5 Mall Chains Are COLLAPSING Across AUSTRALIA

Added: 2026-04-30

[00:00:00]The iconic chain faces rising costs and empty stores. While its competitors are going all out to win over consumers one by one, our favorite retailers are closing their doors and has put one of our oldest department stores on the brink of collapse.

[00:00:16]>> Closure and disposal are very real possibility.

[00:00:20]>> One chain on this list has been in the Australian mall for more than a century.

[00:00:25]Another was sold by its parent company for a fraction of what it was worth a decade ago. A third generated a $35 million loss in 2025, and its owner is now approaching private equity firms and American retail giants to find someone who will take it off their hands. A fourth was already quietly converting its stores into a completely different brand. A fifth closed all its physical locations in January 2026 and is promising a digital future that no one is quite sure will materialize. Five brands. Here is what is happening to each of them. The story of Australian mall retail in 2026 is a story about the gap between what these brands once meant and what they mean now. Some of them have been in Australian shopping centers for longer than any living Australian has been alive. Some of them employed tens of thousands of people at their peak. All of them are contracting and the centers that depended on them are left working out what fills the space.

[00:01:26]If you want to keep seeing this kind of coverage, joining the channel is how you help make it possible. Number five, SAS and B. In January 2026, SAS and Bide closed every physical store it operated in Australia. 14 concessions inside Mayer stores were shut. Three standalone locations at Claremont in Western Australia, Harbortown in Queensland, and Southwarf in Victoria closed their doors. The Instagram announcement used the phrase reinvention in progress.

[00:01:58]Behind that phrase was the end of a physical retail presence that had lasted nearly three decades. Sass and B was founded in 1999 by Sarah Jane Clark and Heidi Middleton. Two Australian women who built a brand that dressed Beyonce, Rihanna, Madonna. Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Kardashian before those names were part of every red carpet conversation. The brand rose from a market stall in London's Portoello Road to international status within a few years of its founding. It was acquired by Mia in two separate transactions in 2011 and 2013 at a combined cost of $70 million. What Mia paid $70 million for in 2013 was a brand with genuine cultural cache. What it was left managing in 2025 was a label whose stock was being discounted to clear, whose performance was described in the company's own communications as a drag on results, and whose physical store network had been reduced to a rump of concessions and three standalone locations. The underperformance of SAS and BD alongside Meer's other owned labels, Markx and David Lawrence, was described by the company as accounting for roughly half of its year-on-year profit decline. The closure was framed as a pause before a relaunch rather than a permanent end. Customers were told the brand would reimagine itself and return.

