So the onetime discount king, descended from the old S.S. Kresge dime-store chain, is now on the veritable fiscal ropes. Its market position has been crowded on one side by Target’s pseudo-hip image and by Wal-Mart’s special status as the only chain retailer in many small towns. Now, it’s the biggest retail company to ever file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. (The previous champ was Federated Department Stores, parent company of the Bon Marche (which finally has a web site!).)
Like many post-boomers, I grew up with the bizarrely soothing pastel blue-and-pink color schemes of the chain’s massive stores (particularly at the lunch counters). These days, like a lotta folk, I don’t get in there much–essentially because there are three Fred Meyer stores between me and the nearest Kmart (on 130th and Aurora, in a building inherited from the short-lived California chain White Front). And when I do get there, much of the merchandise, particularly the clothing and shoes, still looks like shoddy knockoffs ready to fray apart within a week.
Chain management insists it’s got a plan to save the big K. But in case it doesn’t work, or in case it sheds some locations during the restructuring, let’s think about recycling the real estate.
Many Kmart locations, such as the one in West Seattle’s lost valley of Delridge, are standalone sites, sufficiently far away from other big-box stores and strip malls as to be less than ideal trafficwise. A smart and progressive developer (perhaps a nonprofit) could buy up such a site should it become available and re-lease part of the front parking moat for small-retail development. Then, one could put the Kmart building itself, along with the rest of the lot, to new mixed uses.
An old Wired article once suggested something like this. It posited a community of artists taking over one of those 80,000-square-foot structures for production and living spaces, creating something like a permanent indoor Burning Man-esque community. That’s one potential reuse, but not the only one.
Local electronics manufacturer John Fluke turned an abandoned Everett discount store into a factory (too bad he didn’t call it Ye Olde Mall).
The B&I Shopping Center in Tacoma (known mainly as the former home of Ivan the Gorilla) was originally a discount hypermart whose second-generation owners decided would be more profitable not as one big store but as a bazaar with sections rented out to indie entrepreneurs.
The buildings’ simple structures, which necessitate interior supporting posts every 20 linear feet, make them hard to reconfigure for big-open-space uses (arena football, roller skating, etc.). But they could still be used for certain other non-selling purposes. They could become innovative affordable-housing solutions–the vastness of the space could be easily broken up with skylights and open-air courtyards; since the roofs are held up by all those steel posts, pieces of said roofs could relatively-easily be knocked out). Tthey could also be divvied up into alternative work spaces, not just for artists but also for sweat-equity entrepreneurs creating their own lines of clothes, cookies, snowboards, and such.
And, almost needless to say, they’d be awesome party/dance/concert spaces (even with those view-blocking posts).
Meanwhile, the company that wanted to be the retail goliath of the Internet, our own Amazon, announced an honest-to-goodness net operating profit for the first time ever this past quarter (not merely the not-counting-assorted-expenses “pro forma” profit management had promised). This doesn’t mean the firm’s out of the proverbial woods, and it certainly doesn’t mean its investors will see a proper return anytime soon. But it does mean the basic idea of e-tail can indeed work, sorta, with the right products and the right focus. (I still say Amazon would’ve been in the black sooner, and wouldn’t have had to lay off so many Seattle workers, if it had stuck closer to its books-music-video core and hadn’t thrown millions into ventures to sell pet food, video rentals, and power tools.)
