Kmart Reaches Sad Business Milestone

It's officially the end of an era. Kmart, which was once the largest discount retailer in the United States with roughly 2,300 stores in the early 1990s, is closing its last full-sized store located in Bridgehampton, NY. After the New York location closes on Oct. 20, there will only be one Kmart store of any kind left in the country.

A store employee confirmed the upcoming closure to Newsday by phone Sunday. The Bridgehampton location had been open for 25 years, after taking over the lease from the now-defunct retailer Caldor in 1999, following the discount department store chain filing for bankruptcy a few years prior. At the time, Kmart Corp. had paid $7 million to assume the lease, with two 10-year extensions that had run through 2019.

When the store closes, the only Kmart location remaining in the continental U.S. will be at Kendale Lakes Plaza in Miami, FL, as well as a small handful of other locations in the territories of Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

However, in a story last month about the last two Kmart stores left in the country, the Miami Herald reported that the Florida location had already leased out the majority of its space to the home-goods store At Home, and that "most of the cavernous building is now occupied by home decor, furniture, and holiday decorations." The space in the building now occupied by Kmart is in what used to be the garden department of the original store.

A representative for the leasing company that manages the strip shopping center did note that Kmart has a "long-term lease" at the location in Miami.

The latest closure marks a long, two-plus decade struggle for the retailer, which first filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2002. In 2005, Kmart made an $11 billion deal to merge with Sears, which at the time had about 3,500 stores nationwide. Now, there are also only about a dozen Sears stores left in the country.

Kmart filed for bankruptcy again in 2018, and the company's assets were subsequently purchased for $5.2 billion by Transformco (a.k.a. "New Sears"), an owned by ESL Investments, a privately owned company founded by former Sears chief executive Eddie Lampert.