Kmart #7294 - Vero Beach, FL - The Afterlife

Kmart #7294

1501 US Highway 1, Vero Beach, FL - Indian River Plaza

     Good evening, everyone, and welcome to today's spooky edition of My Florida Retail. On this night of horrors and nightmares, I bring to you one of the oldest and scariest tales known to the retail fan - a Spirit Halloween store in a former Kmart (cue the high pitched scream). On this evening of dead retail coming back to life to haunt our souls (and hopefully not eat our brains), we travel to the city of Vero Beach, Florida to explore this peculiar fright. It is here where we will meet one of the bravest, most daring, most fearless individuals known to man, who will risk everything to confront this undead retail specimen, My Florida Retail's very own AFB. What he's about to see might scare you, it might haunt you, it might even jump out of your computer screen and grab you (especially if you were drinking before you read this, or just watched Poltergeist), but if nothing else, it will provide to everyone an interesting conclusion to the story of the Vero Beach Kmart store...

     Since its closure in December 2019, the old Vero Beach Kmart store has sat empty. Kmart still holds the lease on this building until 2024, and a local developer wants to build a 250-unit apartment complex at the site of the old Kmart once the lease expires. Kmart's corporate entity (or whatever is left of it) hasn't seemed to show any desire to sign the lease over to the developer early (as he seemed to want, according to the article), so unless Kmart finds a new tenant for the space before the lease expires, most likely this building will be sitting empty back here, frozen in time, until it's demolished for that apartment project. However, for the 2020 and 2021 Halloween seasons, the old Kmart was home to our old retail hermit crab friend, Spirit Halloween. The pictures we'll be looking at today were taken during Spirit's 2021 bout in this building, a fun way to conclude my coverage of this store's closing (and transition it into the afterlife, as we don't need the restless spirit of Kmart wreaking havoc on the innocent people of Vero Beach because it has unfinished business to take care of - although I've heard rumors that the sequel to this year's Spirit Halloween movie was going to use that plot line! 😁)

     Even though Spirit was fully operational in here, their tiny banner pales in comparison to the sign from the original tenant. Vero Beach must have some kind of ordinance about banners on buildings, as Kmart was never allowed to hang their large "store closing" banner on the front of the building, and Spirit was limited to that tiny one hidden on the awning.

     Spirit made up for their tiny storefront sign with all these decals and posters on the front windows, making their presence in the building known.

     So for the final time, let's walk through these doors and see what relics of dead retail may be lurking in our presence...

     For their store, Spirit walled off a small space in the middle of Kmart's salesfloor, a small fraction of the Kmart building that was deep but not very wide. When Kmart was here, the view in front of me would have looked more like this, with the women's clothing and jewelry counter in view.

     Ahhh, floating dismembered arms!!! (Or just shoppers crashing my photo, you never know which when exploring undead retail). Turning to the right, our view (which used to look like this) now leads to Spirit's partition wall shortly ahead. Spirit arranged the store with adult costumes on the right side of the salesfloor, kids costumes to the left, and props and decorations in the middle.

     To display some of the props and decorations, Spirit set up a few of their famous haunted houses in the middle of the salesfloor. In front of the haunted house was a neat little prop called the Pumpkin Carve o'Matic, which was apparently one of Spirit's signature store displays for 2021. It was fun to watch, and myself and a few others who were wandering around stood there and watched it for a while.

     When Kmart left the building, they took everything inside with them. Whatever didn't sell in the fixture sale was either sent to other stores or tossed, as there weren't any fixtures of any kind left hiding behind Spirit's temporary walls.

     The orange lines on the ground were laid out by Spirit to designate their main actionways (which follow a bunch of convoluted patterns, and not really a straight line). The gray lines are Kmart's old tile markings for their former actionways.

     A Kmart classic - the giant round air diffuser - comes into view in this shot.

     This photo shows the entire width of the space Spirit occupied, looking from the back left corner of their space to the back right. I'd estimate Spirit took only one quarter of the space Kmart used, thus leaving a lot left over. It appears in recent times, Spirit has begun looking for smaller retail spaces to hermit crab in rather than the large former big-box and supermarket spaces they were famous for using in years past. As such, for the 2022 Halloween season, Spirit opted to not use the former Vero Beach Kmart building, but instead the smaller space left vacant by the Salvation Army Thrift Store at the other end of the plaza (following the Salvation Army's move to the south side of town). I'm glad I visited this store when I did, or else I'd have been out of luck seeing the inside of the old Kmart this year!

     Another Kmart classic is the giant electrical box on the pole. I don't know what exact function those boxes had (phone lines or some kind of wiring hub), but you could usually find one of them hanging around on a pole in any given Kmart.

