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Farewell, Super Kmart…
The fire sale has begun at Medina’s Super K.
While saddened to see any retailer close its door and those employees forced to find work elsewhere, I must admit I am not surprised.
The truth is, we just didn’t shop there much any more.
My husband was better about patronizing the store than I was.
Ever the bargain hunter and master at piecing together deals, my husband loves to play the game. He would use gift cards he bought from our church, where we would get some of the money back to help defray our tuition, and couple that with the Kmart rewards program to find some good deals.
But after they took out the groceries last year, even his enthusiasm for shopping there waned.
The Medina store, which was the very first Super Kmart in the country, just looked old and tired. I’m not sure they had invested any money in the store since it opened in the 1990s.
The store shelves looked shabby, the non-grocery products were not real exciting, and the cracked floor made the whole place feel decrepit.
But it will be strange living in a world without a Kmart. Growing up, long before Walmart stormed into Northeast Ohio leaving a scorched retail landscape in its wake, the land of Blue Light Specials was pretty much the place you shopped.
My husband can wax philosophically about the virtues of the Kmart submarine sandwiches of his childhood. I never cared for them – nor did our kids, even though he would happily buy them at the Medina store when they were on sale for something like $1.
I heard an analyst say recently in an NPR report that while Target and even Walmart reinvested in their stores to make them pleasant and inviting, with a good turnover of merchandise to create some excitement, the owners of Kmart never did that. They were instead busy buying up shares of their own stock, trying to create shareholder value. Along the way, though, they lost sight of their mission, which should have been their customers.
So if you want to bid your farewell to Medina’s Kmart you can do so now and even save 20 percent on almost everything in the store. It’s not a huge discount, but if you’re eyeing something that rarely goes on sale, you might give it a try. For example, my husband got me a Keurig coffee maker for my birthday, and he said the My K-cup (which you can fill with your own coffee) would have been less expensive at Kmart than at Target, where he purchased it.
Or, if you really want to take a trip down memory lane, visit the still-open Kmart in Brunswick. You’ll feel like you’ve been transported back in time 30 years — that store seems even more dated than Medina’s.