It's the end of an era. Kmart, a longtime retail chain known for its "blue light specials" and carrying everything under the sun at a discount, is set to close its last full-sized location in the United States next month.

It opened in 1999 in a space that had been vacated by Caldor, a now-defunct discount retailer that filed for bankruptcy in 1995.

The big-box budget store chain was once iconic throughout America, but was slowly displaced by competitors such as Walmart