I saw one analysis that appeared to be spot on. It said that K-Mart spent little money updating their stores, and they became less attractive to shoppers.

I agree with that. We had a K-Mart out here that survived the first round of closures, but made little progress in gaining sales, one of the reasons being that compared to Wal-Mart, ShopCo and Target [[it's 3 biggest competetors in this market), it looks run down and dingy. That affected it's image seriously; I've been in other K-Marts since the local one closed [[finally), and they too are seriously in need of an updating.