Discount store

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A discount store is a retail store offering a wide range of products, many nationally branded, at discounted prices. They are often referred to by shoppers as "department stores", although in the retail world, the label is more accurately applied to larger-format stores such as Macy's, Bloomingdale's, or Sears.

The best known examples of such retail chains include Wal-Mart, Kmart and Target, all of which opened their first locations in 1962. Other retail companies branched out into the discount store business around this time as adjuncts to their older store concepts. As examples, Woolworth opened a Woolco chain; Montgomery Ward opened Jefferson Ward; Chicago-based Jewel launched Turn-Style; and Central Indiana-based L.S. Ayres created Ayr-Way. These chains typically were either shut down or sold to a larger competitor during the late '70s and early '80s. Kmart and Target themselves are examples of adjuncts, although their growth prompted their respective parent companies to abandon their older concepts (the S.S. Kresge five and dime store disappeared, while the Dayton-Hudson Corporation eventually divested itself of its department store holdings and renamed itself Target Corporation).

Many of the major discounters are now opening "supercenters", which add a full-service grocery store to the traditional format. The Meijer chain in the Midwest consists entirely of supercenters, while Wal-Mart and Target have focused on the format as of the '90s as a key to their continued growth.

Further blurring the distinction between "discount" and "department" stores is the new "Sears Essentials", which is a combination of the Kmart and Sears formats (following the companies' merger as Sears Holdings Corporation). That merger is believed by many to be the last chance to keep struggling Kmart alive, as the "Big Two" of Target and Wal-Mart have combined to dominate the market (Other chains such as Venture, Bradlees and Ames had already gone into bankruptcy in the '80s and '90s).ja:ディスカウントストア