were an OK place for house plants and the stuff to care for them (hangers, pots, plant food, etc.). They also usually had the best year round toy selection. They certainly had junk like their waxy candy but at least they tried a little harder and you had a reason to go there once in awhile.

KMart evokes nostalgia and like a lot of that stuff people forget what junk they sold.

I loved K-Mart as a kid, and I share many of the same memories (popcorn smell, eating in the cafeteria, flashing blue light specials). I remember one of my friends brothers used to work at one, and I used to take the bus there to see him as I had such a big crush on him. He was older and straight and knew of my feelings, but was kind. When I look back on it, it was so pitiful. But, it's my main memory about K-Mart. When I got older and could drive, I did like to go to the garden center. Michael wasn't working there by then and had married and started pumping out babies.

[quote] Jacqueline Smith Collection

Oh, DEAR.

When I bought a Commodore 64 computer at Kmart and they cashed me out with a crank cash register, I knew they would be done soon

I'd eat an egg salad sandwich and a butterscotch pudding in the cafetaria while my mom shopped.

Please have your check pre-approved at the Customer Service Desk.

Smoking is permitted in the cafeteria only.

My mum had all our prescriptions at the K-Mart pharmacy. We'd go in and drop off the prescriptions, and then shop while they were filled. The cafeteria--at least at our store--was called the Eatery and my mum would never let us go in there because (as stated above) that's the only place people could smoke. One of my dad's single work colleagues ate x2 of his meals there almost everyday, so we'd usually see him in there and wave from out in the store aisle, since we were barred from stepping foot in the Eatery. (Of course, you could still smell the smoke wafting from a dozen feet away.)

My freshman year of high school, a Super K-Mart opened on the other side of town and the old K-Mart closed. This was a few years before we got a Super Walmart, and the Super K was quite nice and clean for awhile. Several of the old ladies who'd worked at the old K-Mart retired because the new store was "too big" for them. But a few stayed on; the greeter lady with garish makeup and a huge wig stayed until the closing day. The Super K was closed due to a clerical error by corporate K-Mart about x5 years after it opened. They had a liquidation sale and everything. Once the clerical error was "discovered," store was reopened about x6 months later. By then it was too late, as Super Walmart had swooped in and was so much nicer and lower-priced. I think the Super K limped on maybe x2 more years and then permanently closed.

[quote] The stale popcorn smell is also a Sears memory of mine. For some reason, it was the first thing you smelled when walking into a Sears.

The first smell I remember at Sears was hot rubber...we must have always entered through the garage area.

R60 - Every time I went to Sears, I always got a strong smell of rubber. I'm sure that didn't do them any favors, not a very welcoming scent to a department store. Dillards always wreaked of perfume, to the point where whenever you'd try a new perfume, they'd all smell the same because of the concentration of perfume in the air.

The grilled cheese from the KMart Cafeteria

Our KMart didn't have a cafeteria. We must have been REALLY poor.

I was a 90s kid, so it was an ICEE and a slice of Little Caesar’s from the cafeteria for me. Thanks, mom.

Our parents would be arrested for child endangerment for dropping us all off in the cafeteria today.

[quote]Dillards always wreaked of perfume

Oh, dear.

I always hated Kmart and was so embarrassed to shop there with my mom. I remember my mom bought a lot of our clothes there and i always went straight to the toy aisle. This was the early 80's. I know they had a food area but i can't remember it.

My first job was at Kmart. I remember getting paid in cash. Each Friday, we had to go to the lady in the "cash cage" and collect our envelope, which included our pay stub and cash (not a check). The cash cage lady's job was to prepare the starter funds for the register drawers, collect the drawers from checkers at the end of their shift, and prepare these little envelopes with exact change (paper bills and loose change!) for payday.

The most prized role in the store was probably the person who got to run the blue light specials. They had this blue light on a pole/stand with wheels on it, and they rolled it around the store to the next "special" and got to announce the special over the PA system.

The Layaway department was another popular place to work.

I usually volunteered to work a full day on Sundays because it was automatically time-and-a-half. Shoppers would be lined up outside before opening time to rush in and get the sale items. Some people would come through my line multiple times all day long and I think some of them spent their entire day in the store.

A really mean joke that people used to tell:

What are the first words that a [insert name of ethnic group] child learns to speak?

Attention K-Mart Shoppers!

R67 nice memories, my first job was at Kmart too when I turned 16 in time for the Holiday 1999 season, it was a fun job, I worked at night after school from 5-9:30 and on weekends during the day time

I loved making keys and mixing paint, I also worked in Layaway during the holidays and we would always loose layaways so I would get a coworker, to take the layaway receipt and sneak around in the store and grab the lost items on the receipt off the shelf and play it off in front of the customer

It was hilarious and worked most of the time

Does K-Mart still exist?

Liz and Bette said it all.

Grrrr.

There are still some left, one in Key Largo and one in Key West. South Lake Tahoe, too. WTF?

The last Kmart here in Illinois closed in 2020 and there is only one full-line Sears left. I'm surprised that JCPenney has outlasted Sears/Kmart.

They're teachin' me the layout of this lovely store

I'm learning how to sell - what an awful bore

The fluorescent lighting is eating out my brain

"Attention K-Mart shoppers!" is driving me insane

Last week I was in Hardware,

This week I am in Shoes

I got the workin' at the K-Mart

Manager Trainee blues

It's quite amazing how music can take one back to simpler times...