For Kmart, Two Is Company

An elegy, and a comparison, for the nearly dead American retail colossus

I was in The Bulwark last week, writing about the decline of Kmart. It’s a story I started working on back in August, when it was reported that the last Kmart in New Jersey was closing, leaving just two—Long Island and Miami. I got a friend who was in the area to photograph the doomed New Jersey location:

And I wrote, more abstractly:

It’s often said that America doesn’t have history, or ruins. I disagree. It was in America that the neighborhood five-and-dime store evolved into the massive big-box superstore. And it was in America that we overbuilt retail and ended up with these semi- or fully-abandoned strip plazas everywhere. These are our ruins. As I wrote once, “the lone and level asphalt stretches far away.”

Is there anything in store for these landscapes? Other than long-term abandonment or demolition? Sure, you can put medical offices or churches in them, or flea markets. But in another 50 or 100 years, what story will we tell about them? Anything? As an urbanist, I think more about questions like this than I do about actual cities. Far more of America looks like Bergen County—or any number of less populous, less affluent places in the same pattern—than it looks like New York City.

The near extinction of a retail chain that typified that kind of place is a curiosity, but it’s also the making of history.

But in the Bulwark piece, while I make this sort of point at the end, I also made a fun comparison with another very different chain/company. I note that while Walmart is the obvious comparison for Kmart, we can see so obviously how they differed that it’s not terribly interesting. In fact, Kmart came before Walmart, both the company and the modern store format! Kmart’s founder, S.S. Kresge, and his eponymous chain of variety stores, were so old that Kresge barely lived to even see modern Kmart stores!

Which raises this interesting idea that the company came out of a time that, as I put it, is “almost, but not quite, our own.” So what’s the other company I’m thinking of that has a broadly similar origin and trajectory: from founder-driven success in a time almost slipping into history, postwar car-oriented suburban expansion, and grueling, long decline with no real decisive end?

Howard Johnson’s!

Like Kmart, Howard Johnson’s locations predominated in early suburbs and highway stretches. The 1970s oil crunch and the resulting decline of the road trip hurt the chain’s business particularly, but so did the fact that newer, shinier suburbs simply had fewer of their restaurants.

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.

Like Kmart, Howard Johnson’s was effectively going out of business for decades. For years, articles not unlike this one counted how many remained. The last true Howard Johnson’s restaurant, with a direct connection to the old company, closed in 2016; the last restaurant sporting the name, through a quirk of corporate law, shuttered in 2022. But whether even the former was really a “real” Howard Johnson’s anymore was debatable. The famous ice cream plant closed years ago; the central commissary, once overseen by Jacques Pépin, seems to have closed in the 2000s.

It’s that “no real decisive end” that’s interesting. The Howard Johnson’s company basically cut the restaurants loose, and even as the chain’s infrastructure crumbled, nobody pulled the plug. It’s striking that a company that was once so tightly managed basically operated like a plane without a pilot for decades, obviously receding into eventual commercial death. That’s what brings me to the memento mori:

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. The orange-roofed, sharply angled roadside structures you’ll still occasionally notice along the highway have become something like artifacts; those big empty stores, many of them too dated or distressed to ever be occupied again, are our moss-covered ruins. Their big empty parking lots testify to something that once was—something that drew people by the thousands.

Apart from historians of retail or of the culture of the twentieth-century American roadside, few will care about these chains or their stories. And why should they, really? Without the nostalgic ties of personal memories to create a context for these places, they’re just buildings in a sea of others like them. But I find they have an almost spiritual use as reminders that nothing is permanent and nothing is guaranteed. Even companies some would call “too big to fail” come to look very small indeed when they lose the vision of a founder or the dedication of long-serving managers. Bankruptcy is a species of death, and success is a struggle against that virtually inevitable conclusion.

Remember that you will end up like Kmart.

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Related Reading:

Roses Are Red, Walmarts Are Blue

Beyond Bed Bath & Beyond, To What?

Suburban Archaeology

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