K-Mart, The Beautiful Chaos

"Excuse me, ma'am, could you tell me where the bathroom is?"

"Sure," the elderly lady in the K-Mart electronics section says. "Just go right over there, past the furniture section, in the back ... you'll smell it when you get there."

And sure enough, we do.

Somehow, she knows the bathroom will stink. And somehow, we know this is OK with her and, it appears, whoever is in charge.

And it's OK with us. It's K-Mart. This is the way things are ... and always have been.

These days, K-Mart is stuck in a limbo of identity crisis.

K-Mart is not Wal-Mart -- with its robotic economic precision and onward faster/bigger/cheaper/crappier corporate mission statement -- nor is it Target, which polishes its image by marketing cheaply constructed clothes as more fashionable and durable than they really are. Target is for those who for some reason feel guilty shopping at Wal-Mart and feel soiled after just a few seconds in K-Mart.


There was a time K-Mart was what it was: blue-light specials on the Miami Vice apparel, bland popcorn, a 25-cent ride on the slowly revolving singing turtle, the absolute nirvana of a cherry Icee machine.

Those are gone. After years of declining sales, K-Mart has recently redefined itself in an effort to make money.

What that new definition is ... it seems as if K-Mart itself isn't sure.

Beautiful chaos reigns.

There is a sense of thrown-togetherness: batting gloves blend into calcium-enriched grape juice blends into toilet paper blends into televisions in a way that says, "we have what you need and only what you need and if you need more we're not for you."

We drink a hot, liter-sized bottle of strawberry-flavored water while shopping because it's a.) 50 cents a bottle and b.) such a K-Mart thing to do, because no one will hassle you because, well, it's K-Mart.

Beyond the stench of the bathroom, the grimy scent of a superstore-that's-not-a-superstore permeates, granting a sense of underdogedness.

Somehow, K-Mart doesn't feel like a monument to mass production, though it is. The toy section has the modern version of Hot Wheels with pimped-out "Playayzzz" brand stretch limos and tricked out racers.

They probably have them at Wal-Mart. Yet, they seem to fit more here, where a miniature tricked-out stretch limo is a perfect metaphor for the no-man's-land K-Mart finds itself in.

We long for the days of the blue-light special. We pine for its return, a return not likely to happen.

K-Mart will never be more than it is. It will assimilate into a finely greased machine; its elemental appeal will be lost forever, making it K-Mart no longer.

Like an art-house cinema, we wish we could subsidize the superstore so that it could make money being what it is rather than whatever it thinks it has to be to survive.

For now, even as its essence transforms, it is still a journey into a chaos underlying a deliberate order.

And bathrooms that stink to high heaven.