End of an era. Metro, a Singaporean department store chain that has been trading in the country for nearly 70 years, is closing its last two full-size stores.

• One is at Paragon, on Orchard Road, the city's main shopping street. The other is at Causeway Point, a big suburban mall in Woodlands, near the crossing to Malaysia.
• No closing date yet. They go when the leases run out. Metro says it will switch to smaller specialist shops and pop-ups, and Paragon says the two are still talking about keeping Metro in the mall in some new form.

It's not just Metro. Isetan, the Japanese chain, has shut five Singapore branches since 2015: Wisma Atria, Westgate, Parkway Parade, Tampines and Nex. BHG, another department store chain, has shrunk its Bugis Junction flagship.

• That's five full-size department stores already gone from Singapore's best-known malls in eleven years, with Metro's two to follow.

Worth noting the timing. CapitaLand Integrated Commercial Trust, a listed Singaporean company that owns some of the country's biggest malls, finished buying Paragon on 1 July.

• It said it plans to reconfigure parts of the mall, including the space Metro occupies. Metro announced its exit 19 days later, citing its own strategic review of a retail business that had been losing money.

📖 The concept: a positive externality. It’s the same idea as Johor, but it’s the other way around. A benefit somebody creates that other people get for free.

A department store doesn't pay top dollar for its space. It gets a discount, because it pulls thousands of people through the doors every day, and every one of them walks past the other shops on the way in. The boutique on level two pays a high rent precisely because the department store is downstairs.

Take the department store away and the crowd goes with it, unless there are other reasons that bring footfall through the area. Let’s see what happens next.