Charles City Kmart to shutter doors and cease operation

By Kelly Terpstra, kterpstra@charlescitypress.com

The Charles City Kmart will apparently soon close its doors.

That’s the news that one local store official broke to employees on Wednesday afternoon after the announcement was made via a conference call from Kmart’s parent company, Transform Holdco LLC.

“We were just informed. We don’t have a lot of information at all at this point,” said the store official.

The Charles City Kmart, located at 1405 S. Grand Ave., is one of only two Kmart stores left in Iowa. The other, in Algona, was also told Tuesday that it will be closed, according to a story in the Kossuth County Advance newspaper.

The employee, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, did not know when the Kmart in Charles City would close. He said he thought it likely the store in Charles City would remain open through the holidays.

“That’s kind of my understanding, yes,” he said. “I’m pretty positive, just from what I know at this point.”

He said he had been informing other Kmart employees of the decision received from the corporate headquarters that the store will be shuttered just prior to being called by the Charles City Press regarding a closing rumor.

Kmart was a subsidiary of Sears Holdings Corp. and is now a subsidiary of Transform Holdco LLC. The company has been closing stores nationwide for years since first going through bankruptcy in 2002, then a couple of reorganizations. From 2010 to 2018 about 1,000 Kmart stores were closed, according to news reports.

In October 2018, Sears Holding filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

In August this year, company officials first announced that 26 Sears and Kmart stores would close by October, then later that month announced almost 100 more stores would close by December or sooner.

“Following these steps, we will continue to evaluate our network of Sears and Kmart stores and cannot rule out additional store closures in the near term,” the company’s August statement said.

For the last year or so, the company has not released specific lists of which stores would be closing.