The Kmart axe finally catches up with Aberdeen. Hub City shoppers will get to enjoy Kmart’s nationwide holiday liquidation sale, then the usually desolate warehouse of unsold goods will close for good in January along with 45 other Kmarts.
The Aberdeen Kmart’s lack of economic justification for existence is made clear by one customer observation in my morning paper:
“I’ve probably been out here three hours. A gal helped me and she spent the whole time with me,” Sanderson said Thursday night. “(The closing) is very sad” [Victoria Lusk, “Aberdeen’s Kmart Closing in January,” Aberdeen American News, 2017.11.02].
If an employee at any retail store has three hours to spend exclusively with one customer, that store is not doing enough business.
Aberdeen’s Kmart follows into oblivion the Sioux Falls Kmarts that closed within the last twelve months. The only functioning Kmart in South Dakota will be the Rapid City Northgate store at Campbell and North by the Hong Kong Buffet
The only nice Kmart that I have been to was the Mitchell store, which closed nearly two years ago. That store was always nicely organized and clean, and the staff was also friendly too. I can’t say the same for other Kmart stores. The Pierre and Sioux Falls (west 12th location) stores were very dated in their look and image and the shelves were disorganized. Rapid City is a bit better, but there is this large empty space next to the sparse electronics department with randomly placed appliances.
Nothing has moved into the Mitchell Kmart building yet. Hobby Lobby took up half of the Pierre store and constructed a new outdoor entrance. The other half with the interior mall entrance remains vacant.
It makes me wonder how other smaller department stores are doing, like ShopKo. The big ShopKo stores are still inviting and have a good selection of merchandise, but their smaller ShopKo Hometown stores are a different story. The stores in Winner and Madison look like smaller versions of Kmarts with disorganized shelves, boxes sitting in aisles and a seemingly hard time keeping advertised items in stock, if they even arrive at all.
If it’s like the Yankton store, they’ll ship out the good stuff and bring in a lot of crap from who knows where. And they’ll change the prices so the liquidation price is higher than the normal price. And there’ll be lots of close-dated or outdated foodstuffs.
Agriculture cannot support stores like Kmart when you are broke. South Dakota needs to find a new horse to ride as the agriculture horse has been in decline for some years now. Medicaid Expansion would have helped for sure, but the state needs to bring in jobs through infrastructure.
If you note this, agriculture is in severe decline among all the factors in rural state areas like we have here. https://www.creighton.edu/economicoutlook/mainstreeteconomy/ States that have better grasp of diversity are looking a helluva lot better than our failed state. Ask a banker.
Dang—I was hoping for some genuine bargains. :-D
Kmart’s problems are bigger than a sagging ag economy. Low ag prices aren’t keeping shoppers from filling the check-out lanes at Walmart, Target, and Shopko here.