A Hawker Stall Selling Indian Food in Chinatown Will Be Rented Out at $1 Per Month

The hawker centre scene in Singapore is usually bustling

But have you ever stopped to wonder how much it costs to rent a stall?

One stall in Chinatown selling Indian food will be renting their stall for a mere $1.

The person was the only one who bid for the stall, and they were successful.

Here’s more about what happened.

Stall in Chinatown Will Be Rented Out for $1

The bidding prices for hawker stalls for September are out, and one stall’s successful bidding price is raising eyebrows.

Why, you may ask. It’s because the stall will be rented out for only $1.

This is the record lowest successful bidding price for hawker centres in Singapore this year.

The winning bidder sure struck gold.

It is quite uncommon for hawker stalls to be successfully rented out at just $1.

This surprising phenomenon was discovered by a Shin Min reporter who reviewed the winning bids for hawker stalls in September and noticed the $1 winning bid.

To make matters more amusing, the winning bid was the only bid placed for that hawker stall.

According to the records, the stall had been successfully rented by at least three different parties in the past ten years.

The highest bid was $512, and the most recent bid, in 2020, was $11.

The stall has been available since early this year, but nobody was interested in the stall.

It was only in July this year that someone bid $101 for the stall. That was the sole bid for the hawker stall as well.

According to local regulations, if the second round of bidding only has one bid, then that bidder who bids in September (and passes the ownership criteria) will get the stall.

The stall will be selling Indian food.

The Stall Is Not in a Prime Location

A Shin Min reporter who visited the location in the hawker centre said that the stall in question was located near the back row, where footfall was sparse.

There were 15 stalls in that row, and at 3 p.m. in the afternoon, only three of the stalls were still operating.

Six of the stalls did not have any signboards, which indicated that they had been empty for a while.

The stall with the $1 rent will be next to a duck rice and kway chap stall. This stall has been open for over 40 years.

According to the stall owner, Ms Lin Mei Feng (Hanyu pinyin), the $1 hawker stall rent was unheard of, and she was very surprised when she heard about the news.

She said that the prices of ingredients are high nowadays and that a low stall rent may not help the stall to survive.