New Kmart Ad Encourages Shoppers To Spend Least Amount Of Time Possible In Store

The secret to successfully shopping at Kmart is to spend as little time inside a Kmart as you can. We think that’s the message of a new Kmart commercial, which portrays the best shopping trip to Kmart as one in which you spend approximately three seconds in the store: long enough to grab your online order, but not long enough to notice the broken floor tiles.

AdWeek called this spot to our attention, and we found it interesting not just because of the family’s completely uncool coolness, but because of what it emphasizes. There’s the convenience of ordering online and dancing your way back out to the car while Kmart employees carry your bags out to the trunk. There’s also the “members get more” tagline, which continues to baffle us because Kmart is not Costco.

“Members” refers to the Shop Your Way rewards program, which gives customers .01% back in cash rewards for everything that they buy at affiliated stores, with occasional multipliers and bonus points. While the manifesto-writing CEO of Sears Holdings, Eddie Lampert, thinks that the rewards program will be the company’s salvation, mentions of “members” may just cause consumers to think that they will need a card to get inside their local store, and skip going inside to find out.

Of course, commercials featuring dancing customers who are unrealistically excited to shop at Kmart are nothing new: here’s a spot from 1976 featuring an original song, where the shoppers are led to actually spend some time inside the store.

by Laura Northrup via Consumerist