Kmart in Bridgehampton closing, leaving just 1 reduced-size store in U.S.
The Kmart in Bridgehampton is the discount retailer's last full-size store in the United States. Credit: Tory N. Parrish
The Kmart store in Bridgehampton — the last full-size Kmart in the United States — will close in October after 25 years in operation.
The closing will leave Kmart, a once-dominant discounter known for its blue light specials, with one small store in the United States, in Miami.
The Bridgehampton store will close Oct. 20, an employee said by phone Sunday.
Located in the town of Southampton, the Kmart 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 any other 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 could not be immediately reached for comment Sunday.
Kmart’s Miami store has been reduced in size, and most of that store's former space is now occupied by home goods store 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.
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 and the largest big-box discount store in the Hamptons.
The store 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.
The Hamptons is a collection of tony beach communities in the towns of Southampton and East Hampton, on the eastern end of Long Island, that are dotted by mom-and-pop shops and high-end boutiques on main streets.
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 told Newsday for an article published in March 2022.
The closest Walmart to the Bridgehampton Kmart is 24.8 miles away in Riverhead, which is 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, Southampton Councilman Tommy John Schiavoni, who is the council’s liaison for Bridgehampton, told Newsday for the 2022 article.
“The code does allow it but there is a significant amount of community input and requirements that go along with it. We certainly put a lot of deference on our community character here. It’s important to us,” he said at the time.
'They slowly became irrelevant'
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.
Kmart’s failures were partly due to its lack of innovation, James E. Schrager, clinical professor of entrepreneurship and strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, told Newsday in an interview for the 2022 article.
“Kmart decided they were never going to update their strategy from 1962. And they slowly became irrelevant as newer, better discounters appeared,” said Schrager, who said the chain “never found its fashion footing.”
Kmart Holdings Corp. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2002.
In 2005, Kmart bought Sears, another iconic retailer, in an $11 billion deal, forming Sears’ Holdings Corp., which had about 3,500 stores nationwide.
That deal was illogical because the retailers lacked synergies, Erik Gordon, clinical assistant professor in the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business, told Newsday in 2022.
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 October, in Sunrise Mall in Massapequa. After a Kmart in Sayville closed in 2020, only the Bridgehampton store remained on the Island.
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.
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