Final Markdown: Kmart in Little Rock nears final day after 43 years

Sandra Shavers showed up like clockwork this week to the daytime retail shift she has known and come to embrace for seven years.

By Sunday, though, the manager and other remaining employees at Little Rock’s lone Kmart outlet off Rodney Parham Road will be forced to say goodbye to their jobs, about three months after being told that the store would be shutting its doors for good.

< span> “It’s a very emotional week,” the 59-year-old reset lead worker said, with her voice quivering and tears beginning to stream down her face. “I just know everybody is going to cry.”

Shavers, a retail industry veteran of about 20 years, said her appreciation for her employer came particularly from the opportunities afforded to her and the people with whom she’s built lasting friendships.

“The people here, my co-workers, we’re like family. We come together, we laugh together, we cry together,” Shavers said. “I don’t think I’m ever going to find another job like this because when you have a connection with your employees, it’s hard to start over.”

SIGNALING THE END

In the weeks preceding the Little Rock store’s final day in business, Kmart's demise gradually became clearer.

In June, as the location’s closure became official, the pharmacy closed.

A sign at the vacated glass-front kiosk recommended that customers instead fill their prescriptions at the nearest Walgreens location, where their records were transferred.

Markdowns on most items — clothing, accessories, beauty products and toys — were well in progress in July and August. A few select products were deemed “deal flash” worthy.

The long-vacant Kmart pharmacy kiosk remains intact, featuring a message to customers seeking prescriptions. "Your prescription records will be transferred to Walgreens," it reads.
BRANDON RIDDLE/Arkansas Online Weekly upticks in discounts were written on an assortment of colored paper signage signaling price drops of up to 80 percent off. Ceiling-affixed banners placed throughout the location stated: “Everything at least 40 to 75 percent off lowest ticketed price.”

And by the start of September, much of the store had hollowed out.

Goods dwindled among the aisles inside the 43-year-old Kmart store, which opened in June 1974. The back of the store, mostly void of products, contained empty metal displays and racks, many of which were haphazardly placed along the floor.

Layers of unassembled shelving sat atop other shelves that were deserted but still fastened to their wall units. The banging of other metal racks being stripped from their tracks by crews tasked with taking the store down to its bare bones echoed throughout.

Eric Bridges, a sales floor supervisor at the Kmart, said more frequent sales promotions were in progress in the store's final week, with discounts being announced the day they went into effect.

Items selling the most were "hardlines," or anything outside of apparel, Bridges said. Many of the clothing racks on the east side of the store remained stocked with shirts and pants.

Outside the Kmart on Tuesday, a worker stood atop a lift, unfastening a Western Union sign that had been hung on the building’s northwest side. It was one of only two elements of signage left to demount.

A dated Kmart logo just above the outlet’s glass front doors with a red “K” and a white, diagonally inscribed “mart” within the letter — emblematic of the chain’s late 20th-century and early 21st-century marketing — ushered in the remaining customers.

LOYAL PATRONS, BARGAIN HUNTERS REACT

Customers, including some who had been around since the Rodney Parham Kmart’s inception, roamed for deals down the aisles that still stood intact, peering through a disorderly selection of items in the final week.

The shoppers — some faithful to the business over the years and others in search of last-minute deep discounts — generally agreed that the outlet’s departure was a discouraging sign of the current retail climate, which has shifted toward online buying rather than brick-and-mortar sales.

< span> For Murline Baker, a loyal shopper from the start, repeat trips to the were a family affair, one that was carried out through three generations.

“It’s been kind of a family store for me — my daughters, even my husband. My son,” Baker said while browsing sales on women’s apparel and supplies for her college-bound daughter. “We’ve been coming here forever.” The shuttering of the store, Baker added, is the end of an era.

Another longtime shopper Debbie Tate, 69, said: “It breaks my heart. That and Sears both.”

Little Rock’s Sears location off South University Avenue and Interstate 630 closed last July after Sears Holdings, the parent company for both retailers, cited a similar reason that it gave for the Kmart departure.

SIGN OF THE TIMES

Before the end of Kmart’s Rodney Parham Road location, at least one other store in Arkansas’ capital city had long been gone — one off Asher and South University avenues near the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, which announced its closure in January 2003.

Howard Riefs, a spokesman for Sears Holdings, said at the time of the announced Rodney Parham Road closing in early June that the move had been done as part of an acceleration of closings to rid the company of unprofitable stores.

“We have been strategically and aggressively evaluating our store space and productivity,” Riefs said. The past two decades have been fraught with Kmart closures for the company once regarded as a pioneer, including a North Little Rock closure announced in July 2000.

As Kmart Corp. sought bankruptcy protection in 2002, El Dorado, Jacksonville and Pine Bluff were cut from the company’s lineup of Kmart stores. A year later, stores in Hot Springs and Rogers shut down.

In 2004, Kmart Holding Corp. and Sears, Roebuck and Co. announced that they would merge to form Sears Holdings Corp., which now operates as the parent company of Kmart and Sears.

A location in Fort Smith closed in November 2009. Then, outlets in Jonesboro and Springdale ended operations in December 2016.

More rounds of closures would be announced by the parent company, not all of which placed Arkansas stores on the chopping block.

On Aug. 24, the company announced the closure of 28 additional Kmart stores by the end of the year. Not included were either of the two remaining locations in Arkansas: one about 26 miles northeast of Arkansas' capital city in Cabot and another in Russellville, about a 78-mile trek from Little Rock.

For Shavers, her Kmart job offered not only a steady flow of income but also gave her a sense of empowerment, particularly after earning a manager role years back.

On a recent day, she stood under the retailer's covered, scalloped awning and looked on as shoppers entered the storefront.

“I was praying I could retire here," Shavers said. "God has something better in store, but it just feels bad.”