Why do all retailers close at 5-7pm even a shopping mall?

Do locals have convenient shopping options in Bermuda?

Can locals browse the internet on local websites and order a item and have it delivered with free or 2day shipping comparable to Amazon and US stores island-wide?

Does a toothbrush really have to cost $10? Does cereal have to cost $8? Does a shaver that retails for $29 in the states have to cost $79 in Bermuda?

Do the grocery stores really have the power to agree to disagree on lowering costs for customers?

Where is the incentive to shop in Bermuda? Oh I forgot the government wants to use coercion and deny the people of Bermuda a better quality of life and force us to shop in Bermuda where the service is bad and prices are 300-400% that of the states with very limited shopping options and convenience. Please tell me this isn’t the plan. This is as basic as you can get.

Where are we going Bermuda?? We are depriving our own citizens.

HAS THE PLP OR OBA IN THE LAST 10-15 YEARS ASKED THEIR SELVES THESE QUESTIONS? IF THE ANSWER IS NO. THEY HAVE FAILED US.

Local retailers do not carry all the products, and because they don’t it is not fair to hike up all the prices on all goods into Bermuda. Do these people use their Business and Economics they learned in school? This is very frightening.

The government needs to encourage people to spend their money. Forcing locals to shop locally with limited options is reducing the quality of life and will not help the economy. Companies island wide have reduced staff, we have a large unemployment rate, and now you want to hike up duty to fix the economy?? Retailers have to adjust to a global economy and reduce their prices and not charge 300-400% on items.

Most retailers in Bermuda close at 5pm if not 6pm at the latest. How in the world does the Bermudas premier shopping mall in Hamilton close at 5pm? If the average person gets off work at the same time, do they expect customers to do massive shopping on their lunch break? There is very few online retailers that are local in the country and deliver with free 2day shipping comparable to Amazon and other US online retailers. The bottom line is service and retail are pathetic in the country. PLP and OBA (both are bad for Bermuda) need to understand there are other ways to stimulate local shopping and the solution is not raising duty. All you are doing is lowering the already falling quality of life in this country.

A whole bunch of angry Bermudians. How many remember when the dutyfree allowance was about the same purchasing power as $1500.00 in todays money? Of course most of us only got to travel once a year, if we were lucky, back then. Airfares were much more expensive than today.

Vote PLP. Vote for financial slavery.

Do you want to wait hours at the airport to get your 6.5% duty on the few items you have or just apply your duty free allowance, pay your 25% (now 35%) and be out the door in less than 20 minutes?

The import rates paid by relati stores are lower than 20% and should remain.

Not the way to go Paula……

LOL

but you are right the others on the list have to use externally made goods not by choice i might add a we dont make rum, sunglasses, cars or suits

I shop USPS and Royal Mail all the time. Use the least expensive option that includes a tracking number. Not only the couriers have tracking numbers. I’ve never had any issues with lost or missing packages. Also, it has been my experience at my parish post office that the postal service employees are trustworthy and diligent in their duties.

Ride

The only people complaining are the shops who don’t want to adapt to the new online competition. Coopers and the like can say goodbye to my custom if the rates go up for individuals.

A flat rate of 20% would not be welcomed by consumers or the local shops – it would be a 13% increase for clothes, jewelry, perfume. And these are the things that tourists buy too.

I’ve used mailboxes a few times and found it very convenient for items I can’t bring in directly. Ultimately mailboxes expands consumer choice. If the government brings in insane duty hikes for personal imports then it would seriously undermine our consumer choice.

And here’s a message for the Hamilton stores: we know you are the ones lobbying for this. You’d better go into serious reverse mode and plead for Paula not to do this. Because if the personal duty goes up, I will NOT be shopping in any of your stores until the rates go back down and I will be encouraging everybody I know to do the same (last year we spent thousands in Hamilton)

Online competitors are certainly part of Best Buy’s problem, but not for the reasons it thinks. What’s really going on is more basic. Best Buy just doesn’t understand its customers’ point of view.

Replace Best Buy with Bermuda and it’s the same thing.

If I were a retail landlord prior to the airport adjustment I may have been becoming sympathetic to the retailers’ expenses. There were plenty of signs to indicate that sales were down and that businesses were closing. Had one of my hypothetical tenants come to me I may have entertained the idea of lowering the lease at some point. From a landlord’s perspective it is better to have a slightly lower lease than none at all.

But then the landscape changed. The airport duty structure was revised to favour retailers. Now I’m hypothetically thinking, “Hummmm. Let’s keep the lease where it is and see how this plays out. Maybe they’ll be able to continue to pay with this change.”

Some time passes and things still don’t look too rosy for retailers. However, the new airport tax structure has not been in force for long. Therefore, I’m content to see if the retailers can survive. Then the landscape changes again in favour of the retailers. Now I might hypothetically think again, “Hummmm. Even more concessions for the retailers? Let’s keep the lease where it is and see how this plays out.”

The attempts to engineer the retail market are being undertaken with too narrow a view. I think what will happen is people will get hip to online vendors with direct shipping to Bermuda to cut out the Mailboxes, ZipXes and other forwarding services for most of their online purchases. Shipping United States Postal Service or Royal Mail is many times (x8, x10 is some cases) cheaper than these forwarding services. The wait can be as little as a week with some of the options. The word will spread for online vendors that ship direct. The forwarders will lose business, retail will continue its decline (as they refuse to innovate), and people will shop online in record numbers.

Ride

LOL come on the pic above has her holding a PLP shirt for cryin out loud.

LOL again this is a money grab and has nothing to do with people buying Bermuda if anything it will further contract the economy. I’ve read it a hundred times on here that Government should spend money (that what Government supporters say over and over again wish they would have saved some to spend now;) to stimulate the economy and encourge people to spend confidently to get the economy running again. So how does this fit in with that ideology?

Tax hike maybe, make you think twice possibly, force me to shop here, no way!

Or should i start my own protest to make sure people pay the same rate i do at the airport!

If its one rate in one place, then it should be one rate everyplace!

There is a loophole in the law which means that people at the Airport bringing in goods pay one rate and other persons via differing modes of import pay another rate. How exactly is closing this loophole a bad thing.

I’ve heard people up in arms. But if one person were paying 100 and you were paying 500 wouldn’t you want the loophole to be fixed. I don’t see the fuss, but then again I don’t use ZipX or Mailboxes, I just shop here and bring things back when I fly.

just sayin