"Unlike Walmart, which remained in the Walton family, or Target, which handled its transformation from family-owned business to public corporation far better, Kmart underwent very early rapid growth and then began a long period of coasting and decline."
"While Kmart has long been viewed as a sort of downmarket Walmart clone, it’s worth noting that Kmart came first—not just because the company that became Kmart goes back to 1899, but because the opening of the first modern Kmart in 1962 beat the opening of the first Walmart by a few months. It was not until the 1990s that Walmart became a major national player in the discount department store industry. It’s more accurate to say that Walmart beat Kmart at its own game than that Kmart failed to properly imitate Walmart."
"Like Kmart, Howard Johnson’s made several attempts to revitalize its business. A parade of managers who had none of the personal investment of the chain’s founder, Howard Deering Johnson, successively took the reins. The company began to introduce new restaurant concepts, and it underwent a series of acquisitions as well as the division of its hotel and restaurant businesses. All of this flux and churn depressed morale, eroded managerial continuity, and left the once-great restaurant half of the company to fend for itself as its numbers dwindled."
"Throughout this long, slow decline, nobody seriously attempted a “reboot” of the company; nobody bothered to attempt monetizing whatever goodwill the name still held, by, say, bringing back the real recipes of the famous 28 flavors of ice cream. That kind of investment or passion or capital was gone."
"Despite the former ubiquity of both Howard Johnson’s and Kmart—and notwithstanding the nostalgia of their small communities of fans—both chains have left hardly a trace in the popular culture. In business, as in life, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
The demise of Howard Johnson’s, and likewise that of Kmart, is a cautionary business tale. But it’s also a humbling and almost spooky story."
Kmart Elegy
A formerly dominant American retail chain nears extinction
by Addison Del Mastro The Bulwark (X: @BulwarkOnline)
https://lnkd.in/ed7hFsgj
And here is an article showing images of the rise and fall of a store whose building was once the tallest department store in the world and which in the course of the decline of the city of Detroit was eventually demolished in 1998. But as history seems to be like a revolving door (Jorge Drexler dixit) a new building has been erected on this site that will house the headquarters of another company that has also seen better times in the past, GM (https://lnkd.in/egtC4395)
The life and death of Hudson's department store
The Detroit News
https://lnkd.in/eRzShcBe
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