THE surviving sales floors of the Lane Crawford store in Singapore are well provided with video TV screens.
The staff are probably very grateful, for the presentations must help to fill the long gaps between the appearance of a potential customer.
For this lonely outpost of Hong Kong's swankiest shop is facing a very quiet Christmas indeed. Outside its cone-shaped atrium entrance, crowds bustle along an Orchard Road which shimmers with Christmas decorations, but few of the passers-by are venturing into Lane Crawford.
Next year might be different. This 71 per cent-owned offshoot of Wheelock & Co has already bitten hard on the bullet in slashing its Singapore store from five floors to two, and is now planning a major rethink of its product lines.
The big picture planning is being done from Hong Kong by Peter Pao, Lane Crawford's executive director for operations. The execution will be largely in the hands of Eileen Bygrave, the store's general manager, who returned 12 months ago from Hong Kong to her native Singapore to take on Lane Crawford.
'The merchandise is being corrected. We are no longer a department store with a vast core to pull in the masses as we were when we were on five floors. Now we are on two floors we can't be everything to everybody. We must be much more focused,' she said.