Just Because Your Kmart’s Shelves Are Empty, That Doesn’t Mean It’s Closing

(Thomas Hawk)

As Sears Holdings, the parent company of Kmart and Sears, tries to save itself from impending doom, the company is closing a number of its weaker stores. In the current round of cuts, Kmart stores are heavily affected, but the company wants to assure residents of one California town that in spite of empty shelves, their local Kmart store is not about to close.

A round of Kmart store closings happened around the holidays, so you can’t blame fans of the store in Blythe, CA for speculating that the store was doomed when they saw empty shelves. Shoppers’ speculation that the store was about to close makes sense, because a chain wouldn’t ship fresh merchandise to a store that was about to have its entire contents or moved to other nearby stores.

Sears says that it isn’t going anywhere right now, though. “We remain committed to serving our members and customers in the Palo Verde Valley area,” a company spokesperson told the Palo Verde Valley Times. That’s good, because the store is in a relatively remote part of the state, where the next nearest discount stores are more than 45 miles away and are actually in Arizona.

To point out the painfully obvious, if Kmart can’t make it in an environment where the nearest Walmart is more than 45 miles away, then the discount chain has no chance of surviving in general. The empty shelves may have been due to the company’s known problems with suppliers at the moment. It could also be that the isolated store was so successful over the holidays the corporate bosses didn’t even expect it.

ALERT: Blythe Kmart NOT closing [Palo Verde Valley Times]

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist