The sites of the three remaining mainland U.S. Kmart stores are up for grabs — big-box anchor spaces being pitched to new tenants — as the once-mighty chain and American cultural touchstone appears to be nearing the culmination of its slow wind-down.

The activity comes as Kmart closed its store in Avenel, New Jersey, the day before Easter. That week, shoppers sought bargains as the retailer tried to sell remaining inventory — and as pieces of the store itself were carted away by shoppers, both nostalgic visitors and bargain hunters. The closing left only three of the once-ubiquitous discount chain's sites open in the continental United States: in Westwood, New Jersey; Kendale Lakes Plaza in Miami; and in Bridgehampton, New York.

Now the three Kmarts are being marketed. Kimco Realty, a retail real estate investment trust based in Jericho, New York, owns two of the shopping centers where Kmart remains a tenant, in Miami and Bridgehampton. The REIT seeks a tenant for the store in the Hamptons, according to a marketing brochure, and broker JLL has that assignment for the Florida Kmart space. While broker CBRE handles subleasing Kmart’s space in Westwood, the space at the now-vacant Kmart in Avenel is also being shopped around.

Over the years, former Kmarts across the country have been repurposed or split up by new tenants. It's all part of the dwindling of a retail icon that changed the national lexicon, sparking phrases such as Blue Light Special and "Attention Kmart shoppers." The retailer once was a common sight across the country, with nearly 2,200 stores, and 30 years ago even Donald and Ivana Trump shopped at one in Pennsylvania for back-to-school clothes for their son Donald Jr., who was attending a nearby prep academy.

Now the remaining spaces that once drew shoppers are out of place, very large in an era when online sales are popular and many retailers are shrinking store footprints. The depth of the locations make subdividing a challenge in some cases, according to Matthew Harding, CEO of Levin Management, a shopping center landlord and manager based in North Plainfield, New Jersey.

Kmart’s closing of its Avenel store drew national attention, but it was merely part of the shutdown of the chain by its parent, Transformco in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. In the Garden State alone during the past three years, Kmarts were closed in towns such as Wayne, Trenton, Wall, Somers Point, Belleville and Kearny.

Kmart was somewhat of a retail innovator with roots dating back to 1899, when Sebastian Spering Kresge opened a modest five-and-dime store in downtown Detroit, according to Transformco’s website. The chain was an early advocate of layaway plans, which allowed patrons to pay off merchandise over time. In the 1960s, the well-known blue light was lit as a way to boost sales. And the call for the attention of shoppers, the signaling phrase repeated over loudspeakers across the stores, became a well-known catchphrase as customers got discounts for a limited time on certain items.

But like other discounters before it, Kmart failed to change and adapt to the competition of Walmart, Target and Amazon — a fatal mistake shared by its sister retailer, Sears. The parent company of the two chains, Sears Holdings, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2018. The company was then sold to former CEO Eddie Lampert, who launched Transformco to handle its brick-and-mortar portfolio in 2019. Transformco has been closing Kmart and Sears stores ever since.

Transformco has been unspecific about its plans for Kmart. The company didn’t respond to an email from CoStar News seeking a comment about its remaining Kmart stores, and neither did Tammi Banaszak, Transformco’s director of real estate. In addition to the three in the mainland United States, there are a half-dozen Kmarts in Guam, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The Kmart at the Kimco-owned center at 14091 SW 88th St. in Miami is 114,000 square feet, space now listed as available, according to CoStar data. JLL said it is offering the leasehold interest for that site, located in an area it described as “the highly sought-after Kendall market ... home to a dense residential population easily accessible from multiple areas.”

JLL broker Justin Greider declined to comment, and Kimco didn’t respond to an email seeking comment. So it’s unclear if JLL is representing Kmart or landlord Kimco on that particular lease.

In Bridgehampton, Kimco has issued a marketing brochure that includes the 89,935-square-foot Kmart at its shopping center there, Bridgehampton Commons at 2044 Montauk Highway on Long Island. That flyer describes the Kmart space as potentially available. Tom Pira, Kimco’s leasing representative, didn’t respond to an email or phone call seeking a comment on that property.

The third remaining Kmart is 84,280 square feet and is in the Westwood Plaza at 700 Broadway owned by Hekemian & Co. of Hackensack, New Jersey, according to CoStar data. A CBRE marketing brochure says the “Kmart box” space is available for sublease and offers an “anchor opportunity in the heart of Bergen County.” CBRE is representing Kmart, but the broker listed on the flyer, Marta Villa, didn’t respond to an email from CoStar News seeking comment, and neither did Hekemian.

Meanwhile, the owner of the Avenel shopping center, the Delco Plaza at 1644 St. Georges Ave. where the 85,748-square-foot Kmart just closed, said it is busy looking for another tenant or tenants to occupy that vacancy.

So far there’s been “very good interest from different sized tenants for the space,” Jack Jemal, with JJ Operating Real Estate Investments of Manhattan, said in an email. Delco Plaza has already seen one of its former tenants, a large grocery store, replaced by gym LA Fitness, and re-tenanting the Kmart space will mark the second phase of its redevelopment, according to the landlord.

