Sears is gone. Walmart will shut down in September. And now St. Paul’s last remaining Kmart will be closed before Christmas.

“After careful review, we have made the difficult but necessary decision to close the Kmart stores in St. Paul and International Falls, Minnesota,” the company, Transform Holdco LLC said in a statement Saturday. “The liquidation sales are expected to begin in mid-September and the stores are planned to close by mid-December. We encourage customers to continue shopping on Kmart.com for all their product needs.”

Transform Holdco, or TransformCo, was formed Feb. 11 to acquire the Sears Holdings Corporation assets. The company is owned by Edward Lampert’s ESL Investments hedge fund of Greenwich, Conn. Following the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing of Sears Holdings in 2018, TransformCo purchased the assets owned by Sears Holdings for $5.2 billion.

Kmart is a subsidiary of that company.

The manager at the store at 245 Maryland Ave East was aware of the closing but had been advised to refer all media inquiries to TransformCo’s public relations department. She would not say how many employees would be affected, but past articles show each Kmart employs between 50 and 100 people, many of them part-time.

The store has weathered several rounds of layoffs and closures going back to 2001 when Kmart filed for bankruptcy and closed 284 stores nationwide, including six in Minnesota.

In 2003, another wave of closures shuttered metro Kmart stores in Maple Grove, Red Wing, Shakopee and one in St. Paul’s Midway neighborhood.

In 2005, Kmart joined forces with Sears under the ownership of a hedge fund run by Lampert, but its struggles continued.

In 2014, the metro lost four more Kmart stores, in Anoka, Blaine, Burnsville and Waite Park.

The Kmart store on South Robert Street closed in 2016 as part of a larger store slashing by Sears Holdings before it declared bankruptcy.

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Sept. 30 is last day for public comment on Pigs Eye Lake makeover Kmart, Walmart and Target were founded in 1962, and for a generation the three newcomers boomed and came to dominate U.S. discount retailing until the internet changed the way customers shop.

Kmart began as the largest of the three and even entered pop culture with its Blue Light Specials and the familiar announcement, “Attention Kmart shoppers.”