Name: Eddie Lampert
Age: 57
Occupation: hedge fund manager
Last Seen: ??
Bee-otched For: getting Seared
-Age: 57
Occupation: hedge fund manager
Last Seen: ??
Bee-otched For: getting Seared
When people think of Marshall, Michigan, there's a lot to think about.
The town of seven thousand souls sits just 13 miles east of Battle Creek at the intersection of I-94 and I-69. It's known for its 19th century architecture and several museums.
It's also the home of a very special plaza.
In that shopping center, there's an AT&T cell phone store, an optometrist, Anytime Fitness, a Credit Union, a place that cashes checks, a Dollar Tree and a Rite Aid. On both ends of the plaza, there's two anchors. On the right end, there's a Family Fare Supermarket.
However, on the opposite end, there's something that's a part of history. The other anchor of that plaza is a Kmart.
But, it's not just any Kmart. As of the beginning of January, it will be the last Kmart in the whole state of Michigan.
Yep! Michigan's last Kmart isn't in the Detroit area, where the chain began in 1962 by Sebastian Spering Kresge as an offshoot of his chain of five and dime stores. It's not in northern Michigan, where in Interlochen, the local Arts Academy named an open air auditorium after Kresge. It's not in either Charlevoix nor Grayling, two towns nowhere near a Walmart or Meijer. It's not in Grand Rapids, Lansing or anywhere else in the Great Lakes State. It's in Marshall, a town that's big enough to support both Walmart and Meijer, but both are absent in the community.
As mentioned, Marshall's close to Battle Creek, whose main shopping mall, Lakeview Square is struggling. Many of the mall's stores, including FYE and Hot Topic - a store that usually does well even in struggling malls - have all left and all three of its anchors have left as well. Those stores were Macy's, JCPenney and -- GUESS WHO?!?! -- Kmart's corporate sibling, Sears.
By the beginning of 2020, there will only be 126 Sears and 70 Kmart stores left. PERIOD. And a lot of it had to do with the hedge fund dickwad known as Edward S. Lampert. Instead of investing in upkeep in his stores and making them competitive, he decided to penny pinch everything. In the end, Sears and Kmart stores ended up looking like they hadn't been updated since "Ice Ice Baby" was the #1 song on the pop charts. While the Walmarts and Meijers were having a field day, Sears and Kmart ended up in bankruptcy a year ago.
Since then, more stores have closed and time is running out for both Kmart and Sears. To some, it's amazing that they're still around, especially after Kmart's first bankruptcy in 2002. All Fast Eddie has done is fuck things up even worse, and in the end, even he's lost half of his wealth. He's worth about $1.1 billion, down from over $2 billion just a few years ago. Employees have said that he often blamed them for Sears and Kmart's demise over the past two decades. In reality, the fact that many of his stores were dirty, old and falling apart was the reason why shoppers went elsewhere.
The reality is simple: Sears and Kmart operated on an outdated business model. When I was young, if you wore Kmart clothes to school, you simply didn't fit in. I didn't wear Reebok Pumps or Nikes; my mom bought me shoes that had weird letters and numbers on the tongue, presumably the code for the sweatshop employee who stitched them together. The high school kids on my bus were nice enough to put me down because of the fact. Simply put, 90s kids HATED Kmart. Hell, I wanted to puke my guts out every time Rosie O'Donnell made a commercial for them aimed at kids. Nothing like being a target for bullying when the store you buy your clothes from hired a fat, irritating closet homosexual who had one of the worst daytime TV shows of the 1990s.
Over the years, Walmart, Meijer and others built more stores selling better quality products at reasonable prices. Kmart, OTOH, keeps selling no-name crap. Checking their electronics department online, the TV brands they have include AXESS, Trexonic and Supersonic (I'd imagine that the members of J.J. Fad would be calling their lawyers after reading this). I even remembered when they started selling Curtis Mathes TV sets in the 2000s; once upon a time, that company made some of the most-expensive TVs on the market. When Kmart sold them, it became a totally different story.
Only time will tell when Kmart and Sears will both die off. Sears still has a location here in Grand Rapids at Rivertown Crossings Mall. Their other location in Grand Rapids at Woodland Mall was demolished to make way for an expanded wing, plus a new Von Maur store. When Sears' Lansing location closes, they will still have stores in Livonia and Westland, both by Detroit. As I'm typing this, the two are in life support at Retail Memorial Hospital in the same ward where Toys 'R' Us, Payless Shoe Source, Circuit City, Montgomery Ward, Blockbuster Video and others met their fate. We've seen the nurse, and we all know what she would be saying. Hospice is definitely not an option. It's simply best to take Kmart and Sears deep into the woods with a shotgun and simply tell it that this is going to hurt them more than it's going to hurt us.
Eddie Lampert: a bigger asswipe than the Sears and Roebuck catalogs that once graced many an outhouse.
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Bee-otch of the Day Archives can be seen on http://beeotchoftheday.blogspot.com
Bee-otch of the Day is a production of Chuck69.com, Grand Rapids' site for Stern, politics and more!
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