Governments and the private down town retailers made it all but impossible for the natives to want to shop on Bay street, so they need to sit still and wait until their beloved tourist returns in the not so near future.

Eliminate era **the Bay Street Boys** and be done it!
**Dioniso James's** dependency cruise travel to we colony of 1200 out islands, cays, and rocks, and the **little left** of the magic Sir Stafford's old **Bay Street,** should be allowed to continue onward with its own fault of decaying self-destructing.
**Shakehead** once for upyeahvote, tis that time reach **Dioniso James** to move on back to his craft of **washin, dryin' and pressin**' clothes, twice for not?

Bahamians : Good for those Bay Street Boys, about time they got run out of business

Also Bahamians : We need more jobs, our people are starving and can't pay rent.

This country is truly unique.

Many of those 'ole Bay Street families long ago moved on to much more lucrative endeavours. Much of Bay Street is now owned by black Bahamians, Greeks and a few Chinese.

Most have left or passed on, the movement to Bahamian ownership has been a dismal failure, just THINK one glaring example Garet 'Tiger' Finlayson, says it all

Yep. Many of the 'ole white Bay Street Boys and their families long ago moved on to much more lucrative endeavours when they realized the Bahamas could no longer attract spendthrift air arrival visitors and began pivoting to cheapskate sea arrival visitors instead. The crooked nouveau rich vultures swooped in and transformed Bay Street Street within a decade or so into the unsafe grave yard of run down, dilapidated and ghetto looking buildings we see today. Karma for the cheapskate cruiseline passengers and the cruise ship owners who put every dollar spent by their passengers into their own very greedy pockets. The Bahamas will never see better days as long as successive corrupt governments keep pandering to the equally corrupt cruise ship owners. Without an economic model that emphasizes much more spendthrift air arrival visitors, our tourism goose will never again be a golden one.

voting for the SAME PLP and FNM is what will happen for decades, that average D education has worked as designed

Unfortunately, the reality is successive governments were brain dead mammoths with no hands-on experience in tourism, which explains why the sector regressed over the last 50 years.

The undeniable lesson that they should have learned from the cruise industry disaster, is we should be hastily shifting more focus to stay-over visitors, which is more sustainable and contributes 70% more to the local economy per capita, and is far more environmentally friendly than the greedy cruise ship industry that thinks it is their GOD given right to hog-up the majority of the tourism pie regardless of the fact that without the Bahamas and Caribbean destinations their cruise ships would totally useless.

Given our proximity to North and Latin America, what the government should be doing is devising ways to encourage these people to stay-over in the Bahamas. One obvious way of targeting a new wider stay-over market would be to reposition the Bahamas as a duty-free shopping destination. Why successive governments are blind to this is beyond comprehension.

Hotels and every business remotely connected to tourism would see massive growth in such volumes that any government revenue lost in duty-free sales would be tremendously offset by taxes collected from the rest of the tourism industry. Another bonus to the local economy would be Bahamians would shop at home rather than the U.S.

The cruise industry has it's positives as well, however, because of the massive volume they move, they are too greedy and too controlling, to rely on partnering in business with.

We must change direction or we will remain at the mercy of the cruise industry waiting for them to drop a few crumbs for our survival.