Kmart to buy all but 3 Houston Venture stores/900 employees will be laid off
RALPH BIVINS Staff
FRI 07/04/1997 HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Section Business, Page 1, 3 STAR Edition
Kmart Corp. is acquiring 20 Venture Stores, including most of those in Houston, where competition is fierce among discounters.
Ten Houston Venture stores will be sold, leaving three in operation, the company announced Thursday. After a going-out-business sale, Venture will lay off about 900 Houston employees.
Kmart will take possession of the stores by Sept. 15 and will renovate them and reopen them in time for the Christmas season.
Analysts have been expecting some casualties in the discount retail war, where Target, Kmart and Wal-Mart are dominant.
Venture, which entered the Houston market about five years ago, operates in some excellent, high-visibility locations that Kmart wanted to buy, said Ed Wulfe of the Wulfe & Co. realty firm. "It gives Kmart a very strong position in this market."
Kmart has 15 local stores now. The number will grow to 25 with the Venture acquisition.
A clearance sale will begin in a week or 10 days at the Venture stores that are closing, said Venture spokesman Cliff Campeau.
"It will be a savings from anywhere from 15, 50, 60 or 70 percent. The goal is to move the merchandise," Campeau said.
The three Venture stores that will remain open are those at 6802 Spencer Highway in Pasadena, 4553 Garth Road in Baytown and 7600 Westheimer near Voss.
Those three stores were probably rejected by Kmart because they are close to existing Kmarts, said Bob Sellingsloh of Wulfe & Co., which assisted Venture in locating sites in Houston.
The Venture stores that will be purchased by Kmart are located near West Oaks Mall, in the Clear Lake area, near Willowbrook Mall, in Meyerland Plaza, on the Northwest Freeway, on FM 1960, in Texas City, in Sugar Land, at 11542 Gulf Freeway and at 8300 W. Sam Houston.
"These stores fit well with Kmart's existing locations in key metropolitan areas and will add significantly to our market penetration in the Dallas and Houston markets," said Larry Kellar, vice president of real estate for Kmart, which has 2,122 stores.
The Venture stores being sold were selected because they weren't profitable, a Venture spokesman said.
The other stores being sold to Troy, Mich.-based Kmart include five in Dallas, two in Indianapolis, and one each in Tulsa, Okla., Des Moines, Iowa, and Waterloo, Iowa.
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I think this article is interesting, because in addition to basically explaining where all the Venture stores were (I thought the Sugar Land one survived?), it does lay inroads to how Kmart would pull out of Houston about six years after this article was written, with the old Kmarts now into other uses: converted into smaller spaces, second-rate tenants, or demolished entirely.
Venture would fare far worse: they declared bankruptcy in 1998 and closed all their stores.
Venture did not have a good product selection, and most of their products were of poor quality. I visited a few Houston area stores when they were a couple of years old. The electronics section was especially terrible and made every other discount retailer look better in comparison.
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