Supermarkets & Hypermarkets hit index 161 in January 2025, while Department Stores bottomed at 54.9 in February 2022 — a gap that narrowed only margin

Contains information from "Retail Sales Index, (2017 = 100), At Current Prices, Monthly" accessed on 4 July 2026 from Singapore Department of Statistics (data.gov.

sg (Singapore Department of Statistics)) which is made available under the terms of the Singapore Open Data Licence version 1.0 (https://beta.data.gov.sg/open-data-licence).

from Singapore 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.

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