Maplin stores

[Jolly 7]

Originally Posted by Station X

Have any branches actually closed?

Not in the Southampton area but unsure about the rest of the UK. They were selling document display holders, empty plastic trays etc. from the shop a couple of days ago plus good value cut-price cable.

[newlite4]

I went into my local store on Wednesday morning casually looking for a CVBS to HDMI upscaler. Straight away I am shown a "must have Scart to HDMI unit at a "really cheap price!" normally £50 reduced to £20. OK, but it makes it more bulky using a Scart converter at the front end. I then asked about HDMI cables "cheaper than ever - we're closing, one and a half metre for £5, um.
I get to the till, he is spying on my wallet contents from behind the till "two tens and that five in there". I then feel I have had enough pressure selling for one day "no, no, its just not worth it, there's no warranty, whats the point, I've got no comeback if anything goes wrong" to which he replied " there's no warranty on line either" to which I walk out of the shop happy not to have been bullied into buying something not ideally suited to my needs!. I visited Richer Sounds a few hours later and bought a one and a half metre HDMI lead for.........£2.99, nuff said.
Neil

[David G4EBT]

It seems odd that seemingly none have gone yet, but I'd have thought it would make sense to close the stores with the highest operating costs and move any surplus stock to less costly locations, given that some of the stores seem to be quite low on stock now. I went into Maplin's recently and overheard a chap remark that "he thought the prices were dear", but he was looking at the marked prices, overlooking the large red notice right in front of his eyes that said '60% off'. They're hardly going to re-price every single item just to be kind to the 'hard of thinking'. If it's marked at a tenner, it means four quid - how hard is that?

Obviously we're not privy to their operating costs, but it seems a bit odd to keep stores open and close the online strand of the business, which - subjectively - I'd have thought would be less costly in operating costs. The email I received today, as others will have, says 'at least 40% of everything'. The batteries are especially good value - cheaper than Poundland.

They also have some good 'flash deals' till Sunday. EG National Geographic telescope with tripod, 50mm diameter lenses and 360mm focal length for £12.00 and a pair of 5KM range Maplin PMR 446 MHz radios for £11.00. (Handy for home use instead of an intercom?). Might get a pair of those at that price - a dozen pairs in stock at the local branch. 'It's al ill wind...'

[Radio Wrangler]

This is beginning to sound like one of those furnishing stores, you know the ones that seemed to maintain some sort of sale for years.

Just how much stock do they have in their warehouses that needs shifting?

David

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by Radio Wrangler

Just how much stock do they have in their warehouses that needs shifting?

David

If it's large, that could well be one factor in their demise: overstocking means money tied-up and earning nothing! In these days of just-in-time, even if the 'pipeline' reaches all the way back to China having more than a few days' worth of stock in-store is just crazy.

[evingar]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

If it's large, that could well be one factor in their demise: overstocking means money tied-up and earning nothing! In these days of just-in-time, even if the 'pipeline' reaches all the way back to China having more than a few days' worth of stock in-store is just crazy.

It's a tricky business.
IMHO RS have gone too far in the other direction with too much stuff on Back Order. It's probably more important for the likes of RS to maintain adequate buffer stocks as the whole point of their business model is to be able to deliver in a day or so. If they can't do that, you may as well go for a cheaper price and shop somewhere that takes longer to deliver.

[Oldcodger]

Sign in local Maplin, today "We don't know when store is closing". However, I'd suggest that in the staff minds, store has died and gone to heaven. I gave spotty yoof a code to get the look a goldfish in a bowl would give, till prompted by the assistant manager to enter it in PC. Assistant Manager wandered off muttering something about "if we've got it". He returned ,ten minutes later ,like the creature from the black lagoon, clutching a box of fuses . i saw 3.15 A and Blow,paid up and got out fast. At home, they turned out to be Quick Blow, whereas the code I gave was for slow blow. Fortunately it's not critical.

[AL-M0KFO]

Originally Posted by David G4EBT

Obviously we're not privy to their operating costs, but it seems a bit odd to keep stores open and close the online strand of the business,

I suspect they have sold the Maplin brand/name and website rights to someone.

A bit like you can visit Tandy online, but it has nothing to do with Tandy as we knew it.

The brand/online presence is worth something, the rented stores not much and the stock is worth whatever they can get for it.

[Radio Wrangler]

The whole thing just seems sad to me on so many levels.

Maplin, back in the days of the magazine and mail order and reasonably competitive prices was a thriving concern and did something useful.

It turned into a large chain of shops, selecting high-rent premises and grew overhead costs like there was no tomorrow. The opposite direction to the general movement of the electronics components trade. The independents were in small back street shops with a very small staff. The industrials were in warehouses well away from high streets.

It shifted its emphasis to finished goods to try to make more money to feed all those overheads. Those goods tended to be toys and fripperies rather than staples.

It took on a large number of staff. This thread makes it seem that every potential customer who entered a Maplins got one to follow them round while they were browsing. The cost of the goods had to have a mark up at least big enough to pay salary for the time taken browsing, multiplied by an efficiency factor to pay for the time when a staffer had no-one to follow.

The writing has been on the wall for months. Why is there anyone left? Any sensible employee would be diverting 100% of their effort to finding a new job with a future. Are they sticking around hoping for severance terms generous enough to make delaying worthwhile? With a business gone bust, that's unlikely. I'd have expected all those who could to have been offski some time ago.

This thread gives the impression that the majority of Maplin sales people don't have any marketable electronics skills, so retail sales seems to be the main sector for them, but that is in general decline and there won't be many openings at all. There are plenty of jobs out there for technical people in electronics. The firm I work for has been hiring regularly for the past several years, and I'm getting daily contacts from recruiters hoping I might fancy a move. The industry is moving again. Lead times for parts, esoteric chips and mundane capacitors are increasing scarily. But the industry wants skilled developers, not entry-level store detectives.