[00:03:27]That kind of language accompanies a genuine reinvention sometime. More often, it accompanies a managed windown in which the brand continues to exist as intellectual property while the business behind it quietly stops. What was lost in January 2026 is a brand that shaped Australian women's fashion in the 2000s in ways that most of its successes have been unable to replicate. The physical stores where Australian women tried on those pieces are gone. Whether the digital version that is promised will carry the same weight is something the next few years will answer. What the closure of SAS and Baya's physical stores reveals is the difficulty of owning a premium fashion brand inside a department store structure. The concession model that Maya used to house the brand put it in proximity to other products and other brands that diluted its identity. Customers who once sought out a standalone sass and bide store for a specific experience were in the concession environment. One option among many on a floor where dozens of other brands were competing for the same attention. The brand's cultural distinctiveness was harder to maintain in that context and the financial results reflected the difficulty. Number four, Target Australia. Target Australia and Target in the United States are entirely separate businesses with no corporate relationship. What they share is a name, a certain aesthetic positioning between discount and aspirational and a problem that both have been managing for years. The middle of the retail market is the hardest place to survive. Target Australia is owned by West Farmers, the Perthbased conglomerate that also owns Kmart, Bunnings, Office Works, and a portfolio of industrial businesses. West Farmers also owns the Australian Kmart, which is a different business from the American Kmart and which has performed considerably better than its corporate sibling in the mall. The contrast between how Kmart and Target have performed within the same ownership structure is the story of why Target Australia is shrinking. In 2015, Target operated around 283 stores across Australia. As of 2026, that number has fallen to approximately 123. The reduction was achieved through a combination of permanent closures and conversions. West farmers identified the weaker target locations, assessed which could generate better returns as a Kmart, and converted them. The logic is straightforward enough from a corporate perspective. Kmart's product offer is clearer. Its price point is lower. Its customer knows what to expect and visits more frequently. Target attempted to occupy a position that required it to be premium enough to justify slightly higher prices but accessible enough to attract mass traffic. That position is difficult to hold when the customers who might spend slightly more at Target are increasingly spending that money online and the customers who want the lowest prices go to Kmart. West Farmers has been transparent that the target brand will continue to operate in its reduced form rather than being fully absorbed into Kmart. The rationale is that the two brands serve slightly different customers and that maintaining both allows the group to compete across a wider spectrum of the market, but the target of 2026 is a fundamentally smaller business than the target of 2015 and the direction of travel has been consistent and clear. The shopping centers that lost a target and gained a Kmart went through a version of the conversion that is invisible to most customers. The signage changed, the layout was reconfigured, the product mix shifted, and within a few months, the center looked as though Kmart had always been there. What was lost is harder to see. The hundreds of jobs that transferred, the communities where Target had been a fixture for decades, the store managers who had built careers within the Target brand and found themselves absorbed into a different culture. Conversion is tidier than closure on a spreadsheet. It is rarely tidy in practice. The communities that lose a target and gain a Kmart are communities where the retail landscape has been fundamentally altered. Even if a store is still open and trading, the target customer who was buying slightly better quality clothing and homeares at slightly higher prices and treating the shopping trip as a modest form of discretionary spending has been replaced by the Kmart customer who is buying at the lowest available price point and making decisions on strict value terms.

[00:08:11]Those are different retail experiences, different cultural signals, and different versions of what a community's main shopping destination looks like.

[00:08:19]Regional Australia has felt this more acutely than the cities. In regional towns, where Target was the premium option in a center without access to the specialist chains and flagship stores that metropolitan Australians take for granted. The conversion to Kmart represented a genuine reduction in what the local retail environment could offer. The economics are clear. The human experience of them is more complicated. Videos like this one take significant research and production time. If you want to help us keep making them, joining the channel is the simplest way to do it. Number three, Big W. Big W has been losing money for longer than most Australians realize.

[00:09:03]The chain reported a fullear loss of $110 million in 2018. It lost $80 to $100 million in 2019. The pandemic briefly rescued it as lockdowns and government payments pushed Australians toward buying home wares and toys from discount department stores at volumes the chain had rarely seen. When those conditions normalized, the underlying structural problem reasserted itself. In 2025, BigW, reported an Ebit loss of $35 million. Woolworth's group, the chain's parent, simultaneously initiated a formal sale process to test market interest in the business. The name circulating as potential buyers included Walmart, Anchorage Capital Partners, Platinum Equity, and Oakree. Woolworths closed its online marketplace my deal in mid 2025 at a cost of 90 to $100 million. It was structurally a company devesting itself of the businesses that were consuming capital without generating adequate returns. Big W operates 179 stores across Australia.

[00:10:12]Those stores employ approximately 18,000 people. The chain generates around $4.1 billion in annual sales, which makes it a meaningful business in revenue terms.

[00:10:24]The problem is that revenue without profit is just a very expensive way to employ 18,000 people. Every year that Big W fails to generate adequate returns. Woolworths faces the question of whether continued ownership represents the best use of its capital.

[00:10:41]The discount general merchandise category that BigW occupies is under structural pressure from three directions simultaneously. Kmart within the same shopping centers is performing better with a similar but more focused product offer. Amazon and Teu are taking the online category faster than Big W's digital infrastructure can capture and the customers who remain are spending less per visit as cost of living pressure compresses their discretionary budgets. The formal sale process initiated in late 2025 was described by analysts as more intentional and accelerated than previous attempts to gauge interest in the business. Whether it produces a sale, a partial devestature, a further round of store closures, or continued operation under Woolworths remains the open question of 2026.

[00:11:32]What is certain is that the chain's current trajectory is unsustainable and that Woolworth's is actively working to change it. The human dimension of that uncertainty falls on the 18,000 people who work for Big W. They are employees of a business that its parent company is trying to sell. The potential buyers circling Big W are private equity firms and a global retail giant whose primary motivation is return on capital rather than the employment outcomes of the Australian workers inside the business.

