For several weeks, the “EVERYTHING MUST GO!” billboard
screamed at travelers driving up I-69 in Michigan. It was the first in a group
of signs—each blaring a similar all-caps message—starting five miles outside
Marshall and leading passing cars off the highway in something like a haphazard
funeral procession which ended at the city’s Kmart. There shoppers paid their
respects to the gasping retail chain whose history in the state began sixty
years ago, and, in November, ended there, too, when the last of my co-workers
locked the front doors one final time. I had left by then and so had most
everyone else, a strange crew of hangers-on, often working odd hours and
performing unusual tasks. But that was our job: we made everything go.
Of course, it didn’t feel
like Kmart was going anywhere when I pulled into the parking lot on my first
day. The asphalt was freshly paved, as if the store had just opened. And some
of the sale signs plastered on the storefront easily could have been repurposed
for a grand opening. That illusion vanished as soon as I stepped inside. A
closed in-store Little Caesars loomed over the checkout aisles. Whole sections
in the back sat vacant as workers dismantled the shelves. The floor displays
were a mess.
I shook hands with Paul, the
store’s manager, and he led me into the backroom to fill out some paperwork. I
didn’t really know what to expect when he turned me over to Amy, the assistant
manager, for the onboarding process. After all, the store was closing in two
weeks; there couldn’t be that much to say. It soon became clear that in Amy’s
mind, Kmart had already died. She told me I could work whatever hours I pleased
and for however long I wished, a practice almost unheard of in retail. When I
stocked shelves at Safeway, for instance, I was a slave to the schedule my
manager made for me. I was surprised by this Kmart policy and reached for a pen
to sign my employment agreement. A small fly crawled across the paper. Amy
smashed it.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
She soon took me to the
front of the store and passed me off to the mostly female checkout staff. They
also had long ago given up on Kmart and spent most of the time when they
weren’t helping customers, whom they uniformly hated, bantering about their
divorces and children, and bullying Cheryl, a kind older woman whose only
misfortune was not sharing in any of theirs. Once, when we were all smoking
outside, Cheryl accidentally singed the tips of her hair. Gabby, the checkout
staff’s ringleader, mocked her: “Oh? So you’ve never smoked before?” The others
piled on, rather cruelly.
I learned a lot about these
women. Sophia was going through a rough divorce. She said she would rather be
manning the register at the local marijuana dispensary and fantasized about
sitting behind the counter sampling the product. Ellie, who had only started a
week before me, couldn’t stand being in a place that required her to wear a
surgical mask. When I flouted the rule, she confronted me.
“Wait, why don’t you have
to wear a mask?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I
responded, choosing my words carefully. “No one told me to.”
Ellie looked at Gabby, and
Gabby looked at Sophia. They each said one by one that they wouldn’t force me
to comply. It was a small comfort, but a comfort nonetheless. Those women
looked out for each other—and me.
It was a different story in
the back. There two guys with hardly anything in common were clearing out
shelving units. The younger one, Declan, had only recently graduated high
school, and this was his first job. His father had been here before him, but he
quit for the Walmart down the road. And, of course, Declan didn’t want to be at
Kmart either: he planned to join the Army once the store shut down. He didn’t
have much else to say, except for the stray question about my love life. He
asked whether I had a girlfriend (no) and whether I was interested in men (also
no). Well, he told me, there were plenty of people back in high school who
swung both ways. “You know there are no cameras upstairs,” he added
emphatically. “Like, you can do anything, and no one can see it.” He continued
the innuendos, but I had heard enough. I stepped outside for a cigarette in the
cold rain.
The other guy, Mike, looked
like he was in his sixties, but actually he was only forty-three years old. He
had worked at Kmarts around the state for most of his adult life and
moonlighted as a Papa John’s delivery driver. He was more focused on work, and,
unlike Declan, was affable and easygoing. Like a lot of people with a delivery
job, he was upset about high gas prices and blamed the current president. Not
too long ago—under Trump, he claimed—gas in Marshall had been just under a
dollar. He was also skeptical of electric and self-driving cars, which he was
certain were scams. Mike owned three non-electric cars and was proud of all of
them. A few years ago, Mike helped break down the second-to-last Kmart in
Michigan, just half an hour down the road in Jackson, which made him the
backroom’s resident expert. He showed us how to separate out the scrap metal
from the rest of the stock and palletize it so that it could be sold to
junkyards. He told us that we could take anything we found upstairs; it was all
trash at this point anyway.
Declan, perhaps because of
the lack of camera surveillance, kept running upstairs and hiding in a rather
dark corner behind some shelves. I couldn’t tell what he was doing, but he
bolted up there whenever he got the chance. I admit that when I investigated, I
expected to find something unseemly. Instead, I burst out laughing. There,
stuffed in the corner, was an old grocery bag filled with hundreds of unused
Michigan Lottery scratchers. Scratched-up tickets lay on the floor around it.
