8 ms·

UK Electronics Store Maplin Goes into Administration

39 points by s0l1dsnak3123 9y ago

arethuza 9y ago
I used to love reading the Maplin catalogues when I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s - rarely used the shops though - they mostly seemed full of rather tacky electronic toys/gadgets rather than components.
- orf 9y ago
  They still had a great components section at the back, and some not too bad products. The staff seemed more knowledgeable than your average tech shop as well. It's a shame :(
  - matthewmacleod 9y ago
    Yeah, I'd second that. The front of the shops are always filed with the tacky flashy junk, but there was still quite a robust selection of components and smart staff in there.
  - arethuza 9y ago
    Yes, I was being a bit harsh there - the components sections were good - the reason why I did occasionally visit!
  - yetanother1980 9y ago
    I would used to buy other stuff there just to support the existence of a shop with a components section and fairly knowledgeable staff. Real shame to see them go the high street will be less useful without them.
- pm215 9y ago
  Yes, I loved the catalogues of that era too, especially since they commissioned SF art for the covers: http://70sscifiart.tumblr.com/post/166105106512/maplin-catalogue-covers-1979-1990-via-this http://70sscifiart.tumblr.com/post/166105106512/maplin-catal... In the modern era their shops were useful for the "need a Usb cable/external disk/whatever today and will pay the premium for getting it immediately". But I'm not too surprised that that kind of thing wasn't sufficient to keep them going.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    They were great, I believe Roger Dean painted most if not all of them. More at: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/maplinonline/retro-maplin/ https://www.pinterest.co.uk/maplinonline/retro-maplin/ But as you say, nowadays there's no reason to go to Maplin unless you need to go to retail. Online shopping, especially direct-from-China, overtook them. I think also there has been a generational shift in the people doing electronics; the old "ham" culture and the new "maker" culture look superficially like they're both doing things with soldering irons, but the people and community are very different. Brexit and the associated fall in Stirling are mentioned as proximate causes, but they're the hard winter that's going to kill off a lot of already week UK firms.
    - majewsky 9y ago
      > but the people and community are very different Can you elaborate? I'm not familiar with either of those cultures.
      - pjc50 9y ago
        I'm not exactly an inside observer of either, but this is my impression from spending time on electronics.stackexchange.com: Ham culture predates the internet by a long way, when talking over the radio was a sensible option for making friends with interesting strangers in faraway places. Very analogue. Slightly hierachical, generally older, and believe in the importance of theory and credentials. Maker culture is self-taught off youtube and other places. It involves a lot of tinkering and trial and error with Arduinos, Raspberry Pis and breadboards. Very "open source", very digital, very much anti-hierarchical. Although not free of their own gatekeeping issues. ""Millenials"" (+). My feeling is that the wider set of people who were customers for Maplin or Heathkit kits are a lot more like the former than the latter. In some ways it's the difference between people who will build a lego set to the picture on the box and the people who'll freestyle something else with it. (+) I'm so gen X that I have a signed copy of Coupland's book. I also made a couple of Maplin kits when I was younger.
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    I'd forgotten all about their catalogues, I remember spending hours going through lists of components figuring out what I could build. If only I'd spent as much time on my A levels.
- vr46 9y ago
  I still go to Maplins but I think they suffer from indecision and timidity. You don't necessarily think of going to Maplin's for X or Y because you don't know if that's what they deal in. Home automation and the like is probably pointless as most people would research and buy online because of the huge range of stuff. But areas like Raspberry Pi and Arduino they could have gone all out on, as they don't go out of date so quickly and components are generic. Celebrating and riding the wave of maker/hacker culture is something they have ignored and failed on. A place that has locations everywhere? Could have opened up for hacker to collaborate? Had tech bars like Apple? I hope they get rescued somehow.
  - heavenlyblue 9y ago
    There are just too many Maplin shops around to be selling Raspberry PI’s
    - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
      Yes, and they all seem to be prime retail, it isn't cheap in the UK.
- ksec 9y ago
