Distributor Jay Gee Melwani Group said two of its fashion brands with eight stores in Singapore will be closing down in the second half of 2016.

New Look, a British brand, and Celio, a French menswear chain, are not doing well owing to high costs of operations, ho-hum sales and the general trend of people going online these days to buy things they do not need to impress people they do not like.

Jay Gee also distributes other brands, such as Aldo, Levi's, Dockers, Aeropostale, Converse and health supplement chain Holland & Barrett.

Affected staff are given the option of being redeployed to other stores in the group.

This news of impending closures come hot on the heels of conglomerate Al-Futtaim Group announcing last week that it will shut 10 loss-making stores here later this year.

Some 60 to 80 affected full-time staff will be redeployed.

Closures, closures everywhere, with so many more to spare

This shuttering of gates and hanging of vacant signs come after Al-Futtaim had already announced a number of closures in 2015, including its Marks & Spencer outlet at Centrepoint, John Little at Marina Square and Tiong Bahru Plaza, along with several other Royal Sporting House outlets.

And not as if we are hearing the last of these mall deaths.

Last year, once highly-successful home-grown label M)phosis shut stores in Singapore with the last outlet in VivoCity closing down in August 2015.

Previously, Japanese fashion label, Lowrys Farm, had also closed down all eight outlets in Singapore by Chinese New Year 2015, after making a short-lived foray into Singapore's fickle, faux-trendy-relatively-pretentious fashion retail business.

All these loss-cutting, exiting-the-scene-before-the-entire-edifice-burns-to-the-ground comes in the midst of a dispute between Ngee Ann City and its anchor tenant, department store Takashimaya, where both sides are tussling over rent, despite being business associates for 22 years and counting.

Landlord Ngee Ann is proposing to revise the rent to $19.83 per square foot a month, more than double the existing rate of $8.78 psf.

Tenant Takashimaya is not relenting. Their dispute is currently before the High Court.

And also not as if the plight of shoppers in Singapore is not well-known.

As Real Estate Investment Trusts (Reits) are getting more popular in recent years for retail investors to make a quick buck off the back of land scarcity, malls managed by Reits tend to increase rents to grow revenue, causing landlords to get greedy as the perception is that it is still a landlords’ market -- meaning they can command prices, which then results in either malls in Singapore being as empty as some people's souls or malls filled with the same old repetitive stuff.

Like with Uniqlo. Again.

Related articles:

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Uniqlo to open biggest outlet at Orchard Central because S’pore doesn’t have enough Uniqlos

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