Words by Riley Fitzgerald
“The best to you from K-Mart Radio, KMRT!”
From the late 80s to early 90s, loyal K-Mart service desk attendee Mark Davis received a monthly cassette of background music to be played over his store’s sound system.
Not content to throw away these eclectic mixes of elevator music, product placements, celebrity endorsements, plugs for obscure ">sitcoms and chart hits, Davis defied orders to destroy the tapes and pocketed each tape at the end of their runs.
Until 1992, tapes were rotated monthly before, perhaps mercifully for the mental health of employees, they were switched to weekly rotations.
David’s collecting ambitions were foiled in 1993 when music began to be transmitted to stores via satellite, eliminating the need for tape based music.
For more than a decade David held on to his tapes for posterity, but clearly an itch to share them with the wider public was too great not to scratch.
No longer content to keep these consumer culture gems from the world Davis has recently digitised and uploaded all 56 of these tapes online.
Dave’s personal favourite is the 30th anniversary special, a one off event tape, which he believes captures the electricity of the department store franchise at its peak.
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