Maplin "in talks to sell the business"

[Cerebus]

The next chapter in the continuing decline of Maplin is being written and, based on past experience, it doesn't look good.

Ailing gadget souk Maplin is locked in eleventh-hour talks with a potential buyer of the chain but the company may be placed into the hands of an administrator if an agreement cannot be reached.

Private equity owner Rutland Partner, which bought Maplin for £85m in 2014, is understood to be negotiating with interested parties including Edinburgh Woollen Mill, according to Sky. PWC is managing the process, we are told.

...

Previous discussion here: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/maplin-'insurers-cast-doubt-over-future-of-maplin'/msg1359910/#msg1359910

[grumpydoc]

Maplin are going down the pan because a) they have no business focus and b) the service is carp.

E.g - they have an item which, unusually, I know I will find useful, and I'm headed out towards their store this evening.

I note they are offering a £5 voucher if I do the "order online, collect in store" thing. Need to spend £10 but what I want is £10.98 - great.

Web site says in stock and I can collect in 30 mins, even better

Complete the order to find that it is "not available" and I can wait 5-7 days for it to be delivered to store. WTF 

Chances of bothering again, slim.

[grumpydoc]

.......and, of course, despite placing the order after the end of business yesterday and trying to cancel first thing Maplin refuse to honour my consumer rights claiming that the item has been "dispatched" (not terribly likely and headed to one of their own stores so not out of their possession as claimed).

Apparently their answer is that I can reject it when it arrives and they'll process the refund at that point

Of course that is if they are still trading in a week's time

Thankfully it was just a tenner.

[AndyC_772]

I used Maplin a couple of weeks ago, for the first time in ages. I *really* needed a pair of D-type connectors for a customer visit first thing the following morning.

£12 for a pair of 25 way connectors with plastic back shells 

That's the problem, I guess. No way will I ever buy parts at that price given the choice, but equally, no real choice if I need something *now*, and for that reason I'll be sad to see them go.

[grumpydoc]

I used Maplin a couple of weeks ago, for the first time in ages. I *really* needed a pair of D-type connectors for a customer visit first thing the following morning.

£12 for a pair of 25 way connectors with plastic back shells 

That's the problem, I guess. No way will I ever buy parts at that price given the choice, but equally, no real choice if I need something *now*, and for that reason I'll be sad to see them go.

Sadly distress purchases do not make a viable business model in this case.

I've even stopped browsing when I visit the retail park where they are located - if they have a specific item that I want, in stock, at not too ludicrous a price then fair enough but their stock levels have lied to me in the past and staff admit the system has more holes than a tramp's vest.

If they go tits up I might visit for any clear out sale ( - but only because there isn't a vultures circling the corpse icon).

I actually hope that they do find a buyer but it seems thatit will only be putting off the inevitable.

[Cerebus]

I actually hope that they do find a buyer but it seems thatit will only be putting off the inevitable.

I doubt that any buyer will be looking at them as a going concern. Better to wait until they are in administration and then acquire them without 90% of the staff, asset strip the stock and sell the leases on all that high street real estate to betting shops and take-aways.

I'm deadly serious about the latter - the local Stapes premises was sold and converted into a Subway and a Domino's, despite being in a retail park that's way too small to accommodate that much food for sale. I suspect the reason for creating them was to feed the burgeoning take-away delivery trade - councils are getting a bit narky about the amount of traffic they generate in their more traditional high street settings.

When I was a lad, if you'd asked me what I'd get curmudgeonly about when I got older I'd have probably said "The same thing as the older generation now - the kind of music the young listen to, their haircuts and their fecklessness". Instead, it turns out to be moaning about the proliferation of betting shops and the fact that nobody seems to know how to cook a meal at home any more.

[grumpydoc]

I actually hope that they do find a buyer but it seems thatit will only be putting off the inevitable.