I've been through redundancy. It wasn't fun. It was very worrying. It was a large multinational that made the decision to concentrate hardware development in its home country and just shut it down elsewhere. It was in profit and the severance terms were worth a wait. Things were very inwards-looking there, which is sort of inevitable in an empire-sized multinational. However, this must have been several dB less traumatic than being in a firm going bust. I feel an urge to try to rescue some of these people, but I've only been in a Maplins twice in 20 years and so my impressions are from what I've heard and read. What I've read makes it sound like there aren't any keen and curious people there.

I'm wondering whether the people there are finding no openings or whether they aren't thinking of alternative fields, or whether they're so inwards looking they aren't looking at all?

Genuinely saddened

David

[evingar]

Well, our place is currently having extreme difficulty in recruiting experienced technical staff (Power, RF and various mechanical engineering disciplines). I would agree that ex Maplin sales staff are not generally likley to be a fertile recruiting ground.

I share your sadness though becuase Maplin certainly helped incubate a previous generation of electronics engineers by making components more accessible to home users at a time when RS especially were "sniffy" about supplying hobbyist individuals.

Their projects (associated with their mag) were also a fabulous way of introducing people to electronics.

[dave walsh]

Must check out the Eastbourne branch although I won't be too hopeful. I think a Forum member has already reported that there was little to be found there. I've found staff mainly helpful in the past but not really that dedicated or knowledgeable as mentioned by others. As David says though, "death on the high street" is not confined to just relatively "obscure" hobbyist outlets. As an aside, I saw an electronics magazine while passing through Smiths [now mainly a chocolate retailer according H F Whitingstall's recent TV Documentary] at Victoria Station the other day! I'm not much of a "solid state" person myself but to my unpractised eye it looked quite invigorated which would be ironic in the context of the Maplin closures. Maybe it was just a "retro" edition?

Dave W

[dseymo1]

I visited the Shrewsbury shop this morning. Quite a lot of stock still on the shelves, but nothing I wanted at a price I was willing to pay. Even part-reels of cable (the sort of thing often found at boot sales etc.) seemed very expensive still.
The staff were saying that some of the shops would be closing next week, but that theirs was expected to stay open for a good while yet.
There was a rather witty sign near the tills, giving the answers to unspecified FAQs, one of which was "Amazon, Brexit and bad management".

[David G4EBT]

Batteries are excellent value for money - now 70% off.

EG, bought a pack of 24 AAAs this morning - £3.00, (down from £9.99).

Multi-packs of AAs and PP3s had already flown the nest.

[Andrew2]

The Stockport branch at Portwood has a poster in the window which states 'at least 60% off all items'. The items are still stickered at their old prices, but when you get to the counter the amount is drastically reduced. Many items are now out of stock.

[valveaudio]

Maplin website closing down on Monday 30 April

Trevor

[David G4EBT]

We've all had a pop at Maplin and expounded our homespun wisdom and how it could have not just survived but thrived in the present climate if only they got their act together, but it's just one of countless retail chain failures in the ten years since the start of the recession - ten years in which online trading has expanded to an enormous extent.

Without taking the thread too far of track, there have been 29 major failures of companies that were once household names, with 11,601 stores affected and 1,438,914 employees. More will inevitably follow. (Wesfarmers from Oz have well and truly blown it with Homebase/Bunnings).

I spent a tenner in Maplin this morning, but more than that on electronic bits from China and from Spiratronics (who are online only). A couple of clicks and it's sorted. Our three teenage granddaughters don't go into stores - they watch fashion trends on social media, order clothes and shoes from online retailers such as ASOS in two sizes, then send stuff back that doesn't fit.

For a trip down memory lane, see how many of these once familiar names you remember who've gone bust between 2010 - 2018:

http://www.retailresearch.org/whosegonebust.php

Can't help feeling that if Maplin could have been licked into shape, some venture capitalist or another would have taken a punt on it, and even now, there's still time for that to happen, unlikely though it seems.

[AL-M0KFO]

Can't help feeling that if Maplin could have been licked into shape, some venture capitalist or another would have taken a punt on it, and even now, there's still time for that to happen, unlikely though it seems.

Vulture capitals were the problem. A VC bought them about five years ago - they were still making a profit at the time.

They then saddled it with a £90m loan at 15% interest to themselves. The business couldn't sustain it. It's what VCs do - they wreck companies.

[Radio Wrangler]

On the internet front, Digikey and Mouser are starting to compete in the UK with RS and Farnell.

Now Mouser is definitely a venture capital owned operation which is thriving. Berkshire-Hathaway is Warren Buffet's company, one of the biggest venture capitalists in the world. The difference seems to be self-restraint, taking steady income rather than bleeding a subsidiary to death and then asset-stripping the carcass.

Some venture capitalists have a longer-term view than others.
Any stock market listing can be seen as distributed venture capitalism, and firms can be pushed into suicidal short termism to keep the market analysts sweet.

David

[evingar]

On the internet front, Digikey and Mouser are starting to compete in the UK with RS and Farnell.

Indeed they are and I increasingly use both at work. The range of stock at Mouser is huge and makes the UK competition look like "Fred in a shed" operators. It also seems well stocked, and only the most esoteric of items are ever on back order - unlike RS that is now dreadful in this respect.

The downside is a delay of 2-3 days and shipping costs (we have free shipping costs from RS and Farnell). I would rather use UK companies but not at the cost of delay.

[barrymagrec]

I find that Mouser is only an extra day compared with Farnell and RS and I usually buy enough to get free delivery (can't remember the amount offhand)

I certainly agree about their range and stockholding as well as the fact that RS are failing badly on this front currently.