Killing Off Free Shipping on Product Categories at Kmart

It appears Kmart is working hard to diminish online shipped orders with punitive shipping charges forced on all grocery items and most health/beauty items. Clearly this is an effort to get shoppers to shop elsewhere with shipping charges on some items starting at over $9 for ground shipping. Considering Kmart already charges more than Walmart on many items that Walmart will ship for free, this is a deal killer. But it probably also means Kmart workers will see a radical drop in items shipped to customers.

It's continued evidence of a business winding down its operations for good. At a time when free shipping is make or break for online businesses, Kmart is killing itself. Remember when brochures and emails were handed to customers at closing stores telling them they can get free shipping for items they used to buy in the store that is closing? Now that is gone for some popular categories. So now customers with no local Kmart stores won't even consider shopping online if they are faced with enormous shipping charges.

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Sad to lose big sales for pennies.I do have one question....what is a girkloft?Sorry,I couldnt quit laughing at that one.

Funny with cat litter. We used to have a woman who would buy 8 pallets of cat litter at a time at our kmart store because the manager always gave her a discount to compete with walmart price a block away. It was within 50 cents. She managed a pet rescue shelter and shopped us regularly in addition to her 2 cat litter orders once a year. We had to load her trailer up with the girkloft. About 4 years into this the higher ups said no discount for her anymore. I was there at customer service on her last major sale. The manager told her no more discounts are allowed d/t corparate saying so. She said fine this is the last day I shop at this store. I have shopped here for around 15 years. I spend around 5000 additional dollars a year here as I want to support u guys and not walmart. U give me better customer service etc. I never saw her again after this. I thought it was pretty stupid at the time to loose a few cents on a large deal and loose a loyal customer.

I honestly can't really think of a reason for someone to even buy anything online in Kmart in the first place. And of course they'd start cutting it off because they can't afford to compete with Walmart and Amazon. Just another crack opening in the dam.

The company loses an incredible amount of money offering free shipping for items such as 35 pound pails of cat litter, 40 pound bags of dog food, and 12 packs of paper towels. These are items with low margins to start with. If Wal-Mart wants to ship these things for free, along with bottles of bleach and 12 packs of Coca-Cola, then good for them. In many cases, the item cost paid by the customer does not even cover the company's costs for shipping.

In some markets, Kmart is offering free and nominal charge home delivery by associates within the store's market area. In fact, Sears Holdings pioneered this offering in 2009 through mygofer.

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Killing Off Free Shipping on Product Categories at Kmart

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