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SINGAPORE: After 70 years in Singapore, Metro is set to embark on a new chapter.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The department store giant will shutter its last two remaining department stores in Paragon and Causeway Point malls in a bid to move away from traditional large-format stores.<\/p>\n
CNA traces Metro’s history from a small textile shop to becoming a household name.<\/p>\n
Before it started operating in Singapore, Metro already had a store in Surabaya, Indonesia in 1953. A second store in 1955 was later dissolved when growing anti-Chinese sentiments in Indonesia were thought to affect business.<\/span><\/p>\n Its founder, the late Indonesian entrepreneur Ong Tjoe Kim, then decided to restart the business in Singapore, he said in an oral history interview with the National Archives of Singapore.<\/span><\/p>\n In 1957, he opened the first store here at 72 High Street (between Hill Street and North Bridge Road), which was a two-storey shophouse measuring merely 250 sq m.\u00a0<\/p>\n He chose the location because he thought it was more upmarket than Chinatown.\u00a0<\/p>\n A movie buff, Ong named the store after the Hollywood production house Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), shortening it to Metro to make it easy to remember.\u00a0<\/p>\n This was because “people loved the movies, and they were familiar with MGM, which made good movies”, he said in a past interview with The Straits Times.\u00a0<\/p>\n He even invited a movie star, Hong Kong actress Li Mei, to snip the symbolic ribbon on the store’s opening day \u2013 becoming the first retailer in Singapore to do so.\u00a0<\/p>\n Metro started as a textile shop selling a wide range of fabrics used for making traditional clothing such as the sarong kebaya and cheongsam worn by the ethnic communities here.\u00a0<\/p>\n It was a hub for imported fashion and fabrics throughout the 1960s, selling lace from France, embroidery from Switzerland and linen from America.\u00a0<\/p>\n While department stores Robinsons and Tangs catered to expatriates and Singapore residents respectively, Metro targeted wealthy housewives from Singapore and Indonesia.\u00a0<\/p>\n Many of its early customers were Mr Ong’s Indonesian friends who shopped in bulk at his store.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n SINGAPORE: After 70 years in Singapore, Metro is set to embark on a new chapter.\u00a0 The department store giant will shutter its last two remaining…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":70446,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/dam.mediacorp.sg\/image\/upload\/s--jjjMHtWa--\/c_crop,h_281,w_499,x_1,y_1\/c_fill,g_auto,h_676,w_1200\/f_auto,q_auto\/v1\/mediacorp\/cna\/image\/2026\/07\/21\/image-ea7c3176.jpeg?itok=C1wVNq6k","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10040,667,26894,2284,26893,20579,185,1197,209],"class_list":["post-70445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-news-sg-global","tag-closures","tag-final","tag-heyday","tag-history","tag-hollywoodinspired","tag-metro","tag-orchard","tag-road","tag-singapores","wpcat-2-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70445\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/70446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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