“The Kmart space ... can be subdivided to accommodate tenants of 20,000 [square feet] or larger,” JJ Operating said. “The existing space measures roughly [400 feet by 200 feet], making it ideal for potential division. There are multiple loading docks and an abundant amount of parking to accommodate new retail users. ... The property is located directly across the street from a very successful Home Depot and within the extremely dense Woodbridge submarket.”

The last few days before the Kmart in Avenel closed, prices were slashed 30% to 80%. Large swaths of the store were vacant and cordoned off to the public. There was an eclectic array of goods, including apparel, shoes, groceries, beauty products and toys — even metal desks and rows of the small lockers that employees had once used. One corner of the store had dozens of clothing racks for sale for $25 each.

A man outside was loading store fixtures he’d purchased into a van.

Phyllis Wiley left the store after piling into her shopping cart two mannequins, which she had plucked from a display inside. Wiley, who had her 4-year-old granddaughter Astoria Terry in tow, said she owns a thrift shop in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and plans to use the mannequins to display clothing at her shop. She paid $100 each for them.

Another woman, who declined to be identified, was getting help lifting a vertical row of lockers into her cart. She said her husband and some of his friends had worked at the Kmart when they were young and in school, and she was getting the employee lockers as a memento for him. She said her husband and his friends lamented the store closing.

As she was exiting Kmart, Ofelia Garcia, a Rahway, New Jersey resident, said she had been shopping there for years. Asked where she will go now, she said Target.

It was a much different scene that same day at the Westwood Kmart. In advance of Easter, a cheery display at the store’s entrance showcased Easter outfits for a boy and a girl, Peeps candy, chocolate and a human-sized Easter Bunny on display. There were many aisles of women’s, men’s and apparel for children, groceries, shoes, grills, books, bikes, luggage, home goods and more unexpected items such as a washer, dryer and three refrigerators.

Transformco has offered little insight into the future of its remaining Kmart and Sears stores. During the height of the pandemic, some local governments used vacant sites as vaccination centers, but that has ended.

In January, Transformco issued a brief comment about the future, saying its “go-forward store strategy for Sears and Kmart is to operate a diversified portfolio consisting of a small number of larger, premier stores with a larger number of small-format stores — combined with its Shop Your Way rewards program, online marketplace and buy online, pick up in store capabilities.”

The company added that it “will continue to explore both Hometown Stores and Home & Life stores in cities and towns that previously had larger-format stores.” Those chains sell appliances, lawn and garden goods, and other home merchandise.

The remaining Kmart stores don’t have a long future, and neither does Sears, according to Chuck Lanyard, president of The Goldstein Group, a retail brokerage in Paramus, New Jersey. In an email, he described Kmart as “a dinosaur in retail,” adding, “I’m sure they are just running out the lease term, as they’ve done in other locations.”

Levin Management has been dealing with the failures of discount retailers since the 1970s, forced to find new occupants for stores once occupied by E.J. Korvette, W.T. Grant, Caldor and Bradlees, according to Harding.

Kmart was able to exit some leases as a result of the bankruptcy proceedings, and Harding said the remaining stores may have been allowed to survive so long because they were successful and profitable.

“They’re bringing money to the bottom line,” he said.

Levin Management has found new tenants for former Kmart spaces in its shopping centers, with a Fairway Market filling a vacant Kmart in Pelham, New York, for example, Harding said.

But the Kmart stores, because they are typically older brick-and-mortar sites, have drawbacks when it comes to attracting new tenants, according to Harding. Their ceiling heights are often too short to accommodate a retailer that might want to lease 80,000 to 100,000 square feet, he said. And some national retailers have a specific prototype footprint for their stores that ex-Kmart stores don’t match, Harding said.

Because the Kmart stores are so deep, it’s hard to just carve out usable space for multiple tenants.

“If you’re a 100,000-square-foot store you can be deeper because you’re still wide frontage,” Harding said. “But if you’re a 30,000-square-foot store, and you try to go 250 feet deep, you’re a bowling alley.”

Levin Management addressed that issue at a former Bradlees in New Brunwick, New Jersey, which it looked to subdivide for three tenants.

“So we actually cut the front of the building off so that we could provide more parking for these multiple tenants” and reduce the depth of the newly configured stores, Harding said.

The good news for someone trying to re-tenant a former Kmart space is that the retailer’s leases in general are so old that it was paying low rents, “so it makes economic sense to get it [that space] back, reinvest and get some more market kind of rents,” Harding said.

He has seen many chains rise and fall and said there is a lesson to be learned.

“In one sense it’s sad to see a long-standing retailer like Kmart go away that has been successful for a long time, not recently, but successful for a long time,” Harding said. “It shows the need to improve and adapt. That’s what happened over time with retailers that don’t improve their operations and adapt to the customers’ needs, they become a target in a sense for somebody — in this case, a Walmart or a Target — to build the better mouse trap and to take away their customers.”

With the old guard going out, a Target is taking over a former Kmart location at 1825 State Route 35 in Wall, New Jersey.