Kmart OFFICIALLY PHASING OUT GAMES SECTION. 20% Off Games Accessories! Clearance DEALS INSIDE! Post your finds here!

Surprised KMart is still around TBH, but I'm glad you have a job! Thanks for the info.

I hope there's some good clearance deals for consoles soon.

hopefully they update it sooner then later

[quote name="Caffeinefree" post="12464942" timestamp="1422897592"]YMMV Deals at bottom.

So I am an employee of Kmart and happened to see this memo pass through my local store. I can't repeat it verbatim, and I couldn't get a picture of the message due to being constantly on camera.

Basically the memo stated the "exit strategy" for the games section in retail stores. Stating that this was in essence brought on by having overstocked shelves (bwa hahaha) and not enough customers. However Kmart.com, Sears.com, and Shopyourwayrewards.com, would continue to sell games and consoles to meet peoples needs. So they're switching focus from retail to online.

The message continued to explain to sell down merch and fill the empty space with other merch. Eventually to clearance out the whole section if it didn't sell down.


So firstly, wait. Just wait and deals will come.


As a customer I have to say that Kmart has had nothing but crappy deals for the past few years. (On games) Focusing on SYWR points and mediocre sales to bring in customers rather than staying competitive with Amazon, Walmart, and pretty much any retailer that will actually give a deep discount. Therefore they have shot themselves in the foot and driven away most business. As a result of that they face what I call "the burger problem".

When Kmart doesn't get games in to sell, they can't sell them. But instead of getting more stock I guess they just say "X person doesn't want Y game". This is just like a survey of a small town saying no one in the town likes burgers, because no one eats burgers. Only to find out there is nowhere to eat burgers in the first place.

Why doesn't Kmart get games to sell? I don't know if Kmart as a whole does this, or just my store, but we don't get games on a truck. We get them in sporadically via UPS, and never before release date. We get limited quantities and then get restocks oddly. Over the holidays I got dozens of calls for titles we wouldn't get in for weeks. During Christmas we only got a handful of Xbox Ones and no PS4s, and since then only one Wii U and one 3DS XL, which may have been returns. In short they could be making money, but there is just some really bad policies in place that leave plenty of customers walking out the door.

Then on top of that we barely make any money in markup. We buy games basically at cost, given only a few dollars. I've seen games we bought for 58.50 selling for $60. Same for all peripherals, a 20 charger may have costed 12 for us. I was really shocked about this when I first started looking into it. Whereas other sections of the store have a markup that's understandable.

So now after all this poor management, they're getting rid of what has always been the best part of the electronics section - games. I remember there being something said about "better serving our customer's needs", the problem in the first place was that they didn't serve our needs. For the most part they were poorly stocked, AND THIS HAS KILLED THEM THE MOST.


So to finish out here's some YMMV deals.


Disney Infinity 1.0 (360) - $30

Splinter Cell Blacklist (360) $15

Gears of War Judgement - $7.50

Dead Island Riptide (360) - $7.50



Disney Infinity 1.0 (PS3) - $20

Afterglow Universal Headset - $30[/quote]

Those prices seem high since I got Killzone, Ground Zeroes, and Knack for $10 each from my local Kmart not to long ago.

I was told the same thing by another Kmart employee.

So are the sales up to the individual store or does corporate give you prices and dates to markdown? Thabks for letting us know.

RIP Kmart Video Game Section.

I will always have a special place in my heart for Kmart solely because of the Wii launch. Local shopping plaza had (at the time) Walmart at one end and Kmart at the other. Everyone is lined up for consoles at Walmart, and my brother and I split up - he lines up for Walmart and I line up for Kmart on the off chance they have systems. By the morning, the Walmart line was at least 50+, and there were maybe 6 people in line for Kmart (myself included). Well, I got my hands on a console and my brother did not. Thanks Kmart!

I recently was in my local Kmart for other items and popped over to electronics. Man, what a wasteland. I'm not even sure they'll have anything to phase out at this point.

Men and women grab your horses we shall ride to this Land of Kmart!

I don't want Kmart to go out of business. Their game deals help me get stuff cheap thanks to discover price protection.

Let me know when PS4 and X1 games go on clearance.

I'm only up for PS4 games, as I snagged Knack for $10 and Shadow of Mordor for $25. RIP Kmart

The writing has been on the wall for awhile. Kmart didn't get several big name games last holiday season. Like, I don't think they've gotten any new games in since October.

