It was 2 January and Kmart New Finds – an Instagram page dedicated to new Kmart products – posted a picture of $29 Italian marble side tables. “Genuine Marble” it said on the post, with a picture of the box (the account is not affiliated with Kmart, it is run by Kmart fans).
I stared at my screen. How can a marble table be $29? What a freakish bargain! What was the catch? Would they support the weight of a coffee cup? Did small children in Myanmar mine the marble? Why did it look so good and cost so little?
The comments below the post were of the “OMG!!!” variety.
“Genuine Kmart Marble Tops!!!!!!”
“Please please please can we find somewhere for one of these?”
I rushed to a Kmart on the outskirts of Geelong, only to find that the tables had sold out the day they arrived in store. Around me were other women with their phones out – looking for the $39 Butterfly Chair or the Scandi Shoe Rack for $35.
Back on Kmart Instagram pages (or as a pal calls them, “the thugs in the Instagram mum industry”) people were reporting that in Kmarts across the country, the marble table which had just come in, had already sold out.
“Are there anymore in stock??”
“Ohhh yess i was looking for it when we were getting the furniture but they didnt have any left!!”
Such is the appetite for Kmart homewares – with their own Facebook fan pages and Instagram accounts – that the whisper of a side table causes a national wave of desire and disappointment.
So when Barnaby Joyce starts talking about Kmart, ears will prick up. Is he talking about the new Pleated Velvet Look Chair or the Blue Reactive Side Plate? Is he talking about the knit bath mats? Or the cable foot rests?
No, he’s talking about how people who shop at Kmart don’t care about the Paris Agreement. But more of that later.
If we unpack what Joyce said, it was loaded with false class-based assumptions.
Joyce used Kmart as a shorthand for struggling folk – Australia’s Walmart or Iceland. And when he talks about struggling folks, what he really means is “real Australians.” And the dogwhistle? Real Australians don’t care about the environment.
In reality we’ll never know the politics of all the people who shop at Kmart. There will be some customers who care about climate change and some who don’t. It’s a broad church in the Big K.
Kmart itself has issued a statement saying that it cares about the environment and its own policies promise to reduce store energy use and greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020.
Joyce’s understanding of what Kmart is and what it stands for needs updating. He has obviously not visited the homeware section lately, which has done for ceramics, soft furnishings, bedside tables, light fittings, hanging planter boxes, and throw rugs what Zara and Topshop did for fashion. That is, they’ve taken the latest trends and designs and democratised them.
The people who shop at Kmart have taste that outstrips their budget. Before Kmart, if you wanted your home to look like a magazine spread you either had to inherit your furniture or spend big.
When I moved two years ago, I furnished an entire house with op-shop furniture, hand-me-downs and Kmart. It all cost under $1,000 and it looked so nice that it actually was used for a photoshoot in Real Living interiors magazine.
The balance sheet tells the story. Kmart is now “one of Australia’s most insanely profitable stores” with “profits of half a billion dollars a year, sending shoppers into paroxysms of pleasure over cheap essentials and responsible for a burgeoning trend in homeware hacks,” according to News.com.au.
So popular has Kmart become that there is a backlash – I call them Kmart Truthers – of people who mock the quality of the product and the taste of the people who shop there.
People say you get what you pay for. Will that $29 marble side table really be something that you keep forever and pass onto your kids?
Just with fast fashion, the environmental issues of buying a heap of stuff that’s meant to last a lifetime and turning it over after a season, is an issue with the current trend for all things Kmart.
Right now the dominant colour in the Kmart homewares section is dusty pink and a soft grey. But soon this will date and what then are we to do with our matching doona sets and our marble-look placemats?
No matter, because Kmart will release another cheap batch of homewares in the latest colours and styles and we can throw out all the old ones.
When it comes to an ethical supply chain, Good on You has reported that, although Kmart is making a start on improved labour conditions, it is still in the “not good enough” category when it comes to environmental impact.
Which brings me back to Joyce’s original statement that people who shop at Kmart don’t care about the Paris Agreement. Maybe we do care but the lure of fast, fashionable and cheap homewares is too great to ignore.
- Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia writer and columnist
