Blue Ridge Backlog Cleared, Other Backlog(s) Remain

Good news: I finished blogging about my trip at the start of this month to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and North Carolina. The entry I posted yesterday from (attempting to) see Mt. Mitchell was the last piece of the puzzle. I'd already posted the final chronological episode from the trip, Home from the East Coast, two weeks earlier. Yes, that's how far backlogged my trip logs got: two weeks.

It might only have gotten one week behind, which is about par for the course on these kinds of trips, except two other trips came while I was working the backlog. And one of those trips, our wheeling and hiking in the Sierras this past Saturday, is still in the backlog. As are a handful of entries I've been meaning to write about everything from TV shows I've watched to politics in this presidential election year.

Attention Kmart Shoppers!

It's in the news today that the last full-size Kmart store in the 50 United States is closing soon. According to this CNN.com article today (and similar on other media channels) the store in Bridgehampton, New York is scheduled to close on October 18. There's a scaled-down Kmart store in Florida, and 4 full-size stores in Guam and the US Virgin Islands. Edit: I'm familiar with the latter— the full-size Kmart in St. Thomas, USVI— because I bought a blender there. And a shirt. And while I left the blender, I kept the shirt and still wear it.

Wow, Kmart is a trip down Memory Lane. Here are 5 Things:

1) I remember when my hometown got a Kmart store. I don't remember exactly when it was, like what year. I'm going to guesstimate it was 1982. But I remember the hoopla around it. The girl similar to my age who lived across the street bragged that she'd made 3 separate trips there with her parents on opening day. She stretched the truth a lot, but kid-me didn't recognize yet how full of shit she usually was. But even going there once on opening day was big. It was the biggest thing to come to our town since the 1976 Fourth of July parade— the US's bicentennial year— when the nearby military base had a tank rolling down our main street!



2) Why was Kmart such a huge thing? It's not that my town was small; it was just poorly planned. Some self-appointed genius in the 1960s had this idea of "bedroom communities", towns that were nothing but places for people who worked in the Big City to sleep and have kids. I ridicule this self-styled genius because other people who were thinking of the idea of "planned communities" were smarter. In our poorly planned "bedroom" community we had several restaurants, two grocery stores, two drug stores, a few doctors and dentists, and a few hair salons... but we didn't have a department store. If the 25,000 people in our town wanted to buy shoes, or a pair of jeans, or a power drill, or an appliance— or even just a pair of underwear— we had to go at least as far as the next town over. ...And even that town didn't have a full department store. The nearest one of those was 40 minutes away. Kmart arrived 15+ years after the first houses in town were built out. And finally, we were on the map!

3) Going to Kmart was like going to a carnival. I mean that in a good way. Not only did Kmart have a whole mall worth of stuff under one roof— and remember, the nearest mall was 40 minutes away— but there was a festive atmosphere. There was a cafe in the back, a popcorn machine up front, and—oh, who can forget—the roving Blue Light specials?!

4) How many people remember the term "Blue light special" or the call of "Attention Kmart shoppers!" over the loudspeakers? How many people under 50 know what I'm talking about? How many under 40? Back in the day it wasn't just a joke. The store had a little box on wheels, kind of the size of a night stand, with a light atop a pole 5-6 feet tall. The light was blue and it flashed like a light atop a police car. Every 15 minutes on busy nights the manager would send the blue light somewhere else in the store and announce over the loudspeakers, "Attention [cityname] Kmart shoppers, for the next 15 minutes there is a blue-light special in [department name]!" People would make trips to the store around dinnertime, or hang out in the store longer if they were going anyway, to see what flash sales would be announced.

5) Kmart has been a failure, but it didn't have to be. A lot people probably think of Kmart as a relic of the past, a way of shopping well past its sell-by date. But it didn't have to be that way. Kmart's modern competitors, stores like Walmart, Target, and Kohl's, are still around. Kmart failed no so much because there's no room for brick-and-mortar stores anymore but because, in an increasingly competitive retail market, there's no room for shitty retailers. Kmart fell into a downward spiral by the early 1990s. Margins were tight, so they went for cost cutting. Instead of reinvesting in their business and staying competitive in the marketplace, they cut quality, cut variety, and cut staff. Kmart became synonymous with dilapidated stores, cheap products, and poor service. Shoppers moved to other retail brands, like Walmart which was expanding across the country. Declining revenue led to more cuts, which led to fewer shoppers and further declining revenue. That's the downward spiral. And now the infamous blue light will soon flash its last.