New Consumables Private Labels at Kmart

[storewanderer]

It appears American Fare is disappearing from the consumables, health and beauty, etc. private label at Kmart. The new brand is Smart Sense. The logo looks like a cloud. New items are showing distro by Kmart with no reference to the Sears name on the package.

Also it looks like Smart Cents products have been discontinued. They did have some Essential Home Paper Towels which appear to have replaced the old Smart Cents Paper Towels.

What is this company doing? Essential Home on low budget paper towels? Essential Home was developed to replace the Martha Stewart Kitchen Corner/Domestics items as they phased that line out and the Essential Home items in those departments were actually pretty good in terms of quality. They were of a higher quality than the old lower scale private label Kmart used in Kitchen Corner/Domestics called Home Essentials which was lower quality than the Martha Stewart product but of course priced better.

The Kmart Store I visited was a disaster in that it was dirty, messy, and poorly staffed, but it was well stocked. Prices are awful. Depresses me to even go walk through.

[Alpha8472]

Target changed their store brand to Up and Up, but the products are exactly the same. They simply changed the name on the labels because they thought it would appeal more to shoppers.

Perhaps, Kmart has done the same thing. They switched the name to something new, because they thought it would generate more sales. Have you compared the products to see if they are any different? It is probably the exact same stuff. American Fare is a misleading name, since most of the stuff is made outside of the USA.

The people who run the company are completely out of touch with reality. High prices and dirty stores... It's like Walmart hired saboteurs to get jobs at Kmart to purposely sabotage their operations from within.

[storewanderer]

Most of the American Fare items were made in the USA since they were consumable items. Things like paper towels, canned food, kleenex, over the counter medicine, all are made in the USA. It is possible soap or body wash were made in Canada. It is also possible certain things like cotton balls were made somewhere else. Actually they were using a label called Image Essentials (I think) on cotton balls, and those are not in the drug department of Kmart but across the store near the jewelry. Terrible product placement.