[00:12:05]If a sale proceeds, the new owner will conduct their own assessment of the store portfolio and the cost base. The restructuring that follows that assessment will be calibrated around returns over attention. Big W's employees are the people who will find out what that restructuring means in practice. Number two, David Joan. David Jones was founded in 1838.

[00:12:30]It is one of the oldest continuously operating department stores in the world. For most of its history, it occupied a position of genuine cultural significance in Australian retail, defining what aspirational shopping meant for generations of Australians who visited its flagship stores in Sydney and Melbourne, and felt the particular quality of a retail experience built around service, curation, and the implicit promise of a higher standard.

[00:12:58]South Africa's Woolworth's Holdings purchased David Jones in 2014 for $2.1 billion. It was in retrospect one of the most expensive retail acquisitions in Australian history to end in a loss. A decade later, Woolworth's holdings sold David Jones to private equity firm Anchorage Capital Partners at a valuation that was a small fraction of the purchase price. The precise terms were structured to obscure the scale of the loss, but by any reasonable measure, Woolworth's Holdings spent $2 billion in Australian retail and recovered substantially less. Under Anchorage's ownership, David Jones has been accelerating the store closure and footprint reduction program that Woolworth's holdings had been pursuing more cautiously. Private equity ownership of retail businesses follows a predictable sequence. Identify the profitable assets, reduce or eliminate the unprofitable ones, restructure the cost base, and either sell or list the resulting business at a higher multiple than was paid. What this means in practice for David Jones is that the store count that stood at around 48 when Anchorage acquired the business is contracting. The closures that have taken place affect the customers who depended on those stores for a retail experience that the chain's digital offering by general consensus has been unable to replicate. David Jones online exists. David Jones service curation and the experience of a flagship store at full capacity is a fundamentally different thing and the stores where Australians experienced it are disappearing. The David Jones that will emerge from the private equity restructuring process will be smaller and its owners hope more profitable.

[00:14:45]What is being lost in the reduction is harder to quantify. Flagship stores are anchors for their surrounding retail ecosystems. When David Jones shrinks or exits a center, the surrounding specialty retailers lose the foot traffic that the anchor generate. The ripple effects of David Jones's contraction extend well beyond the department store itself. Anchor tenants in Australian shopping centers are more than large stores. They are the commercial logic that makes the surrounding specialty retail viable. A regional center with David Jones as an anchor draws customers who would otherwise shop elsewhere. And those customers flow through the food court, past the specialty fashion stores into the homeares retailers and the jewelers and the cosmetics chains. When David Jones shrinks its footprint or exits a center, every other retailer in that center feels the change in foot traffic within months. The economic model of Australian retail property is built around that dynamic and the contraction of David Jones is disrupting it in centers across the country. Number one, Mia. Mia was founded in Bendigo in 1900 by Sydney Meyer, who arrived in Australia from Bellarus with very little and built one of the country's great retail businesses. The Bour Street flagship in Melbourne, which opened in 1914, became one of the most important retail sites in the country. For a century, Ma was where Australians went to buy things that mattered. the wedding gift, the school uniform, the Christmas present, the dress for the occasion. It was the department store that gave Australian shopping its frame of reference. In 2025, Mia closed its Brisbane City store after 35 years of continuous operation, ending a chapter in that city's retail history. The Frankston store also closed. The pattern of suburban store closures that has been running since the mid20s continued with each closure reflecting the same underlying reality. The suburban meer that once anchored a shopping center is generating insufficient returns to justify the floor space it occupies. The merger with Premier Investments apparel brands completed in January 2025 added Just Jeans, JJ's, Doy, Portman's, and Jackie E to the Maya corporate structure. Together, those brands operate around 717 standalone retail locations across Australia and internationally. Retail strategists estimated at the time of the deal that the combined entity would close between 10 and 12% of those locations as Mia rationalizes the network and moves selected brands into Maya department store concessions rather than standalone stores. 10% of 717 stores is more than 70 closures. The brands being absorbed into Maer's portfolio are fixtures of the Australian shopping center landscape. Just jeans has been in the mall since 1972.