The writing has been on the wall for awhile. Kmart didn't get several big name games last holiday season. Like, I don't think they've gotten any new games in since October.

Zeldafanatic15 said:

So are the sales up to the individual store or does corporate give you prices and dates to markdown? Thabks for letting us know.

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I don't know if they will, but I'm good friends with the guy in electronics. Will update this with lists and more news ASAP.

I actually saw 3DS XLs on clearance at my store on Saturday.  The red and black ones were priced at $120.

My body is ready for cheap shovelware.  My last local Kmart has very few titles left.

Caffeine, K-Mart is braindead.  If they had any sense they would pull a SuperTarget and sell groceries, especially Organics.  KMart had the chance to make all their groceries non-GMO to draw people like me and others in for non-gaming stuff.

Also, what idiots sell games that close to cost?!  I mean $58.90?  Don't they go directly to wholesalers?  I mean wtf?!

Sarang01 said:

Caffeine, K-Mart is braindead. If they had any sense they would pull a SuperTarget and sell groceries, especially Organics. KMart had the chance to make all their groceries non-GMO to draw people like me and others in for non-gaming stuff.

Also, what idiots sell games that close to cost?! I mean $58.90? Don't they go directly to wholesalers? I mean wtf?!

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Really Organics would of been the way to go if they could get the price cheap enough. One of the reason I hate walking into Wal Mart is because I know that the food I get there is either processed to hell or questionable as in filled with GMO garbage/pesticides. If K-mart could offer better options then it would of brought the quality of the stores up a bit.

The Sears near me already pulled all the games and game related stuff after all those super low prices around xmas. Saw this coming for a while!

bought disney infinity for 19.00  the game section had a whole 2 games 

Was told this by several employees. Hopefully there will be some more amazing deals.

Sad to see them go and will miss those great deals

The gaming section of the kmarts near me (the ones that aren't closed) look like old west ghost town pics with tumble weeds and cobwebs.  Everything of any value is already gone.  Wish I would have taken a pic but at one store that would have had an aisle of games or skylanders or whatever, the entire aisle was batteries.  Something like 4 ft by 16 ft of nothing but AA and AAA.  Not even different brands, they were all the same!

Good luck to everyone else.

The stores near me have next to nothing to begin with outside of shovelware. The Sears store at the mall doesn't even have games any more. I was already feeling sad about Sears losing its video game section. Both places were always good to me for clearance as well as sometimes hard to find games.

The gaming section of the kmarts near me (the ones that aren't closed) look like old west ghost town pics with tumble weeds and cobwebs.  Everything of any value is already gone.  Wish I would have taken a pic but at one store that would have had an aisle of games or skylanders or whatever, the entire aisle was batteries.  Something like 4 ft by 16 ft of nothing but AA and AAA.  Not even different brands, they were all the same!

 

 

Good luck to everyone else.

I went to a Kmart last week and all I found worth while was Harvest Moon Animal Parade for $10. Got it thanks to my SYW points too...woot!

Its definitely an end of an era. Sears and Kmart are done with games. Both of these stores were tremendous over the last 10 years on CAG for cagers to get deals. Its sad to see it end. Its the same feeling I had when Circuit City closed. We are losing all of the great clearance game stores.

What makes it even worse is that places like Walmart, which will last forever, dont have a good clearance structure. Target is hit or miss but at least provides every now and then. 

As for the OP, while we appreciate you giving us the forward on an official memo, most of us Cags have known this for months. In fact the 5 Kmarts around me already started their massive markdown purge in like October. Most everything was $5-10 or less.

Can anyone see this as anything other than the beginning of the end of Kmart? It might as well be. I haven't gone into a Kmart for anything other than games in probably 10 years at least.

Beatles93 said:

Men and women grab your horses we shall ride to this Land of Kmart!

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Oppa Gangnam Style! Op, op, op, op! Oppa Gangnam Style! Heyyyyyy, sexay lade-ay!

I'm really going to miss getting games at KMart. That was the only reason I ever shopped there since for other items they were overpriced. One of my best KMart deal memories was around 10 years ago when they had a lot of unmarked games for $2, $3 and $5 and the employee was nice enough to let me go through the games locked in the case and I ended up getting around 15 games for under $50 total.

kmart hasn't been paying all its vendors, especially game/electronics, or pays extremely sporadically, for months and months now.  that is almost always a sign of a company about to enter chapter 11 due to cash flow issues.  Thats why you are getting almost no stock of new games, because places like EA/Activision/Nintendo won't sell them to KMart/Sears anymore due to non payment for older stock.

