It figures. Not even twelve hours after I posted the Journal entry about my trip to New Jersey and Long Island, which included coverage of the Kmart store in Bridgehampton, New York, I saw a post on Reddit that indicated that said Kmart store was closing, and shared the following image of the store:
Photo: Reddit user LordRavioli29
It sounds like Elyse, Kyle, and I were extremely lucky to get it when we did. We had figured that the store’s days were numbered, considering that Kmart parent company Transformco‘s entire mission since it was formed appears to be to gradually liquidate the company down to nothing, just like what was occurring under previous parent company Sears Holdings Corporation (Sears Holdings and Transformco were both owned by the same person, Eddie Lampert, via his hedge fund ESL Investments). However, none of us expected that we’d see the closing come this quickly, i.e. we thought that the numbers on those days were much higher. According to the original poster, the Bridgehampton location will go dark on October 20, i.e. it has fewer than 30 days to live. Elyse had suggested that maybe we would come out here again for one final visit when the store announced its closing, but considering the timeframe that we were just presented with, as well as our schedules between now and October 20, I can say with some confidence that such a thing will not happen, and that in all likelihood, that visit to the Bridgehampton store last week was our final time shopping at Kmart. I’m just glad that our last Kmart visit was to a non-closing store operated by the company rather than a closing store operated by a liquidator, even if the store was still end-stage Kmart rather than being in its prime.
I also find it interesting that they’re closing so soon because they had clearly invested in this store, noting the paint job (which one Reddit commenter indicated happened earlier this year), the carpeting, the new sign, and the new point of sale equipment (with the POS equipment’s only coming about three months ago according to the employees I spoke with), and now they’re killing it off. It doesn’t make sense, because someone in the corporate office had to have known that the closing was coming well before actually dropping the hammer and starting the liquidation, so one would think that they wouldn’t have spent the money on such things if they knew that the store was closing. Of course, not all corporate decisions necessarily make sense. When I worked at the Walmart in Waynesboro, Virginia, I remember that they installed brand new electric hand dryers in the restrooms, both front and back, only to tear them out a few weeks later as part of a full restroom remodel. So who knows.
Discussion on the Reddit thread seems to run the usual gamut for a Kmart store closing, expressing surprise that the Bridgehampton location is closing before Miami (the general assumption was that Miami would have gone first because it had been so greatly downsized), discussion of how many locations are left, some indignation towards owner Eddie Lampert (“Fast Eddie” as some have taken to calling him) for the systematic dismantling of the Kmart and Sears brands, and discussion about why the store would close when it did. One commenter speculated that the landlord, Kimco Realty, had been waiting to get rid of Kmart for a while in order to get a higher-paying tenant in that space. We’ll probably never find out what the actual reason is, but it does seem reasonable enough that Kmart would have just been riding out its lease, and then once that ran out, it closed up shop. After all, there’s not much that you can do with a leased property. Transformco doesn’t own it, so it’s not like they can close their store and then turn around and lease it out to a higher-paying tenant, or sell it onward for a profit. They can only follow the terms of their lease and then leave when it’s up, and it would be completely reasonable if that’s what they did, operating their store according to their lease for the duration of said lease, and then vacating at the end of it.
Meanwhile, I didn’t expect to have to eat my words again so soon. You may remember that on July 8, I published a Journal entry called “The Democrats are playing with fire…” where I spoke about President Biden’s debate performance, and advocated for the party’s sticking with him as their candidate. Then Biden stepped aside, and Vice President Kamala Harris took the reins in his stead. And I had a Journal entry that went from relevant to dated in record time, even as entries about politics go, and I made another entry about a month later recognizing that the entry was now irrelevant, and talking about how things become dated. The entry that contains the Kmart visit won’t become completely obsolete like the Biden one did, because it’s a travelogue-style entry, and Kmart was the fifth out of seven different subjects that the entry covered. The only words that I’m going to have to eat will be the caption for the photos of the front end. There, I said:
The front end, meanwhile, looked like what you would expect for a Kmart store. However, according to the employees, they did upgrade the cash registers to new equipment by Storis a few months ago. That told me that this store was not just hanging on, but was clearly still a going concern. After all, they wouldn’t invest in new point of sale equipment if they were planning to shutter the place. Similarly, the powder blue walls are relatively recent, as images posted to Google Maps as recently as two years ago showed the store with white walls and a blue stripe near the ceiling. Investment in the store, i.e. remodeling and new equipment, is definitely a sign that the company intends to keep this store going for the foreseeable future.
I guess there’s one thing to be said about that: I certainly didn’t foresee that closing’s coming so soon. Also, for future reference, I like salt and pepper with my words. Then I suppose that we’ll all find out together whether I have to eat my words when it comes to another statement further down in the entry, where I said, “I also suspect that if this store ever closes, Target would snap the location right up and open its own store here.” The Bridgehampton location is smaller than a typical suburban-style Target store, but I imagine that Target could still fit into that space, as they do well with smaller format stores, mostly in urban markets, and this location is about the right size for one of those smaller format stores.
So that is that, I suppose. Bridgehampton will ride off into the sunset just before Halloween, and that will leave only one Kmart store remaining in the continental US, three in the US Virgin Islands, and one in Guam. We’ll all find out together how long those last five stores last before they inevitably close as well, and the Kmart name becomes just a memory.