Queensway could be next casualty in sportswear upheaval

Queensway could be next casualty in sportswear upheaval

https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/queensway-could-be-next-casualty-in-sportswear-upheaval

2025-05-08

By---Lin Suling is senior columnist at The Straits Times’ foreign desk, covering global affairs, geopolitics and key developments in Asia.

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Auntie J has spent most of her life selling men’s shoes at Queensway Shopping Centre. 

Once an employee, she assumed the running of the business in 1997, a few years after her daughter was born. Motherhood equipped her with both the boldness to break out on her own and an added imperative to anchor a way of life that allowed for a stream of income while minding a young child at the same time.

Retail was booming in the 1990s. Selling 70 to 80 pairs of shoes a day was the norm. On weekends, hired help provided assistance when things got busy at her small rented 10 sq m store on the second floor facing the escalators.

But as the sun set when I visited one weekday evening, Queensway was all quiet. Neighbouring retailers selling speciality sneakers or sporting equipment do slightly better. Today, Auntie J, now in her late 60s, will be lucky to sell more than five pairs of shoes each day.

“Younger Singaporean men want branded stuff, while bargain hunters buy online or head across the Causeway. There’s little room for the kind of leather shoes I sell,” she confides. A clear-eyed, no-nonsense summation of the current state of her business, the admission is painful nonetheless.

“See, talking about this now... the tears can’t stop,” she says as she smiles, attempting to brush her tears aside and downplay her decision to hold a fire sale until her shop closes for good on May 11.

The sportswear disruption

Auntie J’s tale often elicits reactions lamenting market forces or sighs from finger-wagging critics waving the “why didn’t you do something” card. But reality is far more complex, as seen in the prolonged struggles of a small shop like Auntie J’s to stay afloat amid tidal waves of disruption.  

Shops and shopping malls began as places of commerce for people to peddle wares, yet evolved over time to become centres of civic activity.

Yet now that centrality has been challenged by a wider transformation in our retail landscape, requiring a rethinking of the bricks-and-mortar marketplace and the role they play in modern life beyond becoming homogenising venues for banal consumption.

At the macro level, retail has been upended. Even big boys like TopShop, Esprit and Robinson’s have bowed out of Singapore’s red ocean environment.

Intense competition has come from many directions in the past few years, with e-commerce doubling its share of retail in Singapore since the pandemic and Johor emerging as a retail paradise for a budget-conscious middle class.

On a sectoral level, sportswear, the niche Queensway carved for itself, is facing a reckoning. It is getting squeezed at both the low-cost and the luxury athleisure ends. French discount sports retailer Decathlon captures a huge chunk of the budget-conscious mass market with its low prices, while Lululemon, Adidas, Nike, Puma and other popular brands have squeezed out the middleman and now sell directly to consumers.

This pie may also be shrinking. McKinsey declared in March that “physical inactivity presents an existential risk to the sporting goods industry”, as nearly a third of adults worldwide fall short of basic standards in getting up and moving around.

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Meanwhile, the small pocket of active folks for whom exercise has evolved from activity to identity are spoiled for choice – with Running Lab catering to serious runners and Skechers finding its tribe among brisk-walking seniors.

The result? Stubborn old-time sports retailers are left in the dust. World of Sports has disappeared quietly into the night, a fall from a high of over 20 outlets at its peak. And now Royal Sporting House, the last sports retailer, appears to be facing the same fate with a string of store closures planned over these two years.

The sports retail disruption has been particularly harsh on Queensway, which took a big hit when Sportslink shuttered in 2020 after financial woes forced it into liquidation. Like the death of a queen bee, the loss of an anchor tenant calls into question the survival of the colony of shops.

But it is not just the devastation of the sports retail business model that’s gutting Queensway Shopping Centre, which opened for business in 1976 and quickly gained a reputation for being Singapore’s sports mall.

While most retailers emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic with the upper hand, as revenge shopping powered consumerism, its smallholders did not use the initial period of chaos to negotiate down rents, lock in competitive loan extensions or rethink their appeal. They just didn’t have the capacity, capability or foresight.

The bottom line: There just isn’t a special reason to head to Queensway any more.

The strata mall doom loop

Queensway isn’t feckless but its fragmented strata mall ownership structure disincentivises collective action – the sort needed to revitalise ageing shopping complexes to attract new consumers. 

“That will require investment, resources and expertise – and this will be difficult to coordinate across numerous owners,” Ms Carmen Lee, head of OCBC Investment Research, says. 

Strata malls boomed in the 1970s and 1980s, as a way for small Singapore businesses to own capital and participate in the growing Singapore economy. They were seen as a democratisation of commercial property ownership, yet now appear stuck in a doom loop, a cycle where falling footfall worsens an atmosphere of gloom.