  I remember when I was in College ( That is High School in US ), we were allowed to order some parts from Maplin and soldering things together in Electronics Club. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to make, silly little LED here and there, with speakers, switches etc. We were allow to figure it out ourself. And I would stare at the huge Maplin catalogues. Till this day I still think it is much better experience having the catalogues rather then going online. As long as the items within catalogues aren't updated very often, may be i am just old fashioned. I wanted to do computer programming with these input and output, switches and LED, but I.T or Programming wasn't really a thing in the UK education system at the time, so electronics and programming were separate subject. When I went to university I finally get to write and make a Security / Measuring System, using components I bought from Maplin with full menu. I still remember getting simple signals on/off from parallel or serial port was the easy and fun part. Getting the system results shown in a web page, constantly updating was 10 times harder. Nowadays things are millions times more abstracted and in some way complex. I am not sure if we can do that with USB pins anymore. But thinking back it was a lot of fun. Sad to see Maplin go.
SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
Sad times. I remember going there with my Dad to get all the bits to build a crystal radio - one of my earliest "geeky" memories. I learned to solder on that project - can't have been older than 10 (1994ish). The sales assistant even gave me some advice on winding the tuning coil.
- heavenlyblue 9y ago
  I would not say sales assistants in today’s Maplin know anything.
  - andyjohnson0 9y ago
    Anecdote: A few years ago I tried to buy some 555 timer ICs from a local Maplin shop. I knew that they had a basic stock of components in a back-room (not on display), but it took me nearly ten minutes to convince a shop assistant to even look for them, and what to look for. When he finally returned with a tube of ICs, he was amazed that such things existed and insisted on showing his find to some of his colleagues - like he'd discovered some lost relic. Never again.
matthewmacleod 9y ago
That's a shame. I was kind of pleased that they'd managed to make it as long as they did. Honestly my impression is that they just have far too many stores, most of which are empty most of the time.
- DanBC 9y ago
  But also that everything they sell can be bought from Aliexpress at a fraction of the price.
  - ealexhudson 9y ago
    I think most people are unaware of that, and also when you buy from Ali you're invariably paying steep customs fees (tax + holding charges). They were ridiculously expensive for stuff like cables, they were reasonable on common IT kit (wifi extenders, etc.) and sometimes ok on PC components, and often they had some really great offers. I think a lot of people don't realise quite how broad their catalogue was - they sold disco gear, speaker cables by the metre, all your discrete components and gizmos, plus a bunch of smart home stuff, telephony, etc. And as others said, they had decent staff who could often give good advice. It's very sad that they've not been able to sustain a place on the High St.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      > when you buy from Ali you're invariably paying steep customs fees Are you sure? Whenever I've done it I get parcels which have completely false customs declarations to avoid the fees ("samples", "gifts", zero value declarations etc)
      - ealexhudson 9y ago
        It comes down to pot luck and (I think) how big the parcel is. I've had a bunch of stuff "get stuck", and the admin fee alone is usually £25. The tricks with "samples/gifts" etc. really don't work. Either someone from customs looks at it or they don't, and because a lot of relatively expensive electronics is pretty small now, if you're not sending to a business address they will pull anything that isn't paying tax.
robtaylor 9y ago
The number of times a cable or adaptor from there has saved the day...
andyjohnson0 9y ago
Not surprising really. I've been into a few of their shops and they always reminded me of the last days of Tandy / Radio Shack: cheap stuff and unhelpful staff. I'm sad for the people who will probably lose their jobs though. Very hard to compete with online suppliers in that space. My local Maplin is/was the only physical shop in reasonable travelling distance for emergency purchases of things like perfboard or solder. But when they stopped selling even a basic selection of components I switched to ebay and haven't been back there.
- Already__Taken 9y ago
  They should have doubled down on things I can't easily know to get online. connectors, buttons, displays, enclosure, anything I'd like to get my hands on to feel or wouldn't know the name of to even search for. I thought i'd get some buttons for a control panel, the selection was terrible and what was there was nasty and cheap feeling but cost a lot. Ended up just getting some crimps I needed and those were such poor quality I ended up re-crimping the project next day once amazon turned up.
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    I don't think there was much they could do, it was inevitable that stuff would shift online, the economics of selling it in retail didn't add up.
  - andyjohnson0 9y ago
    That would be great for you and me, but "normal" people don't need such things and business customers use RS[1] or Farnell. You can't maintain a retail network selling to hackers/makers. [1] Whose physical shops inexplicably don't even open at the weekend. Grrr.
wepple 9y ago
RadioShack in the US, dick smith in Aus/NZ, and now maplin. I do wonder if these stores may have survived if they could downsize and stick to what they started doing: electronics supplies and kits?
- heavenlyblue 9y ago
  Yeah, that’s what I am thinking: most of the places where I had visited maplin it was a small shop where you could but some nails or batteries. On the other hand I would definitely visit more often if they had larger but less frequent shops.
- wolfgke 9y ago
