Decades-old neighborhood shops find themselves featured in nostalgia videos by customers who never previously said hello
SINGAPORE Ramasamy Vellasamy has run his ground-floor provision shop in the same northern Singapore housing block since 1986, quietly selling snacks, household basics, and the occasional cold drink to generations of neighborhood residents. This year, somewhat to his own bewilderment, he has also become a minor social media phenomenon, the subject of several widely shared nostalgia videos praising the shop’s “authentic old Singapore charm” from customers who, by his own count, had rarely spoken to him beyond ordering a drink.
“Young people come now with their phones out before they even say hello,” Vellasamy said, gesturing at his modest, well-worn shelving. “They want a video of the shop, the old fridge, the handwritten price signs. Some of them buy something small afterward, almost as an afterthought. I don’t mind. I just find it a little funny, after forty years, that this is the year everyone suddenly finds my fridge interesting.”
A Wave of Nostalgia, Arriving Somewhat Suddenly
Provision shops like Vellasamy’s, once a near-universal fixture of Singapore’s older housing estates, have declined steadily for decades as supermarkets, convenience store chains, and online delivery services have reshaped how residents shop for everyday goods. The remaining shops, run predominantly by aging owners with no clear succession plan, have increasingly become framed in public discourse as a vanishing piece of local heritage, a shift that has, somewhat abruptly, turned surviving shopkeepers into unlikely custodians of collective nostalgia.
“Nobody filmed these shops when there were hundreds of them,” said one Singapore-based heritage researcher who studies the city’s changing retail landscape. “Now that there are only a handful left, suddenly everyone wants a video of the last ones standing. It’s a very human pattern, honestly. We don’t usually value things until we can see the end of them clearly.” The researcher notes that similar nostalgia waves have previously swept through other disappearing local institutions, from traditional coffee shops to specific styles of public housing architecture, each becoming beloved almost exactly in proportion to how endangered it appears.
Vellasamy, Cautiously Embracing the Attention
For his part, Vellasamy says the sudden interest has brought a modest but genuine business boost, with younger customers occasionally becoming repeat visitors after their initial nostalgia-driven visit. “Some of them come back,” he said. “Not many, but some. They bring friends, they show them the shop, they buy a few things. It’s not going to make me wealthy at this point in my life, but it’s nice, honestly, after years of watching customers slowly disappear to the supermarket down the road.”
The Harder Question Underneath the Videos
Despite the newfound affection, Vellasamy and other longtime shop owners acknowledge the videos alone won’t solve the deeper structural challenges facing shops like his: rising rents, aging ownership with few successors willing to take over a low-margin business, and a shopping public whose habits, nostalgia aside, remain largely oriented toward convenience and delivery apps rather than a five-minute walk to the ground floor. “The videos are sweet,” Vellasamy said. “But nostalgia doesn’t pay rent by itself. If people really want shops like mine to survive, the affection needs to turn into actual, regular customers, not just a thirty-second video and a like button.”
A Legacy, However It Ends
Vellasamy, now in his sixties, says he has no immediate plans to close the shop, even as he acknowledges he hasn’t identified anyone interested in continuing the business once he eventually retires. “My children have their own careers,” he said. “I don’t think this shop continues after me, if I’m honest. Maybe that’s exactly why people are filming it now. Maybe some part of them already knows it’s ending, even if I haven’t said so out loud yet.”
Government Heritage Efforts, Limited but Growing
Some local heritage organizations and government bodies have begun exploring modest support measures for surviving provision shops, including small grants for shop preservation and inclusion in heritage trail programming aimed at directing tourist and local foot traffic toward these remaining businesses. Vellasamy’s shop has been informally included in one such community heritage walk, a development he says he learned about only after a tour group showed up unannounced one Saturday morning. “Nobody asked me first,” he said, laughing. “I just looked up and there were fifteen people standing in my shop listening to a guide explain my own life to me. I found it very strange. I also found it kind of touching, once I got over the surprise.”
Heritage advocates acknowledge that such programs, while meaningful, remain far too small in scale to meaningfully reverse the broader decline facing shops like Vellasamy’s. “We can preserve a handful of these places through heritage programming,” the researcher said. “We can’t preserve the entire category through nostalgia and walking tours alone. That requires actual customers making an actual habit of shopping there, which is a much harder thing to engineer than a video going viral.”
Vellasamy says he’s grateful for whatever help the heritage programs can offer, even if he remains realistic about their limits. “A grant helps a little. A tour group helps a little. What actually keeps a shop like this open is somebody walking in on an ordinary Tuesday because they genuinely need a bottle of soy sauce, not because they saw a video,” he said. “I hope people remember that part too, eventually, once the novelty of filming us wears off.”
A Legacy, However It Ends
ders in, phone out or not. Further coverage of Singapore’s changing neighborhood landscape continues at bohiney.com.
SOURCE: https://prat.UK/
