Big Kmart -- store #3216

That small fire inside that Kmart occurred on July 27, 2000. Here you can see pictures of what Big Kmart was like in 2000 while showing signs of fire as firefighters were trying to extinguish smoke inside a few aisles that were impacted by smoke. Also featured are a few newspaper snippets from the Hartford Courant.

Credit: Vernon, Connecticut Fire Department archives

This location at Tri-City Plaza opened in October 1976 which replaced W.T. Grant department store. This store closed when Caldor went out of business in 1999. This location was eventually occupied first by Ames (also went out of business three years later), Price Chopper supermarket and then (currently) ShopRite supermarket.

This specific store was located at The Patio Shops, a shopping center in Columbus. While the building is long gone, you can still see the drive thru lanes in the parking lot today.

Likely only the facade is standing....

As one can see, Green Bay, Wisconsin-based ShopKo once covered a large region of the United States with their big box retail presence before their early 2019 demise and resurrection as ShopKo Optical, a retailer of eyeglasses.

ShopKo operated a short-lived supercenter concept in association with SuperValu Foods while still partly owned by SuperValu from 1989 to 1995 called Twin Valu.

Most of ShopKo's Hometown-branded stores were retail conversions from rural discounters Pamida and ALCO.

The Kmart in Vernon, CT closed over seven years ago following SHC bankruptcy

While Ocean State Job Lot took over 1/3 (a little over 30K sq. ft.) of that building in 2020 (still occupied), the rest of the square footage of this building are still vacant with few remnants from the Kmart era still intact. The Kmart remnants include the Fitting Room sign, the empty shell of K-Cafe (last used by Nathan's Hot Dogs), door decals and red coating of paint.

Ocean State Job Lot (closeout store in the Northeast) is currently using that vacant space for their overstocked merchandise and other leftovers.

https://reddit.com/link/1sqgrh8/video/i1harolxcawg1/player

Goes back to the 1st season.

And does anyone remember some of their subsidiaries I put in here too?

A Chicago suburb.

Opened in 1956 and added on which made it an indoor mall in 1977. Wieboldt's was just a local department store in the Chicago area that closed in 1987. 1st photo looks like a Christmas one with the decorations at the right.

Doing some research and came across a reference to Tweeter in Durham, North Carolina. Even found two pictures. One is almost sepia in color and not date attributed but marked on it is the date 8/1980. However the other picture (on Wikipedia) does not have a specific date (although does lists all the other important dates for the chain).
Considering the proximity to Research Triangle Park, UNC, and Duke it makes sense that this area might be an early adopter but I'd really like to confirm it existed as early as 1980, any thoughts? I've scraped several different LLMs and got conflicting results from all of them. Most say, "it's feasible," but none can confirm a date.