K-Mart in Penn Station is Closing
It is the End of an Era!
If you got it at K-Mart, you lied. You said it was from your aunt or, if you had to admit it was from K-Mart, you lied and said you shoplifted it. Or maybe you really did steal it. Then you bragged.
The point was that K-Mart sucked.
It was a stupid place to shop that reeked of American consumerism at its worst (oh, our foolishness in the days before Walmart and, gods help us, Amazon). We deliberately shopped anywhere but that fluorescent hell.
I have to admit that following the Christmas Eve fire that burned out house down after I’d first moved to Cleveland the Big K-Mart on West 65th Street was a frequent destination (Super K-Marts came later). What made that K-Mart memorable was its location next to one of the last remaining slaughterhouses in Cleveland and the pens of cattle were right behind the store.
The Big K-Mart at 150th and Lorain Avenue in Cleveland was built on land that had previously been one of the last trailer parks in the city. I used to cop from people who lived there. So when my “friends” got evicted and that Big K-Mart got built on their former home site, it was yet another affront.
