The numbers we have quoted all come from the application itself. There is something truly bizarre about this:

1. The application says the new store would have a net retail floorspace of 1066 sq. metres., compared with 400 sq. metres for CK’s.
2. At the Town Council meeting on 17 December, the applicant himself said that the new store would be just 10% bigger than CK’s, and that a building of the size described in the application would not fit on the site.
3. In a recent interview with the Tivyside, he said the store would be 1.5 times bigger than CK’s.

Which one is it?

It doesn’t inspire confidence in any of the other assertions made by the application, does it?

Just because a supermarket on the site would result in finance being raised to develop it doesn’t make it right. Planning permission for a bio waste incinerator, a crematorium or a small nuclear power plant would also result in big investment by someone or other, but that does not make them right for the site either.

The reality which will dawn sooner or later is almost certainly that no supermarket is interested in the site and that it is not worth anything like as much as the applicant hopes. Once that has sunk in, we may get to see more realistic plans which are sympathetic to their surroundings.

Re the proposed size of the new store & some basic mathematics, CK’s at 400sq m gives us a 20m x 20m building, assuming it to be square (which I hasten to add I realise it is not, but please bear with me!)… the new store proposes a size of roughly 33m x 33m (1089 sq m), which is in realistic terms of ‘wall space’ not that much bigger is it?

How do the self proclaimed ‘Action Group’ propose to raise the millions needed to develop this site otherwise, or are they merely happy to go with the status quo (leave as is) & let this blot on the town landscape continue?

Regards, Andy

The other major problem with this application from a retail point of view is that while the applicant says nearly half of the store’s business would come from existing businesses, the other half would come from ‘clawing back’ business now leaking to Carmarthen and Cardigan. The problem with this argument is that the level of leakage is much lower than the applicant claims. The application firstly ignores all the shops in the catchment area it has defined and also ignores the impact of new store openings in Cardigan, Llandysul and NCE itself (Lidl is almost certain to open opposite CK’s). The result of that is that there just is not enough money left in the area to support a store of the size proposed. Of course, one of the major supermarket chains could probably grab 56% or more of existing trade, but they will struggle to get close to the target turnover of £11.8m.

The good news, from the point of view of those opposed to the plan, is that the supermarket chains are not daft. They have almost certainly done the maths for themselves and realised that there isn’t a business case. And that probably explains why the identity of the supermarket remains a mystery.