Kmart’s blue light goes out as it closes its last major U.S. store

New York – Attention buyers! KmartThe end is near!

The former retail giant, famous for its blue light displays, where a flashing blue ball attached to a pole lures shoppers into an instant sale, is closing its last major store in USA.

The store is located in Bridgehampton. New Yorkon Long Island, will close Oct. 20, according to Denise Rivera, an employee who answered the phone late Monday. She said the manager was not present.

That will leave just one small Kmart store in Miami. It has a few stores in Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Transformco, the company that bought the assets, Sears Kmart, which filed for bankruptcy from Sears Holdings in 2019, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

At its peak, there were more than 2,000 Kmart stores in the United States.

Struggling to compete with lower prices Walmart Target’s trendy offerings, Kmart filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in early 2002—becoming the largest U.S. retailer to do so—and announced it would close more than 250 stores.

A few years later, hedge fund executive Edward Lampert merged Sears and Kmart and promised to restore them to their former glory. But the 2008 recession and the growing dominance of Amazon And contributed to the failure of that mission. Sears filed for Chapter 11 in 2018 and now has only a handful of stores left in the United States, where it once had thousands.