[00:17:52]JJ's has dressed the teenagers of multiple generations of Australian family. Doy and Portman's have occupied the same format of mid-market women's fashion retail for decades. When those standalone stores close and their brands are moved into Mayer concessions or discontinued, the shopping centers that house them lose a tenency. Meer's online sales reached $74 million in the most recent financial year, accounting for around 21% of total revenue. That is a meaningful online presence by the standards of Australian department store retail. The online performance means Mia is generating sales that once required physical store presence from a digital channel that costs less to operate. The rational response to that shift is to reduce the physical store network. The consequence of that rational response is fewer stores, fewer jobs, and fewer reasons for Australians to walk through the door of a shopping center. The Mayer of 2026 is a business in genuine transformation. It has a new executive chair in Olivia Worth, a new acquisition that has dramatically expanded its brand portfolio and a clearer strategic direction than it has had in years. It is also a business that is managing those transformations while closing stores, absorbing hundreds of millions of dollars in acquired liabilities and operating in a consumer environment that has been more challenging than at any point since the global financial crisis.

[00:19:24]what the transformation produces, whether it results in a leaner and genuinely profitable MER or a slower version of the decline that has been running since the mid20s will be one of the defining stories of Australian retail in the next 5 years. The shopping centers that depend on Maya as an anchor are watching closely. Every center where Mia reduces its footprint or exits entirely faces the question of what fills the space. Some find answers, others add a page to the history of Australian retail that looks increasingly familiar. The Indorupilli shopping center in Brisbane turned the floor that Meera vacated into a car dealership. That is one answer to what fills the space when a department store departs. It is also a precise measure of what the retail property market is currently able to generate as an alternative to a department store anchor. A car dealership performs a function. It generates foot traffic of a specific kind. It is a commercially rational solution to an empty floor. It is also a long way from what that floor once meant to the center and to the community it served. Maya opened its first store in Bendigo in 1900. For 126 years, it has been part of the fabric of Australian retail. What the next chapter of that history looks like will be determined by decisions being made inside Meer's leadership now in a retail environment that has changed more in the past decade than in the previous five combined. The shopping centers of Australia are waiting to find out. What all five have in common. The five brands on this list are different in almost every respect. Price point, product category, ownership structure, customer demographic, and origin story. What connects them is a single underlying condition that the Australian retail market has been generating for more than a decade. The department store and discount department store model was built around a particular set of assumptions. Australians would come to physical stores in large numbers. The cost of operating those stores, the wages, the rents, the fit outs, the supply chains would be covered by the margin from the goods sold to the customers who walked through the door.

[00:21:37]and the customers who walk through the door would keep walking through the door. Each of those assumptions has been under pressure for years. Online retail led initially by Australian operators and then overtaken by global platforms operating at a scale and margin that Australian businesses are unable to match has captured an increasing share of the spending that once walked through the door. Cost of living pressure has reduced the discretionary portion of household spending that funds visits to mid-market retail. And the customers who still visit physical retail are making fewer trips, spending less per visit, and increasingly directing that reduced spending toward the formats that offer the clearest value proposition. The deeply discounted, the highly specialized, or the experiential. The five brands on this list are the visible tip of a structural shift in Australian retail that is still moving. They are the names that Australians recognize, the anchors that made shopping centers what they are, and the businesses whose contraction is reshaping the physical retail landscape in ways that will still be visible in 20 years. The question that Australian retail property owners are working through in 2026 is what replaces the anchor tenant. The answers being tried include medical centers, gyms, child care facilities, universities, and in at least one documented case, a car dealership. These are all legitimate uses of commercial floor space. They are also a different kind of retail center than the one that anchored the social and commercial life of Australian suburbs for half a century. The shopping center that is primarily a collection of medical services, food and beverage, and entertainment experiences with a residual retail component of specialty stores and convenience shopping is a different thing from the shopping center anchored by department stores and discount department stores that defined the model from the 1960s through the 2000s. Both can be commercially viable.

[00:23:43]They represent genuinely different visions of what a community central commercial hub is for and who it is for.

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