As news hit last week that Kmart – once the largest retailer in America – was closing its last full-line store in the continental United States, it seemed like a good time for one last reminder of why this happened.
Eddie Lampert and Kmart. Go ahead and pick one: Fast Buck Eddie, the Whining Professor, the Doctor, the Magician, No Vision, Captain (of the Kmart Titanic), Hedge Your Bet, Abracadabra, or Take the Money and Run Lampert. Robin Lewis has written over 25 articles about Lampert’s foolish, systematic destruction of two of America’s icons, Sears and Kmart.
It wasn’t Walmart or Target that has put Kmart essentially out of business. It wasn’t Amazon either or the entire ecommerce universe. And don’t blame geopolitical economics, Covid or any other of the usual suspects. It was one person who did this: It was Edward S. (Fast Buck Eddie) Lampert. And he has to take responsibility for his actions in destroying what was once a great retailer, putting tens of thousands of people out of work and devastating all of the suppliers, municipalities and – let’s not forget – the millions of consumers who shopped at Kmart.
By Another Name
Pick One: Fast Buck Eddie, the Whining Professor, the Doctor, the Magician, No Vision, Captain (of the Kmart Titanic), Hedge Your Bet, Abracadabra, or Take the Money and Run Lampert. Robin Lewis has written over 25 articles about Lampert’s foolish, systematic destruction of two of America’s icons, Sears and Kmart. You can check them out on TRR’s website.
Lampert is of course the ersatz wonderkid who first bought Sears and then Kmart – granted neither was in great shape at the time – with grand plans for putting together a retail empire that had the scale and footprint to compete with the other giants in the field. Instead, he sucked the life out of both of these once proud brands, selling off real estate, national brands, entire subsidiaries and pretty much anything that wasn’t tied down. All for the benefit of Edward S. Lampert.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
At its peak in the late 1990s, Kmart had close to 2,000 stores and it was only a little more than a decade before that it was larger than Walmart, Target or its soon to be stablemate Sears Roebuck. As the home for such groundbreaking programs as Martha Stewart’s home furnishings program – reputed to do close to $1 billion at retail, making it the largest private label program in the home sector ever, even to today – as well as apparel under the Jacqueline Smith brand and other celebrities, Kmart was a leader in discount merchandising.
Lampert dragged it through the retailing mud – several times in fact – and today there is apparently one Kmart branded location in Florida that seems to be more convenience store than traditional mass merchant as well as a few outlets in the Virgin Islands and Guam where the retail competition is pretty sketchy. The last Kmart store, incongruously located on New York’s eastern Long Island near the trendy and super affluent Hamptons villages, is scheduled to close next month.
There remain a handful of Sears stores still open but, frankly, who cares? They are barren of both merchandise and shoppers, long since reduced to real estate placeholders waiting for their leases to expire.
The Once and Future REIT King
And Lampert? He is reportedly holed up in a fortress-like island estate off the coast of Miami. Even though some think he took a financial bath on all of this, the truth is anything but. Between asset sales, special dividends and fees, Lampert has taken in billions of dollars for himself over the past two decades. Brilliant, yes. Retailer, no. His stewardship of any retail brand, iconic or otherwise, should be off-limits.Â
And in the continuing Lampert saga, Someday – and someday soon – we’ll be noting the passing of the last Sears store too, theoretically ending this sad tragedy in American retailing history. That is, until somebody buys one or both brands – another asset sale for Lampert – and tries to bring them back to life. Keep those blue light bulbs handy…I guess.