The mall is dead, long live the mall

IT survived multiple economic depressions, two world wars and a catastrophic fire. But after 162 years, Robinsons will be no more.

The iconic Singapore department store may have been the pandemic's latest casualty, but the truth is that the bleeding began long before Covid-19 struck. Suffering from intense competition from e-commerce, the once-publicly listed company had not turned a profit since at least 2014. The pandemic has merely knocked the last nail into its coffin.

Similar stories are playing out for retailers across the world. The double whammy of shoppers' increasing penchant to go online and a pandemic that locked billions of people out of stores and in their homes has devastated retailers from individual brands such as Zara and H&M, to multi-label shops such as Robinsons, to the granddaddy of them all: malls.