Filing doesn’t surprise Kmart’s LV shoppers

Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2002 | 11:03 a.m.

Shoppers at the Kmart store in Las Vegas on Sahara Avenue near Eastern Avenue said today they weren't surprised by today's bankruptcy filing.

"Kmart stores have been slowly falling one by one," said Las Vegas resident Willie Quiros. "The way Wal-Mart and Target have been coming on, it's really not surprising that they (Kmart) are in bankruptcy."

Irene Schleich of Las Vegas said she knew the company was in trouble when Kmart stores in Las Vegas started cutting their hours.

"The stores are also really hard to get around in," Schleich said. "They have stuff stacked in the aisles that wasn't getting sold. So, no, it didn't surprise me at all (that the company had filed for bankruptcy)."

A spokeswoman for Kmart, in the meantime, said its nine Las Vegas-area stores were authorized to lay off some employees even before the retailer filed for bankruptcy protection today.

But managers for local stores say the only layoffs that have occurred have been for seasonal employees, hired prior to the December holidays and no longer needed.

John Jones, manager of the Kmart store at Washington Avenue and Buffalo Drive, said he hasn't had to lay off employees. The manager of another Las Vegas-area Kmart store who asked not to be identified said the only layoffs at his store have been for about 15 or 20 seasonal employees.

But a former Kmart employee at the Washington Avenue store said several employees that had been with the company for more than two years were fired earlier this month without notice. The former employee said she is applying for a job with a Kmart rival and did not want her name disclosed.

Susan Dennis, a spokeswoman for Kmart in Troy, Mich., said layoffs were authorized and being implemented on a store-by-store basis. She said some layoffs involved seasonal help, but others were justified by economic slowdowns in different regions of the country.

She had no information on how many layoffs would occur at Las Vegas-area stores. Kmart has nine discount stores in Las Vegas, North Las Vegas and Henderson.

Dennis said the corporation is encouraging managers to employ more part-time workers with flexible schedules to be in stores when they're busiest. She denied that the company was looking to hire more part-timers as a cost-cutting measure.

"It makes sense in terms of our business to hire people who can work shifts in four-hour increments," Dennis said.

She added that in some locations, long-time employees were asked to take part-time positions.

But the laid-off employee in Las Vegas said she and her colleagues were given no option to take fewer hours.

"They just called us in, paid our wages up to that time and the number of hours of vacation time we had accrued and told us to leave the store," she said. "They told us there were widespread company layoffs, but we got no warning, no nothing."