It's officially the end of an era. Kmart, the largest discount retailer in the United States with about 2,300 stores in the early 1990s, is closing its last full-size store in Bridgehampton, N.Y. After the New York location closes on October 20, there will be only one Kmart store of any kind left in the country.
A store employee confirmed the impending closure News day Sunday by phone. The Bridgehampton location had been open for 25 years after taking over the lease from now-defunct retailer Caldor in 1999, after the discount chain filed for bankruptcy several years ago. At the time, Kmart Corp. paid $7 million to take over the lease and had two 10-year extensions that ran through 2019.
When the store closes, the only remaining Kmart store in the U.S. will be in Kendale Lakes Plaza in Miami, FL, with a handful of other stores also in the territories of Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
But in a report last month about the country's last two remaining Kmart stores, Miami Herald It reported that the Florida branch leased most of its space to home goods store At Home, and that “much of the cavernous building is now filled with home décor, furniture and holiday decorations.” The space in the building now occupied by Kmart used to be the garden section of the original store.
A representative for the leasing company that manages the strip mall said Kmart has a “long-term lease” on its Miami location.
The latest closure marks a two-plus decade long struggle for the retailer, which first filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2002. In 2005, Kmart struck an $11 billion deal to merge with Sears, which at the time had about 3,500 stores nationwide. Now, there are only about a dozen Sears stores left in the country.
Kmart filed for bankruptcy again in 2018, and the company's assets were later purchased for $5.2 billion by Transformco (aka “New Sears”), which is owned by ESL Investments, a private company founded by former Sears CEO Eddie Lampert.