At the retail giant's peak, there were upwards of 2,300 Kmart discount stores located in the United States alone. Today however, that number has plummeted to just under 30 stores remaining open, with most of those chains existing in the State of New York. The side effect of all those closures mean that there are literally thousands of vacant and abandoned Kmart box stores scattered all across the country. In some instances the former stores have been demolished or repurposed by another retailer, yet the stark reality exists that many of the stores are just rotting away; hundreds of thousands of square footage of empty retail space surrounded by a sea of asphalt parking lots.
It has been my experience that many of these massive shuttered storefronts have simply been left to rot, often becoming illegal dumping grounds for household trash and construction debris as the storefronts themselves are often left unsecured or haphazardly boarded up. The expansive parking lots have become choked with weeds happily sprouting up through cracks within the tattered asphalt as plastic bags and other man-made detritus blow across the deserted blacktop like artificial tumble weeds before becoming lodged within a disheveled bush or swept down a storm drain by a gust of wind. I've noticed on more than one occasion that vehicles have been abandoned beneath the ghostly insignia of a Kmart sign, still legible as the brick-and-mortar facade has been discolored with the outline of the logo even though the physical big red letters have long since been removed.
However, it is these apocalyptic retail sights that instill a sense of resentment within me. A fact as American as apple pie and diabetes is that corporations are simply allowed to just dissolve, often leaving behind a decaying environmental mess to become someone else's problem. Kmart it seems has never been held accountable for the stores they have shuttered and vacated, many of which have now become defacto landfills and magnets for societal decay, remaining as nothing more than urban blight and tax blackholes for the towns and cities that once cherished their existence. The retail apocalypse is upon us and within these capitalist collapses it becomes blatantly obvious that corporations do not give a damn about humanity nor cleaning up the scars they have left behind. Kmart and all unfairly regulated capitalism is, and has always been, the true apocalypse. Yet, we as the consumers still the product and now that Kmart is just about dead, they still have one last thing to sells us; and that's the plague of rotting storefronts and the mess they've let fester in towns and neighborhoods they once proclaimed to care about. The ultimate Blue Light Special.
Behind every mega-corporation there are very real humans pulling the strings and rolling in the cash whom rarely are held accountable for their greed. It's time for that nonsense to change. These CEOs are worth millions regardless of their failures and bankruptcies and it's about time we hold them hostage for their money forcing them to pay to cleanup the scars they've left behind. For the true organized retail crime is not the people looting the stores, it's the corporations looting us.
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