Growing up in a Rust Belt state, a person learns to say goodbye to those old familiar places. It's a here today gone tomorrow climate. Businesses who can usually get bought out by a conglomerate and those who can't, well they pack and leave in the dead of night. Farmer Jack's, Winkleman's, Mervyn's, Perry Drugs, Arbor Drugs, Montgomery Ward's, the list just goes on and on depending on how old you are. Nationally Sears squeaked through a bankruptcy whole except for the elimination of the Sears Christmas catalog, a Sears staple. When K-mart hit the skids in the 90s, the ship didn't appear that it would make it. It was acquired by Sears a number of years ago and they have both admirably buffered each other since then but survival seems suspect.
Why the American retailer history? Lately I've been feeling a retail based angst which sometimes bubbles up into a momentary retail rage. When you live in an economic wasteland like Michigan is, the past--the failed past--lies in the rubble around you. You're constantly reminded of it. When you're young, stuff like that doesn't bother you that much. You're too focused on running ahead. As you get older, you still keep moving forward but you look behind more often. When I see a K-mart advertisement now, I feel a lot of sadness. K-mart was one of the neatest places to go with my mom when I was eight years old. I could buy (well my mom could) sneakers, a new book, a stuffed animal and even a Coca-Cola Icee (if I was well behaved). My first bike was bought there. I began going to K-mart more regularly after my grandma died a few years back. When she was alive, I would bump into her there from time to time. Older people like routine and stores they can count on for some reason or another and so she was a frequent K-mart shopper. After she passed, I went in just to remember her and of my childhood. At the same time, my discount mass retailer options were beginning to annoy me in the worst way. I had been (practically) forced to shop a few times at Wal-mart, a store that I refuse to give any of money to and those coerced retail experiences only reaffirmed my dislike for the retailer. Target, my usual go-to guilty pleasure, has left me high and dry in recent months, chronically out of stock in the products I need. Plus somehow it has morphed into a nonstop daycare center which makes shopping a test of endurance in the face of supreme aggravation and annoyance. I'm someone who likes to register complaints but in discount mass retail who do you lodge complaints with and isn't it like spitting into the wind? The futility left me even more annoyed, with current economic conditions considered, until I finally realized that retail is picking the lesser of two (or three) evils. So yeah there weren't PowerPoint reasons for me to do all my sundry shopping at K-mart. It's not always more convenient, their prices are comparative with their peers and so is their customer service. But it makes me feel like I'm contributing a little something in memory of a lost childhood memory (plus they have a loyalty card). And it's not like I hoped there would be a stark difference in their competitors' balance sheets because of my absence (because obviously there wouldn't be) but I feel like I'm finally behaving like a consumer on my terms and not as a hostage.
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