Town Caught in Wal-Mart vs. K mart Struggle : Business: Sulphur Springs, Tex., residents hope to keep doors open at one K mart of 110 slated for closing.

In her 79 years, Lorene Irby has watched the wagons disappear from the bustling courthouse square where her father ran a cafe. She’s gone from being a dairy farmer to selling cow-print merchandise in the Milk Cow Emporium at the county’s dairy museum.

And now, she’s seen a mammoth new Wal-Mart Supercenter open and her town’s K mart destined to close.

That, she doesn’t like.

“I like K mart,” Irby said. “You can find everything at K mart you can find at Wal-Mart.”

The new Wal-Mart is “too big a store for an old person like me,” she said.

K mart Corp.’s announcement in September that it was closing 110 under-performing stores nationwide had little impact in cities like Dallas, where most shoppers have easy access to a variety of discount retailers.

But it’s different in this town of 15,000, about 80 miles to the northeast. Residents waged a letter-writing campaign when K mart considered closing the Sulphur Springs store a few years ago. Now some are asking the company to change its mind again, said Bill Elliott, executive vice president of the Hopkins County Chamber of Commerce.

“I hate to see it go. It’s just a shame we can’t keep them both,” said Sue Manley, a secretary from nearby Greenville making a quick trip to K mart.

On a weekday afternoon, it’s busy at both the K mart and the Wal-Mart, which sit less than 1 1/2 miles apart on the town’s main drag.

The Wal-Mart Supercenter, which opened in May, is a massive gray building with a grocery added to the conventional Wal-Mart. It sits incongruously across the street from a bucolic field where cows graze near a tumbledown wood barn.

The K mart is much older and smaller, a place where local teen-agers gather in the parking lot on weekend nights.

Customers at the K mart repeatedly faulted the new store for what they called a lack of service and long checkout lines, as well as its size.

“I just can’t do all that walking at Wal-Mart. It’s too much,” said Bobbie Holder, who bought a doll at K mart for her great-granddaughter.

“You can get people to wait on you here, and you can’t over there,” said Jacky Wilks, a carpenter. He said he recently walked out of Wal-Mart when no one would help him reach the $119 bicycle he wound up buying elsewhere for his 10-year-old daughter. “I waited so long I left,” he said.

As Irma Diosdado shopped for clothes with her 18-month-old daughter, she was disappointed to learn the K mart will be shuttered. “This is my favorite store for clothes.”

But at the Sulphur Springs Wal-Mart, most shoppers said they are loyal to its low prices and convenience.

“They’ve got everything,” said Sue Stephens, a homemaker shopping for Halloween costumes with her 6-year-old grandson.

Peggy Westbrook, a lab technician flipping through pictures of Halloween costumes in pattern books, said she prefers Wal-Mart’s employees, environment and prices.

“You can just get everything here in one stop,” Westbrook said. “I can get my pattern here and go buy my groceries.”

Sharon Nix was shopping for winter clothes for her three children. “The prices are a lot cheaper than everywhere else,” she said.

K mart, which has 2,350 discount stores, is renovating or replacing hundreds of its older outlets to make them more competitive with Wal-Mart, Target and other discounters. Many of the older stores are small or outdated--problems similar to those at the Sulphur Springs K mart.

Retailing analyst Kurt Barnard, publisher of Barnard’s Retail Marketing Report in Berkeley Heights, N.J., said Wal-Mart isn’t to blame for troubles at K mart or another competitor, Woolworth Corp., whose general-merchandise stores have also lost business to Wal-Mart.

“I think when you look at K mart and you look at Woolworth, you look at two very troubled companies. They’re not troubled because of Wal-Mart; they’re troubled because of serious, severe internal problems,” Barnard said.

“Wal-Mart is really doing very little other than taking advantage of these situations, but it is not that Wal-Mart is killing them. Wal-Mart is killing them because they are sitting ducks for allowing themselves to be killed.”

Sulphur Springs might land another K mart someday, or a different discount store, said Leonard Berry, director of the Center for Retailing Studies at Texas A&M; University. More retail chains are seeing opportunities in mid-size and smaller markets, he said.

But Wal-Mart won’t be the only store in town when K mart is gone.

Wal-Mart has other competition--Sulphur Springs’ hardware and grocery stores. Few of them are losing much business, Elliott said.

Terry Riley, general manager of Masters Western Store in Sulphur Springs, said he really hasn’t had to cut prices since Wal-Mart opened because his customers want service from his store, which sells hardware, major appliances and fine jewelry and offers its own financing.

Jim Emerson, a Sulphur Springs police officer, said he has been shopping at Masters for 15 years and likes being able to go directly to what he’s looking for. “It’s just one of those things where, whatever you need, they’ve got it,” he said.

Emerson also said he appreciates being allowed to handle the guns at Masters instead of looking at them behind a counter, as at Wal-Mart.

“I bought a lot of my guns here,” he said. “It’s just a lot more personable, I guess.”