Fun that some of the messages in-between the songs are for things like security being called to go to a particular zone of the store. I remember hearing those as a kid and wondering who got busted, never thinking that the announcement might be as fake as the security cameras.
Captain Pedantic checking in to remind our viewers that at a quick glance this does not appear to be Muzak (EDIT: no, that is definitely not Muzak), but rather ambient music played in K-Mart stores. Muzak is a specific brand of ambient music, which appears to suffer the same fate as Kleenex and Xerox:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzak</a><p>That page is worth a read, if only for the means of distribution used over the years. But do I ever digress...
Oh man. Exurban wastelands of Nowhere, America. Endless fluorescent popcorn ceilings and despair. Is there another word for nostalgia, where instead of missing something you remember fondly, you are grateful to have escaped from something that seemed to drain your soul? I remember these places having an almost Dementor-like effect on me long before I was old enough to be a coastal elite or a classist or an architecture snob or whatever.
FINALLY! I've been wanting to remix these kind of songs into hiphop songs for a long time. This is such a weird victory for music producers. These are a gold mine for hip hop sampling.
There is a fun niche on YouTube that’s similar to this. It’s called mallsoft or mallwave and is a subgenre of the vaporwave genre.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/JELt1jxJsHQ" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/JELt1jxJsHQ</a><p><a href="https://youtu.be/FZUfiW3W1KY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/FZUfiW3W1KY</a>
Late to the party on this one but I wanted to leave this note for posterity. Turns out that there's an interesting business story and a timely death tied-in here too.<p>I got curious because some of the tapes bear the name of an audio production company in Greenville, OH, a few miles down the road from my hometown. The booming male voice on the recordings also sounded familiar to me, too. I'm fairly certain I heard him on the local radio station that my father played over the PA in our family grocery store when I was growing up.<p>I did some searching and learned that back on November 30, the gentleman who founded the audio company, and who acted as the "voice of K-Mart", died.<p>It looks like he was involved in ventures that persist today. His company EchoSat[1] (which I'd heard of with some past involvement in the convenience store / retail petroleum industry) recently merged with an IT security firm to become "ControlScan".<p>Quoting the obituary[2]:<p><i>He started Tower Sound and Communications while in Greenville to pursue a venture that would eventually spearhead "in store" broadcasting for companies such as Kmart (he became the voice of Kmart) and Jamesway which evolved into another corporation in KY called EchoSat that would use satellite technology in helping with multiple stores for POS processing and security.</i><p>There's an interview with Lee Rutherford in 2011.[3] He absolutely still has that "radio voice".<p>[1] <a href="https://www.dandb.com/businessdirectory/towercommunicationsgroupinc.-lexington-ky-14562153.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.dandb.com/businessdirectory/towercommunicationsg...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailyadvocate/obituary.aspx?n=cecil-rutherford-lee&pid=197199331&fhid=8238" rel="nofollow">https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailyadvocate/obituary.asp...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQqoQL3pkyI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQqoQL3pkyI</a>
In case anyone is looking, here is a Christmas tape to get you in the mood. It even includes the ads!<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/KmartDecember1992" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/KmartDecember1992</a>
K-Mart’s only Black Friday Instagram post was a picture of an end-cap featuring Spider-Man, Frozen and BABY YODA masks. <a href="https://twitter.com/unangst/status/1332526873130229760?s=21" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/unangst/status/1332526873130229760?s=21</a>
I was just thinking about this a few days ago and even made a note to go look them up on archive.org. I think someone shared this a few years ago and it got picked up by buzzfeed (or whatever).<p>When I worked retail we had this but it was a mini-cd system that looked like a GameCube. My boss was a little bit forced into investing in it because a customer was furious that a P!nk song on the radio had the word "ass" or "hell" in the lyrics. The shuffle on that thing was horrible, sometimes the same song would come up twice and most evenings we just kept it off.
Another popular background music system was sold by Seeburg (the jukebox manufacturer). You bought a Seeburg 1000 Background Music System and then subscribed to a service that mailed you double-sided vinyl records that were stacked into the unit and played back continuously. Records were mailed back at the end of a period.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeburg_1000" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeburg_1000</a><p>There's a streaming website for you to enjoy during your workday: <a href="https://seeburg1000.com/" rel="nofollow">https://seeburg1000.com/</a>
I've acquired a lot of 60's and 70's easy listening music from thrift stores. Bert Kampfert, Ray Conniff, Jackie Gleason, etc. I figure it's coming from estate sales.
I remember when this remix first dropped on Soundcloud <a href="https://soundcloud.com/2mello/kmart-october-1989" rel="nofollow">https://soundcloud.com/2mello/kmart-october-1989</a>
I keep thinking this is a distilled piece of Americana, a cultural artifact, of a time, & place. But I'm not sure it's really distinctly American. The term feels insufficent.
previous discussion in 2015 was flagged <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10369105" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10369105</a>
Just a story: My friends and I built a beer-loan agency for a burning-man event. We had people fill out forms to get a beer loan, told them their credit was too low, sent them on a quest, then gave them a beer on return.<p>This music is what we used for our fully fabricated waiting-room office. At one point a guy with a legal degree from Yale came to question our paper-work, and proceeded to litigate from the bar down the road we'd sold our failing business to.
This is a great find:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9hR4Gg6b9w" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9hR4Gg6b9w</a>
i spent a bunch of time sampling this back when it came out in 2015<p><a href="https://curatorbeats.bandcamp.com/album/k-m-r-t" rel="nofollow">https://curatorbeats.bandcamp.com/album/k-m-r-t</a>