The Long Goodbye From my local K-Mart
K-Mart has a location at 1500 Charleston Hwy, West Columbia, SC 29169 (803) 794-9150 which has been around since my childhood. This is a store where I shopped for Christmas presents when I was just a chap ... and it's still here in the same place with pretty much the same exterior look but a much different interior look. |
You can imagine my pleasure to find that it was not going to be closed with those many other K-Mart stores in that last spate of closings recently. However, this all ended with my last few visits because I came to the sad realization that it's just a matter of time.
The management of this location is totally unsatisfactory. I repeatedly go there to find them air conditioning the airport vicinity with front doors wide open in the hundred degree plus heat indices.
This along side the other mismanagement makes me wonder if anyone really cares about profitability when I see the prices of items I can walk across the street and get for 30% less on average.
Then there are those episodes like the day I saw a young black man take his old beat up shoes and put them in the box from which he had just changed to brand new shoes only to place the box with his old shoes on the rack and walk out unchallenged by any of the several employees milling around him.
I bought two laundry products where the prices were not those at the display from which I chose them as I stood in the humdity and heat adjacent to that door which had been open all day long adding adding more to the cost of operation which I can only presume trickled down to me with a selection of overpriced products and subpar order and cleanliness of the entire facility.
Yes, the old K-Mart of my youth is dying a slow painful death from a corporate structure either too disinterested or too stupid to see the folly at hand and just why they will never be profitable at that location.
Why don't they fire these stupid employees and give the store a fighting chance ? Could it be that the entire organization has fallen into such disarray that everyone is simply too incompetent to do what is necessary to operate ? It sure appears so.