Kmart just closed its last full store — but there’s still a location in Kendall
The blue light has officially dimmed to one tiny flash in the entire continental United States.
Kmart closed its last full-scale store this week with the shuttering of its Long Island location.
The demise of the discount big-box store in the posh Bridgehampton neighborhood, about 95 miles east of Manhattan, didn’t surprise fans of the retain chain, once all over South Florida and known for its announcements: “Attention, Kmart Shoppers — Blue Light Specials in Aisle ...”
“I’m not surprised; it’s always ... empty,” Juliette Fayh, of East Hampton, told NBC New York when she popped over for Kmart’s final sales week. “This is actually the most crowded I’ve seen it.”
The shutdown of the New York store leaves just one Kmart in the United States — and it’s in the Kendale Lakes neighborhood of Southwest Miami-Dade.
KNOW MORE: Miami has one of the last two Kmart stores left in the country — and it’s different
But it’s not a full-scale store like the one that just closed.
The small, two-room storefront, tucked in a far corner of the Kendale Lakes Shopping Plaza at 14091 SW 88th St., is about the size of a neighborhood CVS. There are signs for “Blue Light Specials,” but not a lot of merchandise.
In 2023, Kmart gave its Kendale lease to the Texas based home-goods chain At Home. The new store replaced the iconic red K that hung above the door with its own logo, and relegated the Kmart to the small corner section of the store that had once been home to the original Kmart’s “garden shop.”
Kmart has three full-scale stores remaining, in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam.
Kmart once boasted more than 2,000 stores in the U.S. before merging with Sears in 2005 in a deal engineered by hedge fund manager and CEO Eddie Lampert, according to USA Today. In 2019, the Transformco hedge fund acquired Sears.
A Target will replace the former New York store, USA Today reported.
READ MORE: Inside the last Sears: How a dominant Miami department store has changed. What’s next?
