Kmart Closes Doors in Chambersburg

For as long as I can remember, there has always been a Kmart in Chambersburg, but that might not be the case for much longer. At one point walking into Kmart was an enjoyable experience, but soon  the quality of experience at the store declined, and I started going less, along with most of their other customers. Kmart has gone through a series of rough financial patches throughout the years and as a result, the company has been closing multiple stores every few months, upon that list of store closures is the Chambersburg store.

In recent years the company has had multiple financial problems, with it getting so bad that they filed for bankruptcy twice, once in January 2002 and again in October 2018. The Kmart in Chambersburg is set to close in mid-December right in the middle of the holiday season. The store currently has everything on sale, and they have signs up that everything must go, along with signs up for sales on almost everything in the store.

The first Kmart store opened in April 1962, and the company was doing well. In January 2002 Kmart filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and closed more than 300 stores in the U.S., including the last store in Alaska, and merged with Sears in November 2004 and created Sears Holdings Corporation. Kmart then opened Sears brand appliances in their Kmart stores in July 2009. In 2010, about 22 stores closed due to underperformance and low profitability. Kmart announced the closure of 77 stores that are set to close for good as of December 15, 2019. This will be the first mass closing of stores since they came out of bankruptcy in 2018. After this mass store closing, there will only be 115 locations remaining in the U.S. as of December 2019.