Kmart in Bridgehampton closing, leaving just 1 reduced-size store in U.S.

The Kmart store in Bridgehampton — the last full-size Kmart in the United States — will close in October after 25 years in operation, ending an era for a once-dominant discount retailer.

While thousands of Kmarts closed for decades, the Bridgehampton store was able to hang on for so long because it lacked competition and it fulfilled a need in the Hamptons, locals said.

“People think of the Hamptons as an upscale location but there are plenty of people who are blue collar who work here, who shop at Kmart, and a lot of other people shop at Kmart, including the jet set,” said Southampton Councilman Tommy John Schiavoni, who is the council’s liaison for Bridgehampton.

The Kmart in Bridgehampton will close Oct. 20, employees said.

The store is at 2044 Montauk Hwy. in Bridgehampton Commons, a shopping center owned by Kimco Realty Corp., a real estate investment trust in Jericho.

Kimco spokeswoman Jennifer Maisch confirmed that the store will close but declined to provide more details. She directed inquiries to Kmart.

Kmart and sister chain Sears are owned by Transform Holdco LLC, which does business as Transformco. The Hoffman Estates, Illinois-based company did not respond to requests for comment.

The closing of the Bridgehampton store will leave Kmart with one small store in the United States, in Miami.

Last year, most of the space in the Miami store was leased to home goods retailer At Home, the Miami Herald reported in August.

Transformco also has a few Kmart locations in the U.S. territories of Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

‘People from all walks of life’

Bridgehampton Commons is a 287,493-square-foot shopping center whose other tenants include a King Kullen supermarket, Gap, TJ Maxx, Staples and Ulta Beauty.

Occupying 89,935 square feet, Kmart is the biggest tenant in that shopping center.

The Kmart opened in 1999 in a space that had been vacated by Caldor, a now-defunct discount retailer that filed for bankruptcy in 1995.

Kmart Corp. paid $7 million to assume Caldor’s lease, which was to run through 2019 and had two 10-year extensions, according to a February 2000 article published in Newsday.

One reason that the Kmart in Bridgehampton was able to hold on for decades when most of the other stores in the chain couldn’t was that there was a lack of competition in the Hamptons, Southampton residents and officials said.

The closest Walmart to the Bridgehampton Kmart is 24.8 miles away in Riverhead, outside the Hamptons. The closest Target is 23.3 miles away, also in Riverhead.

There aren’t more big-box stores in Southampton because the town discourages their development, "to maintain the look and feel of the communities,” Schiavoni said.

Around 2003, Southampton enacted a restriction in most zoning districts that limits the size of buildings to no more than 15,000 square feet, but Bridgehampton Commons was exempt because it was built before the code change, said Clare P. Shea, assistant town planning director.

On Monday afternoon, signs hanging from the ceiling inside the Kmart in Bridgehampton advertised store closing sales.

Some shoppers were at the store hoping to get good deals on clothes, appliances, furniture, health and beauty items, cleaning products and other goods.

Several waxed nostalgic about the store.

“A lot of people around the area love to come here, easy access, and when you’re in shopping centers like this, it’s a lot easier to go to one place than to start traveling all around than to go to different stores that have different things,” said Montauk resident Jim Donohue, 65, who, with his wife, Kelly, bought a white lifeguard chair and 8-foot orange ladder at the store.

For decades, Philip Hauser, 68, has been stopping by the Kmart about every two weeks while residing at his family’s vacation home in Montauk, from May to November annually.

He spends the remainder of his time at his Valley Stream home.

Kmart attracted a wide swath of people, he said.

“You see people from all walks of life. Whether they’re coming up in a Rolls Royce SUV or if they’re coming by in a pickup truck. I mean everybody has got to go to Kmart to buy some things,” Hauser said.

No ‘second act’

The first Kmart opened in Garden City, Michigan, in 1962, the same year that Target, Walmart and Kohl’s opened their first stores.

Kmart’s current status is a sharp contrast to the heyday of the chain, which used to be the nation’s largest discount retailer, with 2,300 stores in the early 1990s, and was known for its Blue Light Specials, which were unadvertised product sales announced in stores with blue flashing lights.

The groundbreaking retailer carried merchandise at a good value and expanded by opening stores in suburban neighborhoods, said James E. Schrager, clinical professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Kmart's failures were partly due to its lack of innovation, he said.

“Kmart didn’t have a second act. … If you compare them to Walmart, which has been staggeringly successful for much longer, Walmart continually changes what they need to do in order to grow and be profitable,” he said.

Kmart Holdings Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2002.

In 2005, Kmart bought Sears, another iconic, struggling retailer, in an $11 billion deal, forming Sears’ Holdings Corp., which had about 3,500 stores nationwide.

Mired in debt and losing shoppers to discount and online retailers, Sears Holdings closed thousands of stores over time.

The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2018, and its assets were purchased for $5.2 billion in 2019 by Transformco, an affiliate of former Sears chief executive Eddie Lampert’s ESL Investments Inc. But the store closings continued.

The are about a dozen Sears stores left in the United States.

The last Sears on Long Island closed in 2021 in Massapequa's Sunrise Mall. After a Kmart in Sayville closed in 2020, only the Bridgehampton store remained on the Island.

By Tory N. Parrish

tory.parrish@newsday.comToryParrish1

Tory N. Parrish covers retail and small business for Newsday. She has worked at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and Observer-Dispatch in Utica, N.Y.