If you work at Kmart I'd be looking for another job.

YoshiFan1 said:

I'm really going to miss getting games at KMart. That was the only reason I ever shopped there since for other items they were overpriced. One of my best KMart deal memories was around 10 years ago when they had a lot of unmarked games for $2, $3 and $5 and the employee was nice enough to let me go through the games locked in the case and I ended up getting around 15 games for under $50 total.

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RIP the K-Mart game section. I hardly knew ye. I went to your store since I was (probably) first born until around 2003, when you closed every K-Mart around me. Seriously, I'd have to drive about 250 miles to get to one (Corpus Christi). I honestly don't remember buying any games from you, but your poorly managed and filthy stores has lived on in my heart.

YoshiFan1 said:

I'm really going to miss getting games at KMart. That was the only reason I ever shopped there since for other items they were overpriced. One of my best KMart deal memories was around 10 years ago when they had a lot of unmarked games for $2, $3 and $5 and the employee was nice enough to let me go through the games locked in the case and I ended up getting around 15 games for under $50 total.

Click to expand...

RIP the K-Mart game section. I hardly knew ye. I went to your store since I was (probably) first born until around 2003, when you closed every K-Mart around me. Seriously, I'd have to drive about 250 miles to get to one (Corpus Christi). I honestly don't remember buying any games from you, but your poorly managed and filthy stores has lived on in my heart.

It doesn't surprise me at all. Ours hasn't gotten but a few copies of a few new releases in months, and I think the only consoles they've had since before Christmas is a couple Wiis and a few 3DS.

As you pointed out, selling video games really isn't worth it for most places. The profit margins are so tiny, I'm amazed that anyone still sells them. Around here, all of the big box stores have been slowly shrinking the amount of any kind of media they get in, be it DVDs, blu-rays, video games, CDs, whatever, because profit margins on them are all pretty damn small. Tie in small profit margins with how competitive all the big box stores get on pricing, and it's NOT an area you want to be in if you're a struggling chain. Also why there's almost no more indie media outlets.

I wouldn't be surprised if all the other big box stores officially hit this point in the next 5 years.

I was just in there the other day, all of the games were moved to one section of the locked shelves, while the other locked shelves were filled with DVDs.

So, I basically figured that this was coming.

And... Kmart just signed their death warrant. Old people alone are not going to keep the store alive.

Josh's curse has finally taken down kmart.

Word is, (from people I know who work at KMart), is that they are phasing out the entire electronics dept.

preston181 said:

Word is, (from people I know who work at KMart), is that they are phasing out the entire electronics dept.

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Well, makes sense, the employees neglect that area 98% of the time anyways.

The only thing I bought from them was a R2D2 XB360 for $300 in 2011. I haven't bought any games because they're always overpriced...

The beginning of the end has started, so it would seem anyways. There are two near me and one just got condemned due to a foundation issue. I'll hop by the other and hopefully find a few last minute deals before the execution. 

if you buy food that is non gmo you are getting ripped off.    unless you by 100 per cent organic you are wasting money.     I have been in the food industry for last 15 years.

Wow, they blamed us for not buying the games they don't have.

My store had absolutely nothing on the shelves the last time I was there games wise, but they still had a lot of accessories so I'll be on the lookout for those being marked down.

If Kmart/Sears want to switch the focus over to digital then they need to fix their godawful websites. Quite literally the worst websites I've ever used and I can't help but laugh at what is supposed to be a major retailer having that kind of a website in 2015.

K-Mart has never been a good place to shop. How it managed to have at least two Manhattan locations for so long astounds me.

No stores within 100+ miles of me...

http://youtu.be/vxRPJRz9TOs

Vintage Kmart gaming ad rip Kmart games

Sir_Fragalot said:

Really Organics would of been the way to go if they could get the price cheap enough. One of the reason I hate walking into Wal Mart is because I know that the food I get there is either processed to hell or questionable as in filled with GMO garbage/pesticides. If K-mart could offer better options then it would of brought the quality of the stores up a bit.

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As bad as Wal-Mart is, the idea of KMART having been converted to an organic grocery is even more absurd. They were the most backward and cheap of the big box stores. Organic grocery is diametrically opposed to what they are as a company.

preston181 said:

Word is, (from people I know who work at KMart), is that they are phasing out the entire electronics dept.

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Why bother phasing out "departments" at this point? Just phase out the stores.