When I mentioned the bag to Mike, he chuckled. There was no chance that Declan
would ever hit the jackpot. The scratchers were long expired. “Anyway,” Mike
said, “you have to scan them into the store system to work. They’re made that
way so no one can steal them.”
But there were plenty of
other things that we took from the backroom without shame. Our main goal was to
find some old Kmart memorabilia, which many of the employees felt they deserved
for their decades of service and commitment even as the chain lurched in and
out of bankruptcy. And they did deserve it. Our scavenger hunt was like one
last Blue Light Special sale. Unfortunately, the pickings were slim: an old
Santa Claus suit, more than one V.C.R., and a useless pile of dial-up-era
computers. At one point, someone found a box of re-usable red Kmart-branded
shopping bags. These we decided to take, and we were careful to hide them from
John, the liquidator sent to Marshall from the corporate headquarters in
Chicago.
John was always walking
around the store, calculating how much money he could squeeze out of the place
before it closed. “He’ll try to sell anything he can get his hands on,”
resentful employees insisted. We all feared that he would find our souvenirs
and sequester them. Amy called him “the Bad Guy”. John of course knew that he
wasn’t liked. “Amy makes me sound worse than I am,” he told me. “It’s not like
I have a gun that turns you into liquid. I’m just helping the store close
down.” Maybe no one liked him because he so clearly was not from Marshall and
had the difficult job of winding down one of the city’s major employers. John
was a hard worker. I liked talking with him. And someone had to be the Bad Guy.
Later the Bad Guy would be
Paul, the manager. One day I was filling out some paperwork when he walked into
the backroom and saw me maskless. “I knew I was forgetting something,” he said.
“You have to wear a mask. Has no one
told you that?”
I recalled my conversation
with the checkout women and once again tried to speak carefully: “No, no one
has,” I said. “I don’t have one.”
I really didn’t have one,
and like all the other employees, I didn’t want to wear one. But Paul gave me a
mask anyway and told me to put it on in front of him. It broke immediately. He
gave me another one, and that broke too. I discarded it once I was out of his
sight.
When my last day arrived,
no one knew it but me. I had simply decided that it was time to leave. That
morning I quietly palletized shelves with Mike and Declan. The dirt and dust
caked on our hands was a disgusting shade of brown. Meanwhile Paul and Amy used
a forklift to move and arrange the finished pallets. It seemed odd that the
manager and assistant manager were doing this work, but it wasn’t as if I could
have done it. I’m not forklift certified. It was also odd that we were still
restocking some items. In the mid-morning a U.P.S. truck with a shipment of pajamas
showed up behind the store. Paul, Mike, and I unloaded them, and I silently
wondered why we were doing any of this at all. Half the store was already empty
and the rest of it was quickly getting cleaned out.
As we walked back into the
store, Paul once again told me to put a mask on, admitting, however, that
nobody wanted to do it. “Why do we have to wear them, then?” I asked. “What is
Kmart going to do if we don’t—shut down the store?” He paused for a moment and
sighed. “It’s just store policy,” he said, and returned to his office. I felt
bad afterward, even though I was only joking. Paul didn’t want to wear a mask.
He didn’t want to tell me to wear a mask. And no matter what he did, he was
still losing his job.
I spent part of my last
hour tossing metal scraps into a dumpster, alone. Every now and then a piece
not thrown high enough would clang against the high wall and ricochet back at
me. It was an odd way to close out the life of a big-box store whose reach at
one point was rivaled only by Sears. When this location closed down, I thought,
there would only be six left in the country—and none in the Midwest where the
chain originated. That meant there couldn’t be more than five hundred of us
still employed by Kmart. What a strange chance that I ended up as one of those
people.
Soon my back began to hurt
and I was anxious to leave. I should have listened to those signs that say,
“Lift with your legs, not your back.” I decided to palletize shelves in the
store since working at the dumpster was no fun alone. But with every minute
that passed inside my back hurt more and more. It felt like time was slowing
down. And it didn’t help that I forgot to eat lunch that day. Just before my
shift ended I went to the break room and found a guy sitting there eating a
sandwich. He nodded at me and I at him as I grabbed a bag of off-brand Doritos.
He asked when I got off my shift. I said 5:00 p.m. He looked up at the clock
and saw that it read 4:55 p.m. “Oh,” he said. Not his problem.
As I was clocking out, a
customer walked in and started talking to John. “Man, I remember when this
place opened, that’s how old I am!” he said. “It really is sad to see it go.”
John hurried away from him. He was still the Bad Guy. “Yeah,” he said. “It is.”
Colman
Rowan is the editor of American Colman, a
humor website.