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The story of KMART spans over one-hundred years in all. More than one hundred years ago, Sebastian Spering Kresge opened a modest five-and-dime store in downtown Detroit...and changed the entire landscape of retailing. The store that Kresge built has evolved into an empire of more than 1,800 stores and an Internet presence that reaches millions of customers. The Kmart name has become a symbol of Americana, standing for quality products at low prices. When Kresge opened his first store in 1899, he sold everything for 5 and 10 cents. The low prices appealed to shoppers and allowed him to expand to 85 stores in 1912, with annual sales of more than $10 million. War and financial depressions hit America hard over the next decades, but Kresge stores were always there to offer families products at prices they could afford. They also offered people what other businesses at the time could not -- jobs to support their families. As time went on, prices may have changed, but the business philosophy stayed the same -- offer consumers products they need at prices they can afford -- and they’ll keep coming back. By the mid-1920s, the S.S. Kresge Company was opening locations that sold items for $1 or less, a precursor to the current discount store. These ''green-front'' stores often were right next to the traditional red-front five-and-dime Kresge stores. Ten years later in 1937, Kresge opened a store in the country’s first suburban shopping center -- Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri. The retail environment was getting more competitive, and again Kresge blazed the trail for future retailers by launching a newspaper advertising program to entice shoppers to its stores. Those print ads were the precursor to radio promotions, which followed 20 years later, and then TV commercials, which began to air in 1968. Kmart is still the leading print promotional retailer, with weekly circulars reaching millions of households each week. By the 1950s, it was evident that the company needed to change to continue to be a leader in the growing competitive retail environment. That change came through Harry B. Cunningham, who became Kresge President in 1959. Cunningham had been studying other discount houses and developed a new strategy for the Kresge organization. Under Cunningham’s leadership, the first Kmart discount department store opened in 1962 in Garden City, Michigan. Seventeen additional Kmart stores opened that year, leading to corporate sales of more than $483 million that year. Just four years later in 1966, sales in 162 Kmart stores and 753 Kresge stores topped the $1 billion mark. In 1976, S.S. Kresge made history by opening 271 Kmart stores in one year, becoming the first-ever retailer to launch 17 million square feet of sales space in a single year. In 1977, nearly 95 percent of S.S.
Approximate Word count = 1860
Approximate Pages = 7.4
(250 words per page double spaced)
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