https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/kmart-elegy
A REMARKABLE FACT: Despite the former ubiquity of both Howard Johnson’s and Kmart—and notwithstanding the nostalgia of their small communities of fans—both chains have left hardly a trace in the popular culture. In business, as in life, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
The demise of Howard Johnson’s, and likewise that of Kmart, is a cautionary business tale. But it’s also a humbling and almost spooky story. The orange-roofed, sharply angled roadside structures you’ll still occasionally notice along the highway have become something like artifacts; those big empty stores, many of them too dated or distressed to ever be occupied again, are our moss-covered ruins. Their big empty parking lots testify to something that once was—something that drew people by the thousands.
Apart from historians of retail or of the culture of the twentieth-century American roadside, few will care about these chains or their stories. And why should they, really? Without the nostalgic ties of personal memories to create a context for these places, they’re just buildings in a sea of others like them. But I find they have an almost spiritual use as reminders that nothing is permanent and nothing is guaranteed.