Kmart Blue Light Special
"Attention, Kmart shoppers." A rotating blue police light on a pole, a voice on the PA, and a stampede toward whatever aisle it was parked in. It ran from 1965 until 1991, so early-90s kids caught the tail end, and then Kmart spent the next two decades trying to bring it back.
The Blue Light Special was a short in-store flash sale during regular hours, announced over the public-address system and marked by a rotating blue light, modelled on a police beacon, wheeled to the spot. It began in 1965, credited to a store manager looking for a way to clear slow-moving merchandise, and it became Kmart's signature: the phrase "Attention, Kmart shoppers" entered the language, and the gimmick helped power the chain through the 1980s, when it was the largest discount retailer in the country.
For a kid dragged along on a Saturday errand, the light was the only interesting thing in the store. You could not know where it would appear or what would be under it, which is why the memory is so specific: the sudden crackle of the announcement, adults changing direction mid-aisle, a parent deciding on the spot whether a markdown on socks was worth the walk. It belonged to the same Kmart of the 1990 red-K logo, the first Super Kmart in 1991 and the in-store cafeteria, a chain whose profits peaked in the early 1990s and then slid against Walmart and Target.
Kmart retired the Blue Light Special in 1991, around the time Walmart passed it in sales. The company never quite let it go. It attached the name to a free dial-up internet service, BlueLight, in 1999. It brought the light back in 2001 and filed for bankruptcy in January 2002, revived it again briefly in 2005 and on Saturdays in 2009, and in November 2015 relaunched it in all 942 remaining stores with a television ad on Sunday Night Football, this time as a standing program with online deals. None of it reversed the decline.
The phrase outlived the stores. "Attention, Kmart shoppers" is still shorthand for a cheap-and-cheerful bargain, or for any announcement delivered to a crowd that is not listening, and it belongs to a generation that remembers a Kmart in every town.
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