- This topic has 1 reply, 2 voices, and was last updated 1 year, 6 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
-
It’s been in business for 125 years. The retired chairman of the Detroit firm for which I worked (K-Mart was founded in Troy, MI) did their real estate work and much of their corporate work.
Their failure has been nearly a quarter-century in the making. Our partner told me that K-Mart basically did everything wrong…poor quality products, poor lighting, tired stores, terrible customer service, etc. They also had bad technology which ruined its inventory channels, and they made mistakes in their advertising.
K-Mart hit $1 billion in sales in 1966, 13 years before Wal-Mart did, and K-Mart opened their 2,000<sup>th</sup> store in 1981. But their product was, essentially, junk. Tacky, cheap, poorly made. They compounded their mistakes by buying random big box stores like Sports Authority, OfficeMax and Borders.
K-Mart retrenched by converting many stores to “Super-K” to compete with Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Clubs, but Wal-Mart was expanding their store base by 8% a year at that time.
Audaces fortuna iuvat
-
-
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.