Kmart’s last store on Oahu is expected to close in the next two to three months.

The 135,000-square-foot Kmart in Kapolei is due to be shuttered soon by parent company Sears Holdings Corp., according to an announcement made to store employees on Tuesday.

Once it is closed, Hawaii will be left with just two Kmarts — one in Lihue and the other in Kailua-Kona. The closure of the Kapolei store will follow by just a few months the shutdown of the Halawa Kmart, which closed in March.

An employee at the Kapolei store on Wednesday disclosed the time frame for the closure but declined to reveal any further details, referring further questions to the company’s media relations department.

Sears Holdings, the parent company of Sears and Kmart, has announced four rounds of closures this year in an attempt to return to profitability. CEO Eddie Lampert announced July 7 in a blog post that the company would close eight more Sears and 35 additional Kmart stores that are unprofitable by early October. But the Kapolei store was not listed among the 43 closures.

Counting the latest reduction, Sears Holdings will be left with about 1,140 stores. That represents a little more than half of the 2,073 stores it operated five years ago.

Lampert said the closures are “part of a strategy to address losses from unprofitable stores and to reduce the square footage of other stores because many of them are simply too big for our current needs.”

He said he was on track to cut $1.25 billion in annual costs.

Since January, Sears has announced the closures of 308 stores, excluding the Kapolei outlet.

The Sears and Kmart brands were brought together under one roof in 2005 when Kmart Holdings Corp. bought Sears, Roebuck and Co. and the name of the combined company was changed to Sears Holdings Corp. Lampert took over as Sears’ CEO in 2013.

“Retailers are bleeding,” Honolulu retail analyst Stephany Sofos said. “The retail industry is really suffering right now. Everybody’s down.”

Sofos attributes the problem to a “big, robust expansion 10 to 15 years ago” due to lower interest rates. “They wanted to try and capture the market,” she said. But in the past 10 years, consumer spending has slowed and “consumers are debt-heavy.”

“In order to survive in business, you either have to get bigger and bigger and bigger, or you have to cut down to a manageable level. You can’t stay static,” Sofos said.

She also attributes the bleeding by Sears and Kmart to a shift in shopping trends with budget-conscious shoppers shopping online. Also, “there’s too much retail,” she said.

“The consumers are very fickle,” she said. “A lot of younger millennials don’t want to shop at Mom and Dad’s store.”

Department stores were born in the 1950s and ’60s, and grew until the 1990s, Sofos said.

Now “millennials want smaller stores,” she said, adding that shoppers have an appetite for boutique stores. “Retail shopping has become entertainment.”

She added, “It’s probably true that (Kmart and Sears) did not change with the times.”

A spokesman for Sears Holdings did not return requests from the Honolulu Star-Advertiser for information.

It’s unknown how many employees will lose their jobs by the closure of the Kapolei Kmart, which opened in 2000. Prior to its opening, landowner Campbell Estate announced on Aug. 23, 1999, that the store would create 200 new jobs.

In November 2000, Kmart said it employed more than 1,400 people in Hawaii at seven Kmart stores.

Sofos said she’s not worried about the displaced workers. “A good salesperson is worth their weight in gold,” she said, adding that while one store might shut down, two others will replace it.

Kmart’s history goes back to 1899 when Sebastian S. Kresge opened a variety store in downtown Detroit and sold everything for 5 and 10 cents. The S.S. Kresge Co. incorporated in 1912 in Delaware with 85 stores. The first Kmart discount department store opened in 1962 in a Detroit suburb.