Kmart went out of business up here in Canada in 1997. I lost a job because of that, I worked at a prepress shop who did their flyer, and the loss of it cost us $1 million in business, and 50% of the 150 employees were laid off shortly after that. I had worked there over 7 years.
On the up side, I ended up bouncing around to 2 other shops, learned some new skills, and ended up working at the best place of all, at a much higher wage, and on 9-5 instead of afternoon shift.
Zellers simply bought out a lot of the old Kmart stores, but they moved their stuff into it. I believe they offered jobs to a lot of old Kmart people. But someone else already had the Zellers flyer account. Strangely enough, one of the places I went to after getting laid off was the one who had that account! I ended up getting laid off there too, since Zellers went from giving us 500 images a week to scan, down to about 10.