  > I do wonder if these stores may have survived if they could downsize and stick to what they started doing: electronics supplies and kits? Is this such a large market?
  - wepple 9y ago
    I’m honestly not sure. I think it would be a tiny fraction of what they were trying to target, but it does seem to be growing with the whole maker movement. Don’t forget he UK has seen some fairly ambitious plans to get electronics into education (see microbit) The tricky thing as a CEO/chairman would be accepting that you’re intentionally downsizing your company to maybe 10% of its size, in an attempt to survive vs staying at 100% and attempting to survive with the same old plan.
- Already__Taken 9y ago
  With all maker brand style revival(not that it wasn't always around) going on there should be a games workshop for electronics.
bnastic 9y ago
How they managed to survive this long is more interesting than the fact that they eventually folded
billpg 9y ago
The benefits of Brexit... They just keep never starting!
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
nanna 9y ago
The comments here so far about why Maplins has gone into administration miss the point. It's not just about being outmaneuvered by online shops. In their words: > The business has worked hard over recent months to mitigate a combination of impacts from [1] sterling devaluation post Brexit, [2] a weak consumer environment and [3] the withdrawal of credit insurance. So it's [1] Brexit having caused the value of the £ to fall (in respect of USD). Gah, Brexit. [2] Lack of customers. This is probably partly to do with online stores sucking up their custom but also to do with general lack of consumer spending. [3] Withdrawal of credit insurance. Anyone able to explain this one? For context its worth adding that Britain's ToysRUs has also just gone into administration too, following their US parent.
- blibble 9y ago
  [2] is more than everything in there is exorbitantly expensive, 3x Amazon/other physical retailers isn't uncommon I won't even enter one of their shops unless I can't wait to have it delivered
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  It's worth bearing in mind that Brexit / value of £ is a handy scapegoat because it takes the heat off the board and executive team. I worked for a company that anybody would have imagined would have suffered heavily from Brexit but it actually ended up coming out ahead because the benefit of weaker competition getting torched outweighted the negatives of lower aggregate demand. I'm sure Brexit had an effect, but I'm equally sure it was deliberately exaggerated. I would imagine it was nearly all online competition and their failure to respond that killed them. 3 is probably simply a tacit recognition that their situation is not going to improve and that they are not a good credit risk.
  - billpg 9y ago
    The first rule of Brexit Club is that bad things are never the fault of Brexit - but always someone else's fault. Those damn remoaners talking Britain down, they caused Maplin to fail!
lucideer 9y ago
I don't know if this is the case for all Maplin's but my own associations with the brand are exclusively negative, so this is one rare case of a physical shop being outdone by online stores on more far than just price and convenience. My local Maplin opened shop around the corner from one the oldest, most well-loved independent electronics shops in the area and drove them out of business by virtue of location and size alone. They didn't even bother to undercut them, and their staff were untrained and clueless, they were just a few hundred metres closer to foot traffic and had more shelves to browse, sparing shy customers the awkwardness of having to ask for an item from the back. I'm actually a little surprised they've done so badly when they seem to have no competition on the street and the margins must surely be enormous given their extortionate pricing.
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Even with large margins you still need some volume.
pbhjpbhj 9y ago
It's a shame but far from unexpected. My local hardware store shutdown about 8 years ago: the sort of place where you asked, expecting a no, "don't suppose you've any toggle switches?" and they passed you a battered cardboard box with 20 different types in then made up the price on the spot. Didn't discover Maplin really until after that place closed. Useful to have close, but I barely ever visited.
kypro 9y ago
Doesn't surprise me at all. Maplin is a terrible store. I haven't been in a while to be honest, but a lot of the stuff they sold there seemed like it was cheap Chinese imports. Their music and hardware sections seemed okay, but not very competitive. The staff like in most large retail stores were useless as well. I used to work part time in a small independent computer store while I was studying, we sold a lot of the same stuff as Maplin, but we were 100% about the service. We knew people could get stuff cheaper online, but they couldn't get the service. You might know your WIFI doesn't reach the whole of your house, but you might not know what the best solution is. Do you buy a more expensive router, a different brand, a range extender? These are the kinds of things you'd be unlikely to find answers for in Maplin. You might as well just take a guess and buy something cheaper online. People don't go to stores like Maplin just to buy things anymore. The business model doesn't make sense if you're competing with online retailers. You have to offer the only thing online retailers can't, service and peace of mind.

