UK Electronics Store Maplin Goes into Administration
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
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.
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.
[1] Whose physical shops inexplicably don't even open at the weekend. Grrr.
It's a shame :(
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.
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.
Can you elaborate? I'm not familiar with either of those cultures.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Didn't discover Maplin really until after that place closed. Useful to have close, but I barely ever visited.
> 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.
I won't even enter one of their shops unless I can't wait to have it delivered
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.
Those damn remoaners talking Britain down, they caused Maplin to fail!
Regardless, the first rule of executive club is to shift the credit and shift the blame - such that you get the credit and somebody (or something) else gets the blame.
Essentially it sounds like the insurer was worried about their cashflow and decided they no longer wanted to take the risk that Maplin would be unable to pay their suppliers.
Is this such a large market?
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.
Honestly my impression is that they just have far too many stores, most of which are empty most of the time.
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.
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)
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.
You pay customs duty on anything over £135.
You pay a handling fee for the courier to sort that out for you (although it's doubtful they can force you to pay that).
It takes a few weeks to arrive. And you gamble with the safety of it, especially if it's mains powered. But it's so cheap Maplin doesn't really have a chance.