By VERNON CLEMENT JONES, Guardian Business Editor, vernon@nasguard.com

Restructuring continues at the country's leading retailer, as Solomon's Mines shuts its Mall at Marathon anchor store — raising questions about the merchant's future in the market it once dominated.

On Tuesday, a spokeswoman for the Bahamian retailer confirmed the latest closure, a move following on the heels of that location's re-branding under the "Solomon's Mines Mademoiselle Collection" and the wholesale shift to women's apparel.

That new signage remained posted at the entrance of the store as late as last weekend. Only empty fixtures lay inside. Workers from the store have been scattered across the existing chain of stores, said the Solomon's representative.

Last year's renaming exercise may have come too late to encourage the kind of increase in trade to keep the store from heading down the same road as several other Solomon's locations.

According to a written statement from the company, the mall closing is a continuation of restructuring efforts began last August. The jettisoned locations cut a wide swathe across the merchant's inventory of stores as well as its collection of retail names. Among the axed were other Mademoiselle locations, a Pipe of Peace location and another tourism-focused outlet in Treasure Cay, Abaco.

This latest move leaves the merchant with only a perfume kiosk in Nassau's busiest shopping plaza — a substantially reduced presence from only six months ago.

Last August Solomon's decided to end operations at no less than seven locations across the country, with a whopping four of them on Bay Street. That, argue many other merchants along the famed retail strip, has helped erode tourist impressions of the downtown core.

Then CEO Mark Finlayson argued the cutbacks as a deliberate move to shed assets that have simply failed to meet expectations.

He asserted that the company had decided to refocus efforts on better exploiting the local market, moving downmarket with retail lines meant to better appeal to the pocketbooks of Bahamians.

That represents something of a sea-change for a merchant synonymous with high-end shopping for most of its 99-year history.

"Absolutely, we will be moving down market," Finlayson told Guardian Business last August. "We have moved away from the Breitling and Patek Philippe watches and we are now focusing on everyday brands like

Guess and Fossil, so we are moving away from the higher end to brands that are more affordable."

It's the kind of action that retail analysts across North America are now endorsing as a way of better connecting with shoppers as the U.S. economy flirts with recession and its retail market takes it on the chin.

They point to shopping malls as arguably the best place from which to mount those campaigns. That may make it harder to explain Solomon's move to close its Marathon location.

The viability of what remains of its chain now seems even more dependent on the health of the country's tourism industry, given the large number of its stores on Paradise Island.

That may bode less then well. According to new Ministry of Tourism statistic, the number of visitors to The Bahamas last year fell 2.9 percent from the year previous.