Which three Kmart stores are still trading?
Three Kmart stores were open in September 2026, and only one of them sits in the 50 states.
The mainland survivor is in Kendale Lakes, in southwest Miami, at 14091 SW 88th Street. It is not a discount department store any more. Kmart leased most of the building to the home goods chain At Home in 2023 and kept the corner that used to be the garden department, so what is left runs about the size of a neighborhood drugstore and stocks shampoo, cleaning supplies, clothing and small appliances.
The second is a full-size big-box store in Tamuning, Guam. It is the largest of the three by a wide margin and the only one that still looks like the Kmart people remember, which makes the most complete Kmart on earth a store most Americans will never walk into.
The third is a big-box store at Tutu Park Mall on St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Kmart.com is still trading and still ships to all 50 states plus APO and FPO addresses, so for almost every American the honest answer to "is Kmart still open" is a website rather than a parking lot.
Who owns Kmart today?
Transform SR Brands LLC, which trades as Transformco, owns Kmart. It is privately held, so it publishes no store counts and no sales figures for the brand. The count above comes from local reporting in Florida, Guam and the Virgin Islands, not from the company.
Kmart ended up there through Edward Lampert. His hedge fund, ESL Investments, bought up Kmart debt while the retailer was in Chapter 11 and turned it into control when the company came out. When the combined Sears Holdings collapsed years later, Lampert bought the pieces worth keeping out of that bankruptcy in 2019, and the surviving Kmart stores went into Transformco.
Transformco has spent the years since subtracting rather than adding. In July 2026 its logistics arm filed a Pennsylvania layoff notice to close a 2.2 million square foot distribution center at 1 Kresge Road in Falls Township, cutting 147 jobs, with a final day of September 16, 2026. The road is named for S. S. Kresge, whose five-and-dime chain grew into Kmart. The company that began as Kresge shut the warehouse on Kresge Road.
How Kmart fell from 2,486 stores to three
Kmart peaked in 1994 with 2,486 stores worldwide. Then Walmart beat it on price, Target beat it on presentation, and the buildings aged badly around cluttered aisles and empty shelves.
On January 22, 2002, Kmart Corporation filed for Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois, the largest retail bankruptcy in the country to that point. All 2,114 Kmart stores stayed open that day, propped up by $2 billion in debtor in possession financing, and the company pointed at a collapse in fourth quarter sales and a loss of supplier confidence.
Chief executive Charles C. Conaway said the company would take "full advantage of this chance to make a fresh start and reposition Kmart for the future" in the announcement issued on the day of the filing. Kmart came out of Chapter 11 in 2003 and merged with Sears in 2005 to form Sears Holdings Corporation, which filed for bankruptcy of its own in 2018. Two chains that had each been the largest retailer in America managed to fail together.
Why Bridgehampton was the end of the mainland run
The last full-size Kmart in the mainland United States stood in Bridgehampton, New York, on the east end of Long Island. It closed on October 20, 2024.
The setting was strange enough to make national news. A discount chain built for Michigan and the Midwest finished its mainland run in the Hamptons, in a store that had outlived more than 2,000 other American Kmarts. Shoppers cleared the shelves of toys and shoes in the final weeks, and the red sign came down.
What was left after that was the Miami fragment plus the two stores in the territories. The pattern is familiar from the rest of the big-box collapse of the era. RadioShack and Woolworth both ended as brand names attached to something other than the stores that made them, and Kmart went the same way: the logo outlives the leases.
What happened to Kmart in the U.S. Virgin Islands?
In 2024 the U.S. Virgin Islands still had three Kmart stores, more than the entire mainland. Within a year it had one.
Transform KM LLC gave notice in May 2025 that it would permanently close the Sunny Isle store on St. Croix, and the store shut in the first week of July 2025, about a month earlier than most of the staff expected. It was the second St. Croix closure in two years. The Lockhart Gardens store on St. Thomas went next, closing on August 16, 2025 after a liquidation sale that included the fixtures.
That left Tutu Park as the last Kmart in the territory. Leasing manager Lilibet Foster and marketing director Juan Christian said in September 2025 that "Tutu Park Mall has received no indication from Kmart that they are closing the store as long as there is sufficient business." The Kmart pharmacy inside it did close that month, after running since the store opened in 1995, with prescriptions and staff moving to the Walgreens across the street.
What was the Blue Light Special?
The Blue Light Special ran from 1965 to 1991. A rotating blue light was wheeled out to a rack or a bin, a loudspeaker announced "Attention, Kmart shoppers," and whatever sat under the light was cheap for a few minutes. It was a flash sale decades before anyone used the phrase.
Kmart retired it in 1991 and then kept exhuming it, with revivals running into the 2010s. None of them worked, and the reason is not sentiment. The original landed because information was scarce. A shopper in 1978 had no practical way to check whether the price under the light was any good. By the 2010s the same shopper could compare three retailers on a phone while standing in the aisle.
That, more than any single bad quarter, is what replaced Kmart. Walmart took the price position, Target took the taste position, and online retail took the browsing. The blue light was left announcing discounts to people who could already see every price in the country.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Kmart stores are left in 2026?
Three Kmart stores are open in 2026: a small store in Kendale Lakes, Florida, a full-size store in Tamuning, Guam, and a full-size store at Tutu Park Mall on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Only the Florida store is in the 50 states, and it occupies a corner of a building Kmart mostly leased away in 2023.
Who owns Kmart now?
Kmart is owned by Transform SR Brands LLC, which trades as Transformco and is tied to the investor Edward Lampert. Transformco took over the surviving Sears and Kmart assets out of the Sears Holdings bankruptcy in 2019. It is privately held, so it publishes no store count or sales figure for Kmart.
When did the last full-size Kmart close?
The last full-size Kmart in the mainland United States, in Bridgehampton, New York, closed on October 20, 2024. Kmart had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on January 22, 2002 with 2,114 stores still open, and the chain was already down to a handful of locations before Bridgehampton shut its doors.