     I visited this Spirit location only a few days before Halloween, which is why there were large chunks of the center salesfloor looking quite empty, as merchandise was being consolidated toward the walls. I said before that I got really lucky visiting this store when I did, as this was a totally unintended stop for me! I was returning home from a different trip to South Florida this day and decided to cut over from I-95 to US 1 for the rest of my drive home. I passed the Kmart and remembered Spirit was there, and the stop was certainly worth it!

     Spirit's check lanes were located in front of that purple paper along the front wall, roughly in the same area as Kmart's old check lanes.

     The black partitions to my left were used for the queueing of the line to the registers, with more children's costumes out of frame to my right.

     When I was here, Spirit had a small section of their own branded merchandise, limited to a few hats and a sweater this late in the season. Spirit has made their mark in recent years for being the largest pop-up Halloween chain in the US (especially with the glut of empty retail space out there right now), and they've also built up a bit of notoriety from being the butt of numerous jokes on the internet, which I think has made them even more popular.

     Here's one last look inside our "Spirit of Kmart", as we approach the exit...

     From the vestibule, we get a small glimpse into the empty right side of the building, where all the lights were shut off except for the security ones. Somewhat of a spooky vantage point to conclude our interior tour with...

     So I visited the Spirit of Kmart and lived to tell the tale! (And I didn't even have to use the proton pack once!) Now in the safety of the parking lot, on the way back to my car, I also spotted this example of the spirit of cars past:

     Someone with a Dodge Omni decided to go for a stroll around the local Spirit store while I was here. For a car from the 1980's, it looks like it was kept in really nice shape, and I'm sure this car has made a lot of trips to Kmart in its lifetime too!

     Also on the topic of cars in the parking lot of the old Kmart, some folks from the competition also decided to pop over and make sure the Kmart corpse was officially dead (or maybe they just wanted to buy some Halloween decorations). This SUV is used by Walmart's In-Home delivery service, which is a program that was piloted in 2019 in three markets (Kansas City, MO, Pittsburgh, PA, and Vero Beach, FL). With this program, you can order groceries from Walmart and have them delivered to your home, however, the delivery person will actually go into your home and stock everything in the refrigerator and pantry for you (which I think is a bit creepy, but that's just me). This was my first time seeing the dedicated In-Home delivery vehicle out and about. In 2022, Walmart launched their In-Home delivery service into more markets, and now includes the service as an upgrade to the Walmart+ program. For those of you not near Vero Beach, you might be seeing more of these vehicles around now too.

     Following my visit to the Spirit store, we'll jump ahead a few months to the summer of 2022. I was passing by this store early in the morning around sunrise, and pulled in for a few additional photos to conclude my coverage of this store with. The lighting on this particular morning worked out great for me, and I really like how the pictures turned out.

     With Spirit over in the former Salvation Army space for 2022, this is what the old Vero Beach Kmart looks like now, and probably will continue to look like until the lease on the building expires in 2024. The sign still up, landscaping maintained, and lights on, it only looks like Kmart hasn't opened for the day yet to the casual passer-by. I didn't get a picture of it, but Kmart's logo is still on the pylon sign out front on US 1 too. Sadly, if you walk up to the building you'll see the truth, and realize you haven't come across an operating retail relic from times gone by (you have to keep on driving down to Miami for that, and some big changes are about to come to the Miami Kmart soon if you haven't heard yet).

     The shopping center was super quiet on the morning I took these photos. I was the only person back here, with only the faint sound of cars going by on US 1 in the distance. I guess all that adds into the spooky effect from the Spirit Halloween part of this post too!

     With all of Spirit's stuff gone, looking through the one missing hurricane panel we see the empty shell of Kmart.

     I only frequented this store for the last 4 years of its life, but in that short time I grew quite fond of this place. I saw a lot of change in that short time, made some memories, and continued to grasp what little bits of the Kmart experience I could in that time. The last time I saw Kmart as a semi-decently put together retailer was in this building, the Kmart that I knew for years from childhood until the doors of this store were locked for good. That's the Kmart I want to remember. I know the last 20 years for Kmart haven't been glamorous, but up until 2019 there still seemed to be some small shreds of competency that Kmart tried to hold on to, which all fell apart shortly after this store closed. The remaining Kmart in Miami is not much more than a Kmart in name only these days - left to wither away as a glamorized closeout store stuffed in the original building's garden center.

     Just a month shy of the three year anniversary of this store's closure, my coverage of this place finally comes to an end. This is probably a terrible time to remind myself I have a few sets of photos from the closure of the Sears on the other side of town I need to post too, but I'll take the satisfaction of finishing this series and hold onto that for a little while right now! Anyway, plenty more adventures (both spooky and not spooky) to come in the future on MFR, so keep an eye out for those from myself and the other MFR contributors.

Happy Halloween everyone, and until the next post,

The Brave and Fearless AFB