39 points by s0l1dsnak3123 9y ago

I used to love reading the Maplin catalogues when I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s - rarely used the shops though - they mostly seemed full of rather tacky electronic toys/gadgets rather than components.

orf 9y ago
They still had a great components section at the back, and some not too bad products. The staff seemed more knowledgeable than your average tech shop as well. It's a shame :(
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  Yeah, I'd second that. The front of the shops are always filed with the tacky flashy junk, but there was still quite a robust selection of components and smart staff in there.
- arethuza 9y ago
  Yes, I was being a bit harsh there - the components sections were good - the reason why I did occasionally visit!
- yetanother1980 9y ago
  I would used to buy other stuff there just to support the existence of a shop with a components section and fairly knowledgeable staff. Real shame to see them go the high street will be less useful without them.
pm215 9y ago
Yes, I loved the catalogues of that era too, especially since they commissioned SF art for the covers: http://70sscifiart.tumblr.com/post/166105106512/maplin-catalogue-covers-1979-1990-via-this http://70sscifiart.tumblr.com/post/166105106512/maplin-catal... In the modern era their shops were useful for the "need a Usb cable/external disk/whatever today and will pay the premium for getting it immediately". But I'm not too surprised that that kind of thing wasn't sufficient to keep them going.
- pjc50 9y ago
  They were great, I believe Roger Dean painted most if not all of them. More at: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/maplinonline/retro-maplin/ https://www.pinterest.co.uk/maplinonline/retro-maplin/ But as you say, nowadays there's no reason to go to Maplin unless you need to go to retail. Online shopping, especially direct-from-China, overtook them. I think also there has been a generational shift in the people doing electronics; the old "ham" culture and the new "maker" culture look superficially like they're both doing things with soldering irons, but the people and community are very different. Brexit and the associated fall in Stirling are mentioned as proximate causes, but they're the hard winter that's going to kill off a lot of already week UK firms.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    > but the people and community are very different Can you elaborate? I'm not familiar with either of those cultures.
    - pjc50 9y ago
      I'm not exactly an inside observer of either, but this is my impression from spending time on electronics.stackexchange.com: Ham culture predates the internet by a long way, when talking over the radio was a sensible option for making friends with interesting strangers in faraway places. Very analogue. Slightly hierachical, generally older, and believe in the importance of theory and credentials. Maker culture is self-taught off youtube and other places. It involves a lot of tinkering and trial and error with Arduinos, Raspberry Pis and breadboards. Very "open source", very digital, very much anti-hierarchical. Although not free of their own gatekeeping issues. ""Millenials"" (+). My feeling is that the wider set of people who were customers for Maplin or Heathkit kits are a lot more like the former than the latter. In some ways it's the difference between people who will build a lego set to the picture on the box and the people who'll freestyle something else with it. (+) I'm so gen X that I have a signed copy of Coupland's book. I also made a couple of Maplin kits when I was younger.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  I'd forgotten all about their catalogues, I remember spending hours going through lists of components figuring out what I could build. If only I'd spent as much time on my A levels.
vr46 9y ago
I still go to Maplins but I think they suffer from indecision and timidity. You don't necessarily think of going to Maplin's for X or Y because you don't know if that's what they deal in. Home automation and the like is probably pointless as most people would research and buy online because of the huge range of stuff. But areas like Raspberry Pi and Arduino they could have gone all out on, as they don't go out of date so quickly and components are generic. Celebrating and riding the wave of maker/hacker culture is something they have ignored and failed on. A place that has locations everywhere? Could have opened up for hacker to collaborate? Had tech bars like Apple? I hope they get rescued somehow.
- heavenlyblue 9y ago
  There are just too many Maplin shops around to be selling Raspberry PI’s
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    Yes, and they all seem to be prime retail, it isn't cheap in the UK.
ksec 9y ago
I remember when I was in College ( That is High School in US ), we were allowed to order some parts from Maplin and soldering things together in Electronics Club. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to make, silly little LED here and there, with speakers, switches etc. We were allow to figure it out ourself. And I would stare at the huge Maplin catalogues. Till this day I still think it is much better experience having the catalogues rather then going online. As long as the items within catalogues aren't updated very often, may be i am just old fashioned. I wanted to do computer programming with these input and output, switches and LED, but I.T or Programming wasn't really a thing in the UK education system at the time, so electronics and programming were separate subject. When I went to university I finally get to write and make a Security / Measuring System, using components I bought from Maplin with full menu. I still remember getting simple signals on/off from parallel or serial port was the easy and fun part. Getting the system results shown in a web page, constantly updating was 10 times harder. Nowadays things are millions times more abstracted and in some way complex. I am not sure if we can do that with USB pins anymore. But thinking back it was a lot of fun. Sad to see Maplin go.

SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago

Sad times. I remember going there with my Dad to get all the bits to build a crystal radio - one of my earliest "geeky" memories. I learned to solder on that project - can't have been older than 10 (1994ish). The sales assistant even gave me some advice on winding the tuning coil.

heavenlyblue 9y ago
I would not say sales assistants in today’s Maplin know anything.
- andyjohnson0 9y ago
  Anecdote: A few years ago I tried to buy some 555 timer ICs from a local Maplin shop. I knew that they had a basic stock of components in a back-room (not on display), but it took me nearly ten minutes to convince a shop assistant to even look for them, and what to look for. When he finally returned with a tube of ICs, he was amazed that such things existed and insisted on showing his find to some of his colleagues - like he'd discovered some lost relic. Never again.

matthewmacleod 9y ago

That's a shame. I was kind of pleased that they'd managed to make it as long as they did. Honestly my impression is that they just have far too many stores, most of which are empty most of the time.

DanBC 9y ago
But also that everything they sell can be bought from Aliexpress at a fraction of the price.
- ealexhudson 9y ago
  I think most people are unaware of that, and also when you buy from Ali you're invariably paying steep customs fees (tax + holding charges). They were ridiculously expensive for stuff like cables, they were reasonable on common IT kit (wifi extenders, etc.) and sometimes ok on PC components, and often they had some really great offers. I think a lot of people don't realise quite how broad their catalogue was - they sold disco gear, speaker cables by the metre, all your discrete components and gizmos, plus a bunch of smart home stuff, telephony, etc. And as others said, they had decent staff who could often give good advice. It's very sad that they've not been able to sustain a place on the High St.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > when you buy from Ali you're invariably paying steep customs fees Are you sure? Whenever I've done it I get parcels which have completely false customs declarations to avoid the fees ("samples", "gifts", zero value declarations etc)
    - ealexhudson 9y ago
      It comes down to pot luck and (I think) how big the parcel is. I've had a bunch of stuff "get stuck", and the admin fee alone is usually £25. The tricks with "samples/gifts" etc. really don't work. Either someone from customs looks at it or they don't, and because a lot of relatively expensive electronics is pretty small now, if you're not sending to a business address they will pull anything that isn't paying tax.

robtaylor 9y ago

The number of times a cable or adaptor from there has saved the day...

andyjohnson0 9y ago

Not surprising really. I've been into a few of their shops and they always reminded me of the last days of Tandy / Radio Shack: cheap stuff and unhelpful staff. I'm sad for the people who will probably lose their jobs though. Very hard to compete with online suppliers in that space. My local Maplin is/was the only physical shop in reasonable travelling distance for emergency purchases of things like perfboard or solder. But when they stopped selling even a basic selection of components I switched to ebay and haven't been back there.

Already__Taken 9y ago
They should have doubled down on things I can't easily know to get online. connectors, buttons, displays, enclosure, anything I'd like to get my hands on to feel or wouldn't know the name of to even search for. I thought i'd get some buttons for a control panel, the selection was terrible and what was there was nasty and cheap feeling but cost a lot. Ended up just getting some crimps I needed and those were such poor quality I ended up re-crimping the project next day once amazon turned up.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  I don't think there was much they could do, it was inevitable that stuff would shift online, the economics of selling it in retail didn't add up.
- andyjohnson0 9y ago
  That would be great for you and me, but "normal" people don't need such things and business customers use RS[1] or Farnell. You can't maintain a retail network selling to hackers/makers. [1] Whose physical shops inexplicably don't even open at the weekend. Grrr.

wepple 9y ago

RadioShack in the US, dick smith in Aus/NZ, and now maplin. I do wonder if these stores may have survived if they could downsize and stick to what they started doing: electronics supplies and kits?

