The Fraser Plus Designer Outlet Swindon has increased the minimum spend required for a free parking voucher from £100 to £200, a change announced last week that has prompted a wave of complaints from shoppers who turned up at the desk expecting a stamp and left with a lecture on thresholds instead.

Parking itself remains unchanged at £2.50 for five hours, the outlet confirmed in a statement, but the amount you now need to spend to avoid paying that £2.50 has doubled. Shoppers on social media pointed out that this meant spending an extra hundred pounds purely to dodge a charge roughly equivalent to a meal deal, with several suggesting they would simply park at the nearby Orbital Shopping Park instead, where parking is free and nobody asks to see your receipts.

Others raised concerns that drivers unwilling to meet the new threshold would start parking in residential side streets, a prediction that local residents are said to be viewing with the weary calm of people who have had this argument before.

"I'm not one to gossip," said Brenda Pask, 72, of Old Town, who has lived there since before it was old, "but I hear number eleven's drive has had more visitors this week than the outlet itself, on account of them all being parked on it instead. In my day the outlet was called a factory, and if you wanted free parking you worked there."

The outlet is understood to be considering further refinements to the scheme, with insiders suggesting a tiered system in which spending £300 earns free parking plus a laminated certificate, and £500 unlocks the right to be personally escorted to your car by a man with a clipboard.

Gary Tench, Area Manager at Tench Paper Solutions in Westlea, said the story had given him a fresh way of pitching his own department's incentive scheme. "Spend two hundred pounds to save two fifty, that's basically our loyalty card for the vending machine," he said. "Julie's been saving tokens since March and she's still forty pence short of a Twix. I've told her that's not a parking space, that's a journey."

Brenda remained unconvinced by the whole arrangement. "Ron used to say if a shop wants you parked outside it, it should pay for the privilege, not the other way round," she said. "Mind you, Ron also thought a trolley with a working wheel was the height of modern engineering, so he wasn't always right."

A spokesperson for the outlet reiterated that the standard parking charge had not changed, only the amount needed to avoid it, a distinction several shoppers said they understood perfectly and resented enormously.

Whether the new threshold will encourage bigger baskets or simply bigger detours to the Orbital remains, as yet, unspent.