I AM both amused and bemused by the ongoing debate about the closure of the Home Bargains store following Verity Tingle's original complaint ("We don't need these cheap shops", Your say, June 14).

I've used this store, not weekly or monthly, but I've often gone in when it suited me to look round.

Sometimes I purchased something which wasn't tack or tat and many a time I didn't buy anything. The choice was mine.

One writer to Your say wrote: "You can buy brand names cheaper than anywhere else." Isn't this called intelligent purchasing?

Some may say Home Bargains was a pound shop or a cheap shop but as the same writer remarked: "The goods were mainly cosmetics which we all use daily." Some people have written that they use the outlet every day.

Whatever is your thing about Home Bargains it all comes down to disposable income. Some women are thrifty with money, others are reckless with cash.

You certainly have to be wise with money if you are a low-income worker with children. Of course Halifax has its share of "scratters", wandering and idling about, cursing and smoking in people's faces, grubbily-dressed and in need of more than a weekly wash.

This type of people, it seems, are being born in every town and city now. I wonder if Miss Tingle was mixing up these people with the rest of us.

Every time I've been in the store the people in it seemed to be from all backgrounds, decently dressed with manners on show, as were the staff, who were always helpful and courteous.

But I wondered why Home Bargains came in for such criticism when just along the precinct we have Wilkinson's. Not a pound shop, I'll grant you but a bargain-based store nonetheless.

Opposite the Westgate pub we have a 99p store; this didn't come under fire.

I like Harvey's – it's a class store and all that goes with it – but who shops there every day, week or month? I have shopped there, and not just on "sale" days. Halifax needs such outlets.

When we set out to shop around it is to physically investigate a market or a situation in search of the best buy. So to go shopping is, of course, in relation to your personal income and the distribution of it.

But nowhere in all of this letter writing have I read one line about the 20-odd staff who were put out of work by the closure of Home

Bargains – people who also rely on their disposable income.

Clarrie Shaw