The mosaic of interests held by many individual store owners challenges decision-making and stymies investments in essential maintenance, marketing and the redevelopment of shared infrastructure. Upgrades stall. Facades decay. Even bloc attempts at an exit strategy at Queensway have faltered.

In contrast, “malls owned by real estate investment trusts (Reits) are generally better managed, have economies of scale and can bring in tenants to regional malls, giving customers the same shopping experience across their malls”, Ms Lee adds. 

From CapitaLand, whose portfolio includes high-traffic downtown shopping centres like Raffles City, Bugis Junction and Plaza Singapura, to Frasers, which has focused on neighbourhood malls like Waterway Point and Causeway Point, Reits have little trouble maintaining near-full occupancy.

Deft day-to-day mall management – overseeing tenant relationships, maintaining the property, optimising finances, and boosting customer service and marketing – has been crucial in keeping people coming through, something that Reits-owned malls excel in. 

“They have a team of professionals able to curate and attract a diverse range of retailers. They are then able to replicate this concept throughout all their retail assets… and offer reward programmes to encourage spending,” Ms Lee highlights.

At the same time, Reits turn malls into appreciating property assets.

“Reits can hire professional and experienced asset managers to manage their malls, carry out asset-enhancement programmes systematically, and obtain more favourable financing for their capital expenditure,” Professor Sing Tien Foo, Provost’s Chair Professor at the Department of Real Estate at NUS Business School, points out.

In short: We’re seeing a sharp divergence in Singapore’s physical retail landscape. On the one hand, Reits report firm 2024 earnings, higher yields and continuing churn as rents rise, along with low vacancy rates. On the other hand, strata malls face the threat of decay and decrepitude, without access to government funding provided to mom-and-pop heartland shops since 2007.

If only there was a way to hitch the sails of strata malls to the sails of Reits giants of retail – not as charity cases but because of the value to unlock. Like how a refreshed Golden Mile may breathe new life into the Beach Road area, or the redevelopment of the ageing residential Pearl Bank, while retaining an architectural nod to its heritage, could accelerate the revitalisation of Pearl’s Hill.

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The rise of the ‘non-place’

Yet in our efforts to modernise old places, care should be taken to avoid a particular form of gentrification, by transforming old sites into luxury shopping malls dripping with heritage. (Sorry, New Bahru. You’re lovely but the prices are insane.)

Another – and more common – temptation that must be resisted is the cookie-cutter formula, filling the building with tenants available in every other Singapore mall. It is a dull and unimaginative template. The addition of more stores from Uniqlo, Hooga, Shake Shack and the like may seem safe but can only bring diminishing marginal returns.

In Introduction To Supermodernity, the French anthropologist Marc Auge coined the phrase “non-place” to describe places lacking defining characteristics like history, identity and strong social connections. Motorways, hotels, airports and the modern mall, he says, are non-places that prioritise efficiency at the expense of character. 

The key concept here is average speed. Non-places are high-speed places. They facilitate quick movement and fast, frictionless transactions – getting you around quickly, without a chance to catch your breath or draw meaning from the experience.

But the astronomical rise of the shopping centre in Singapore in the 1990s was about their low average speed. Malls were a place to hang out at – for play, rest and community. You would spend the whole day there – watching a movie, getting coffee and, as I’ve written before, wandering through bookstores.

“From the concrete structures of these places came unplanned histories, imaginations and communities,” Chua Beng Huat writes in a foreword for the book The Singapore Mall Generation.

In some sense, Queensway’s fate speaks volumes about the wider trade-offs we’ve accepted in the name of urban modernisation. It echoes the loss of other subcultural havens like the Substation, which sold drinks and music but offered up a chance for social connection. Some will remember the open space around the fountain at Suntec’s basement as a venue for breakout mass dances by enthusiastic junior college kids. Today, it is filled by restaurants, cafes and shops.

What’s vanishing isn’t just a place but a shared fragment of urban memory – where school athletes bought their first football boots, sneakerheads haggled for rare drops, and parents of full-time national servicemen stuffed their faces with some laksa while their sons got last-minute running shoes the weekend before enlistment.

In that commercial endeavour, what we received in return went beyond the purchase of tangible sportswear – but opportunities for social interaction and group identity formation anchored by sports.

We have fewer of such societal connective tissues these days – a role such heritage commerce used to play. And as I said goodbye to Auntie J that day, I realised why I felt a strange sense of grief over the permanent closure of her store. 

Our malls are getting sleeker and more sanitised. But can they please come with a soul?

Lin Suling is senior columnist at The Straits Times’ foreign desk, covering global affairs, geopolitics and key developments in Asia.

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