The Kmart store in Guam is located 6,000 miles west of California in the Pacific Ocean, well past the easy reach of Target , Wal-Mart or Amazon Prime.
The store, open 24 hours a day, also seems beyond the reach of time itself. Inside, it feels more like 1980, when Kmart ruled the big-box retail market.
Americans living in the U.S. territory prowl the aisles for food, clothing and housewares. Tour buses deliver Korean and Japanese tourists who scoop up popular sellers such as Easy Cheese spray and Tums antacid tablets. The Little Caesars pizza outlet has a line. “I Guam K-mart” tees are $9.98.
Guam Kmart, by far the chain’s busiest store, is protected by an expanse of ocean from a consumer market that’s largely shunned such stores, prospering on a retail version of the Galapagos.
“People come by and take photos, selfies out in front,” said Mike Fleissner, the store manager. On Instagram, shoppers pose with Kmart’s red shopping carts and displays of brightly colored bottles of laundry detergent.
Guam is the closest U.S. outpost to Asia, making its Kmart a mecca for tourists seeking an authentic American shopping experience. About 1.5 million tourists visit Guam yearly, according to a spokeswoman for Macy’s, which has a department store on the island that also benefits from the visitors, she said.
North Korea’s threats last summer to attack the U.S. territory dented tourism a bit, except from South Korea. The number of visitors from the country jumped 25% in past months. Among them was Kim Myeong-jun and his wife.
The couple recently took the 4 1/2 hour trip from Seoul to Guam for a holiday that included Kmart visits. Their shopping list included teething rings and baby blankets. When in Guam, he said, “Kmart shopping is a must.”
Korean and Japanese-language websites and blogs give tips for shopping at Guam Kmart, including an explanation of discount coupons.
Guam’s 100,000 square-foot Kmart is somewhat of a unicorn for Kmart’s parent Sears Holdings Corp. and its owner Edward S. Lampert, the 55-year-old financier who through his hedge fund, ESL Investments Inc. is Sears’s largest shareholder, with a 54% stake. Mr. Lampert declined to comment.
Kmart opened its 2000th store in 1981 and now has roughly a quarter of that. The company last week said it would close another 64.
In much of the U.S., Kmart is seen as a down-market, old-fashioned brand. said Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail, a research and consulting firm. The store in Guam, he said, “never had that sort of status.”
The company doesn’t disclose sales for individual stores, but a former executive said the two-decade-old Guam Kmart produces slightly more than $100 million in annual sales—about three times the revenue of the next-highest grossing store. The average Kmart store had sales of $9 million, according to retail consultancy eMarketer, down 20% since 2012.
Not bad for a locale with just 162,000 residents, along with another 7,000 or so on two U.S. military bases.
Nicole Winkler hadn’t shopped at Kmart for years until she moved from Port Townsend, Wash., to Guam in 2016 for her husband’s naval posting. “It’s like the cheapest area to buy stuff,” she said, “and you tend to be able to find everything you need in a one-stop shop.”
Ms. Winkler had stopped by for shampoo and left with two camping chairs.
While visiting Guam last year, Marie Henson, of Fairhope, Ala. headed to Kmart for cold medicine. The crowds surprised her. “I don’t go too much to the Kmart at home because basically they’ve closed,” she said, but in Guam, “people were loading the carts down.”
Gilbert Grimm returned home to Munnsville, N.Y., last week from a Guam holiday and brought back a store T-shirt. “The local Kmarts in this area of New York have all shut down,” he said. “I remember Kmart from when I was a little kid back in the early ’60s so it was a nice souvenir to have.”
Guam residents don’t get free shipping from Amazon Prime. Amazon purchases take around 12 days to reach the western Pacific island. The online giant won’t ship items longer than 9 feet or heavier than 70 pounds. A $14.95 board game can cost nearly as much to deliver.
The difficulty of getting items to Guam is popular conversation. “Lots of stores just don’t ship to Guam,” said Dee Perez-Damian. She said some online retailers don’t recognize Guam as a destination because it’s neither a sovereign state nor an American state.
Target shipped to Mongolia and the tiny Pacific nation of Kiribati but not Guam. After a recent query from The Wall Street Journal, a spokesperson for the retailer said a system “glitch” was fixed, adding Guam to the list of approved shipping destinations.
Internet sales make up around 4.5% of Guam’s retail sales compared with 12% across the U.S. according to Euromonitor International, an estimate that excludes motor vehicle sales, food services and wholesale industries.
Rodrigo Verano-Torres, of Detroit, Mich., visited the Guam Kmart last year and said he had to leave because of the crowds. “The sheer volume of people there, especially during the day, kind of raised my anxiety level,” he said.
—Suzanne Kapner and Min Sun Lee contributed to this article.
Write to Lucy Craymer at Lucy.Craymer@wsj.com