It was 1965.

The first Kmart was opening in Sacramento County off of Auburn Boulevard.

Since Kresge’s opened the first Kmart in 1962 in Garden City, Mich., Kmart had become the hottest retailer in the United States.

So much that my Aunt Grace drove from San Francisco that at the time boasted “the” shopping district in Northern California in the form of Union Square, with one of her expressed purposes of her trip to check out the new store.

I was 9 years old at the time.

We were in the women’s department where my Mom and Aunt Grace were checking out the blouses.

That’s when “it” happened.

It started with an announcement: “Attention, Kmart shoppers.”

Just as those words were being said, a clerk pushed a cart up that had a pole with a light fixture attached next to where we were at.

Something was said over the public address system about blouses being discounted for the next 10 minutes.

And as the last word was said, the clerk flipped on the blue light that starting rotating.

Within seconds there was an excited commotion.

Then what seemed out of nowhere, there was a stampede of shoppers.

I remember getting bumped a couple of times.

At one point, I figured I needed to get out of the way.

So I made my way into the sanctuary of the middle of a circular clothing rack.

For the next 10 minutes or so, there was a crush of shoppers frantically moving metal clothing hangers back and forth on the clothing rack’s steel tubing as the searches for the right style and size.

When things finally settled down, I emerged from the safe haven.

The light was no longer flashing.

The Kmart hordes had moved on.

And on the floor there were dozens of discarded blouses.

Kmart ditched the in-store Blue Light mania by the time 1991 rolled around 26 years later.

I had no idea that has happened given I didn’t make a return trip to a Kmart until a year later.

My Blue Light special experience had turned me off when it came to Kmart.

The year 1991 was  year after Kmart had been bumped out of the No. 2 spot behind Sears on the list of the nation’s top retailers.

They had been replaced by Walmart.

I didn’t step into a Kmart again until I moved to Manteca in 1991.

It was located in the Manteca Marketplace space that was remodeled first into a multi-screen cinema and then into a collection of concerns that included the soon-to-be-shuttered Big Lots as well as Harbor Freight and Planet Fitness.

The transformation came after Kmart opened a larger store off the beaten track on Northgate Drive.

That location closed in 2017. Today, it is a massive U-Haul storage system.

I was kind of ambivalent about Kmart by the 1990s.

Walmart opened the year before in Manteca.

And when Kmart moved to Northgate Drive to a 110,000 square-foot store that was about double the size of the one on West Yosemite Avenue, I discontinued shopping at Kmart as it was inconvenient to do so plus there was no other nearby retail.

Kmart’s closure in Manteca seven years ago came as Amazon was growing by leaps and bounds literally within miles of the store.

Amazon by then was flying four jumbo cargo jets into Stockton Metro Airport with the Manteca Kmart store just outside of their approach corridor.

There were already three Amazon fulfillment centers in the area — two in Tracy and one in Patterson.

Online commerce accounted for 8.5 percent of all retail sales nationally in 2017.

Today it is 23.4 percent.

And almost 60 percent of that online sales volume is through Amazon.

As for Kmart that can stretch its roots back to 1899 when the first Kresge’s variety store opened in Memphis, Kmart stores peaked at 2,055 locations in 1981 in the United States and Canada.

Today, it is down to one full-scale Kmart store in the United States.

And that will be closing in October.

The final store is in Bridgehampton, New York.

It’s kind ironic given the Long Island town has a median household income of $181,492.

That is a long way from the dowdy outdated store that Kmart had become known for being by the late 1990s.

The closure will leave only one Kmart store in the United States. That store in Miami is not of a full-scale Kmart pedigree as it is a much smaller footprint and is considered more of a convenience store.

There are also a handful of Kmart stores left in Guam and the Virgin Islands.

Kmart’s purchase of Sears in 2004 for $11 billion did nothing to stop it’s back slide.

Sears also reeked tired and frumpy; terms Wall Street analysts used at the time.

Sears, which once operated 3,500 stores was the Amazon of its day with its monstrous reach in catalogue sales through the mail, is now down to less than a dozen stores.

Up until August, there was a Sears store in Stockton.

Only three remain in California. They are in Whitter, Concord, and Burbank.

In a way, it’s amazing stores like Kmart and Sears have  survived as long as they have.

Other national chains in the post-World War II era when American mobility with family cars becoming the norm and the spread of suburbia had much shorter shelf lives.

White Front. CBSS. Gemco. Best.

Those are just a few examples.

You can’t blame it all on online retail although experts project it will grow from the current 23.4 percent of all sales to 29 percent by 2030.

It is much about the experience and ambiance as it is price, selection, and convenience.

Old school isn’t the killer. It’s worn and tired.

And as both Kmart and Sears near the end neither could shake the stigma.

After all, if Martha Stewart and Jacyln Smith (think “Charlie’s Angels”) exclusive offerings couldn’t save Kmart, what could?

This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com