Kmart Corporation. Sears Holdings, the parent company of Kmart, declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 15, 2018. S. S. Kresge, the founder of the company that would become Kmart, met variety-store pioneer Frank Winfield Woolworth while working as a traveling salesman and selling to all 19 of Woolworth's stores at the time. In 1897 Kresge invested $6,700 saved from his job into a five-and-dime store in Memphis, Tennessee. He jointly owned the first store with his former tinware customer, John McCrory. Kresge and McCrory added a second store in downtown Detroit the following year. These were the first S.S. Kresge stores.
Department store Corporation headquartered in Minneapolis. George Dayton had founded his Dayton's Dry Goods store in Minneapolis in 1902 and the AMC cooperative in 1912. His descendants built Southdale Center in 1956, opened the Target discount store chain in 1962 and the B. Dalton Bookseller chain in 1966. Dayton's grew to 19 stores under the Dayton's name plus five other regional names acquired by Dayton-Hudson. The Dayton-Hudson Corporation closed the flagship J. L. Hudson Department Store in downtown Detroit in 1983, but expanded its other retail operations. It acquired Mervyn's in 1978, Marshall Field's in 1990, and renamed itself the Target Corporation