The fight for our custom as Salisbury keeps on growing

INTERESTING that such a major retail player as Dunelm Mill is moving in to Salisbury.
As a near neighbour of Matalan and Homebase, it’ll give them a run for their money in the competition for customers who fancy jazzing up their homes with the latest accessories.
Arriving, as it does, hot on the heels of the TK Maxx offshoot HomeSense, it’ll have shoppers at the bargain end of the market spoilt for choice.
Waitrose and Tesco have been busily revamping their stores to ensure that they each maintain their appeal and their market share.
With the thousands of new homes springing up around the city, all of them needing to be kitted out, Dunelm bosses have rightly spotted a golden opportunity.
And a rival for our established stores can only be a good thing when it comes to keeping prices low.
With luck, it will also mean that fewer of us feel the need to drive to Southampton and tramp miles through the horrendous maze of bizarrely named furnishings that is Ikea when all we really need is half a dozen wine glasses and a couple of candle holders.
By the time we’ve paid for our petrol and possibly a plateful of those puzzlingly popular meatballs, we’re not exactly quids in, are we?
Retail is already Salisbury’s biggest source of employment, accounting for almost one in five jobs. And the newcomer will create 65 more.
The downside is that it will lure yet more custom away from the city centre, where there’s already lots on offer for those of us eager to freshen up our décor.
Size does matter in this context, I admit. Many of our quaint old buildings are simply too small to display enough stuff to offer us the choices we demand these days.
I don’t particularly enjoy shopping in soulless retail parks full of mammoth warehouses.
But Southampton Road is what it is. It isn’t going to go away, and it looks less hideous when its buildings are bustling with life than when they’re vacant, staring at us with blank eyes as we drive past.
And for many, many people, the free parking there is understandably a major consideration.
Let’s hope Wiltshire’s Tory leaders – who, by and large, are not short of a few bob – bear that in mind in the coming weeks when they’re mulling over the level at which they’ll set the city’s new parking charges.
But don’t hold your breath. What they give with one hand, they’ll take away with the other because they insist that the final result must be ‘cost neutral’.
In other words, they seem to have already ruled out the possibility that if they reduce the costs for everyone, more people will come.