heavenlyblue 9y ago
Yeah, that’s what I am thinking: most of the places where I had visited maplin it was a small shop where you could but some nails or batteries. On the other hand I would definitely visit more often if they had larger but less frequent shops.
wolfgke 9y ago
> I do wonder if these stores may have survived if they could downsize and stick to what they started doing: electronics supplies and kits? Is this such a large market?
- wepple 9y ago
  I’m honestly not sure. I think it would be a tiny fraction of what they were trying to target, but it does seem to be growing with the whole maker movement. Don’t forget he UK has seen some fairly ambitious plans to get electronics into education (see microbit) The tricky thing as a CEO/chairman would be accepting that you’re intentionally downsizing your company to maybe 10% of its size, in an attempt to survive vs staying at 100% and attempting to survive with the same old plan.
Already__Taken 9y ago
With all maker brand style revival(not that it wasn't always around) going on there should be a games workshop for electronics.

bnastic 9y ago

How they managed to survive this long is more interesting than the fact that they eventually folded

billpg 9y ago

The benefits of Brexit... They just keep never starting!

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

nanna 9y ago

The comments here so far about why Maplins has gone into administration miss the point. It's not just about being outmaneuvered by online shops. In their words: > The business has worked hard over recent months to mitigate a combination of impacts from [1] sterling devaluation post Brexit, [2] a weak consumer environment and [3] the withdrawal of credit insurance. So it's [1] Brexit having caused the value of the £ to fall (in respect of USD). Gah, Brexit. [2] Lack of customers. This is probably partly to do with online stores sucking up their custom but also to do with general lack of consumer spending. [3] Withdrawal of credit insurance. Anyone able to explain this one? For context its worth adding that Britain's ToysRUs has also just gone into administration too, following their US parent.

blibble 9y ago
[2] is more than everything in there is exorbitantly expensive, 3x Amazon/other physical retailers isn't uncommon I won't even enter one of their shops unless I can't wait to have it delivered
crdoconnor 9y ago
It's worth bearing in mind that Brexit / value of £ is a handy scapegoat because it takes the heat off the board and executive team. I worked for a company that anybody would have imagined would have suffered heavily from Brexit but it actually ended up coming out ahead because the benefit of weaker competition getting torched outweighted the negatives of lower aggregate demand. I'm sure Brexit had an effect, but I'm equally sure it was deliberately exaggerated. I would imagine it was nearly all online competition and their failure to respond that killed them. 3 is probably simply a tacit recognition that their situation is not going to improve and that they are not a good credit risk.
- billpg 9y ago
  The first rule of Brexit Club is that bad things are never the fault of Brexit - but always someone else's fault. Those damn remoaners talking Britain down, they caused Maplin to fail!

lucideer 9y ago

I don't know if this is the case for all Maplin's but my own associations with the brand are exclusively negative, so this is one rare case of a physical shop being outdone by online stores on more far than just price and convenience. My local Maplin opened shop around the corner from one the oldest, most well-loved independent electronics shops in the area and drove them out of business by virtue of location and size alone. They didn't even bother to undercut them, and their staff were untrained and clueless, they were just a few hundred metres closer to foot traffic and had more shelves to browse, sparing shy customers the awkwardness of having to ask for an item from the back. I'm actually a little surprised they've done so badly when they seem to have no competition on the street and the margins must surely be enormous given their extortionate pricing.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago
Even with large margins you still need some volume.

pbhjpbhj 9y ago

It's a shame but far from unexpected. My local hardware store shutdown about 8 years ago: the sort of place where you asked, expecting a no, "don't suppose you've any toggle switches?" and they passed you a battered cardboard box with 20 different types in then made up the price on the spot. Didn't discover Maplin really until after that place closed. Useful to have close, but I barely ever visited.

kypro 9y ago

Doesn't surprise me at all. Maplin is a terrible store. I haven't been in a while to be honest, but a lot of the stuff they sold there seemed like it was cheap Chinese imports. Their music and hardware sections seemed okay, but not very competitive. The staff like in most large retail stores were useless as well. I used to work part time in a small independent computer store while I was studying, we sold a lot of the same stuff as Maplin, but we were 100% about the service. We knew people could get stuff cheaper online, but they couldn't get the service. You might know your WIFI doesn't reach the whole of your house, but you might not know what the best solution is. Do you buy a more expensive router, a different brand, a range extender? These are the kinds of things you'd be unlikely to find answers for in Maplin. You might as well just take a guess and buy something cheaper online. People don't go to stores like Maplin just to buy things anymore. The business model doesn't make sense if you're competing with online retailers. You have to offer the only thing online retailers can't, service and peace of mind.