Walk through a Singapore mall and the contradiction is unavoidable. The grocery sections — FairPrice Finest, Cold Storage, Giant — hum with shoppers. Restaurant queues snake through the concourse. But the department store anchors, once the gravitational centre of suburban retail, feel cavernous and tired. Now, government figures confirm what foot traffic already suggested: the island’s shopping habit has split into two distinct tracks, and the old format may never fully recover.
What the numbers show
The Retail Sales Index — benchmarked to 2017 and measured in current prices — records Supermarkets & Hypermarkets hitting 161.0 in January 2025, the highest reading across 50 months of data that end in December 2025. In the same series, Department Stores scraped a trough of 54.9 in February 2022 and could only crawl back to 97.3 by the final month of the dataset. That is a gap of more than 60 index points on a base of 100, and it has barely narrowed.
The quiet rally in food and drink
The second-most revealing shift sits in the Food & Alcohol segment. At 133.8 in December 2025, it overtook the supermarket category for the first time in the series and suggests Singaporeans are channeling more discretionary spend into dining out, bars, and quality food retail. That number sat at just 65.1 in November 2021; the doubling of the index in four years marks a fundamental rewiring of the consumer wallet.
Department stores haven’t found a floor
The headline total index averaged 102.6 over the full period and closed at 120.6 in December 2025, but that aggregate masks the chasm underneath. While supermarkets stayed above 130 for much of 2025, Department Stores last crossed the 100 barrier in February 2023. Mini-Marts & Convenience Stores fared even worse, sinking to 89.0 in the final month — never having firmly reclaimed the 2017 baseline. Because the index is expressed in current prices, part of the rise reflects inflation rather than volume growth, making the department-store stagnation in nominal terms all the more alarming.
- Supermarkets peaked at 161.0 in January 2025 and held above 130 in eight of eleven subsequent months.
- Department Stores’ lowest point was 54.9 in February 2022; the index remained sub-100 for the entire final three years of the data.
- Food & Alcohol surged to 133.8 in December 2025, overtaking supermarkets and signaling an experience-led shift.
- Total retail sales climbed to 120.6 by December 2025, but the gain partly reflects rising prices rather than booming volumes.
For landlords, investors, and policymakers, the durability of the gap between the grocery-and-meal category and the department-store format is the bigger story than any monthly top-line oscillation. Whether the anchor department store can reinvent itself — or whether the four-year trend is now baked into the island’s retail DNA — remains the open question that 2026’s data will have to answer.
Source: Singapore Department of Statistics via data.gov.sg · 2026-07-04T21:10:22.290Z
