A record crowd travelled to the Hamilton Princess & Beach Club for the Bermuda Chamber of Commerce’s annual Budget Breakfast yesterday to hear from the Minister of Finance, but it was Marico Thomas who stole the show.

Mr Thomas, the president of the chamber, followed a 47-minute conversation between David Burt and Arthur Wightman, PwC Bermuda territory leader, with a 34-minute presentation of his own.

He said that he heard many opinions about Bermuda’s problems and how to fix them but those conversations were often “heavy on emotions and heavy on perceptions, and far too often they were light on facts, figures and truth”.

Mr Thomas then unveiled a series of slides with data points representing how the chamber viewed the island’s economic landscape.

The 400 people in attendance, a wide cross-section of Bermuda’s political and business ranks, sat in silence as he moved from slide to slide, setting out the figures and prompting attendees to consider what they meant for the future of the island.

He addressed the number of jobs filled on the island; the average age of workers; declining school enrolment; birth and death rates; retail sales trends; the impact of the number of jobs on retail sales; the impact of online shopping; a review of tourism properties that have closed either temporarily or for good; monthly air arrivals and the role of tourism in Bermuda’s future; the number of houses for sale; marriages and divorces; the cost of rental properties over time; tourism; and more.

He said the median age of the working population in Bermuda was 39.6 in 1999, but had risen to 47 in 2022.

Mr Thomas said: “The workforce is ageing – and how will we replenish the workforce?”

He said that private school enrolment remained steady at 3,300, but the number of students in public schools had declined 41 per cent from 6,326 in 1996 to 3,719 in 2022.

Mr Thomas said: “The current negative trends in overall school enrolments will make for an insufficient amount of Bermudian children to grow to the workforce to address future needs.

“The gap in workforce is not actually a long-term issue, it is an immediate one – and it is on our doorstep with impacts being an increasing factor over the next five years.”

Addressing retail sales trends, he said the value of goods sold was up, but the volume – the number of orders – was down.

“Fewer things are being purchased and they are being purchased at an increasingly higher cost.

“What is the spending power right now of the average person? What is the cost of living – how does it feel for you? What is the cost of business – how does that feel for you? When do you think you’ll be able to retire?”

He added: “What is the correlation between the number of customers buying and the number of employees serving? What is the impact of a shrinking population?”

In the retail clothing sector, Mr Thomas said, sales values were down 21 per cent but courier activity was up 57 per cent.

The chamber president said: “The challenge that all of our retail members feel is the competition from online sales and the ease of shipping.

“Consider the impact of not purchasing in Bermuda on employment, on tourism, on international business, on local store fronts.

“How does overseas shopping impact the quality, or quantity, or variety of items available here in a local shop when you need it?

“As a business owner, what items do you choose to sell and not sell? As a purchaser, what items can you not find?”

Of the island’s housing shortage, Mr Thomas said: “Bermuda used to have a significantly larger population, and no one was living in tents, so where did the housing go?”

He said the chamber’s research uncovered 19 reasons, including rent control; landlord tenant; digital nomads; changing demographics; probate; fewer marriages; declining household size; derelict houses; limited new builds; cost of construction; vacation rentals; and more.

“It’s not one thing – it’s all these things.”

He added: “Bermuda requires 8,000 additional persons in the workforce. Where are they to live?”

Mr Thomas listed 29 tourism properties that had closed either temporarily or for good and the number of lost rooms in each instance.

He wondered what happened to all the former employees of those entities.

Mr Thomas said: “Where did they go? Did they stay in the industry? Did they leave the industry?

“What story, when they went home, did they tell their children about no longer being able to work in hospitality?

“And how do those children now feel about hospitality? How do those children of those people that were no longer in those properties feel about tourists, let alone tourism? How do they feel about service in general?”

Mr Thomas said the chamber would be organising a series of lunch-and-learn sessions to share and discuss its collected data with the community.