I doubt that any buyer will be looking at them as a going concern. Better to wait until they are in administration and then acquire them without 90% of the staff, asset strip the stock and sell the leases on all that high street real estate to betting shops and take-aways.

Sad though it is, I agree - about it not being a going concern in its present state.

Not sure about the betting shop/take-away transition, at least not locally. It will probably share the same fate as the Comet close by which is empty and still has the "Comet" sign up, what?, 5 years after they all closed.

[stj]

it will depend on the local council,
where i am, bussiness rates are so out of control that they are higher than the property rent - so lots of buildings sit empty.

this creates a harmless scam too.
property owners let people rent the property for next to nothing, knowing the people renting will run a £/$ type store or an "unlock your phone" type store for 6-12months and then vanish without paying the taxes or electricity bill - but the property owner is not liable so escapes paying bussiness rates on empty property!!

this is the reality of artificially inflated property prices in a collapsing economy. 

[bexwhitt]

Now there are enough ebay UK suppliers of electronic parts (and cheaper if you wait from China) at a reasonable price, Maplins 4 1/4 resistors for £1 is passed its sell-by date.

In my case CPC is a couple of miles away and even with their slightly bumped prices it's still going strong.

[theleakydiode]

I have to admit Maplin are convenient for one off parts if you live close to a branch like me, no need to wait for delivery or pay extra handling fees for smaller orders.

I also like holding products in my hands before buying.

Maybe they could stop selling the useless stocking filler crap and just keep a small component stock for people like me.

[stj]

wont happen, they like being "Tandy" 

who else is going to sell you a drone or shitty wireless house alarm with your components!!

[StuUK]

Sad, just gone into administration today

[StuUK]

Sad, just gone into administration today

http://www.cityam.com/281407/maplin-has-collapsed-putting-2500-jobs-risk

[Tandy]

Perhaps we should buy them 

[cowasaki]

I used Maplin a couple of weeks ago, for the first time in ages. I *really* needed a pair of D-type connectors for a customer visit first thing the following morning.

£12 for a pair of 25 way connectors with plastic back shells 

That's the problem, I guess. No way will I ever buy parts at that price given the choice, but equally, no real choice if I need something *now*, and for that reason I'll be sad to see them go.

It's funny isn't it.  I bet between us in our "bought but not used" piles we probably have more stock than Maplin :-)  I've got a large box with dozens of D type plugs and sockets with the pins, shells etc.  I really don't like Maplin much.  I'll occasionally pop in for something I need just there and then but rarely.  I'd rather wait a day or two and I have CPC on my patch!

[AndyC_772]

Probably!

My parts 'bin' tends to be surplus components that I've ordered for prototypes. If I'm building 'n' samples of something, I normally order (n+1) kits' worth of parts, rounded up if I'm somewhere near a price break.

This, of course, means I have boxes containing 1 or 2 of almost every part I've ever used, which would be handy for spares if I could figure out a sane way of organising and storing them, which doesn't end up costing more in time and effort than the parts are worth.

I wonder if my local Maplin branch will end up selling off their component storage racks? 

[nfmax]

I wonder if my local Maplin branch will end up selling off their component storage racks? 

The number of times I have gone into a shop and thought "I don't want to buy any of this crap, but how much are the shelves it is sitting on?"

[FrankE]

They held a lot of low quality stock that was overpriced. I'm not sure their locations in town elsewhere but their place here was too far out of town. Those without transport like schoolkid hobbyists I can't see  bothering to get a bus out of town to get there, but Tandy failed in the city centre. For those with transport there was better quality and, perhaps keener prices.  Nothing seemed to change over the years. It was same old, same old. I got the impression that the people who worked there were quite depressed about it and seemed embarrassed and apologetic for the place.

I don't think the firm had a sense of whom their market was.

[AndyC_772]

I don't think the firm had a sense of whom their market was.

Did anyone?

[Zero999]

It's not been commercially viable to sell very low cost, niche items, such as electronic components, on the high-street, for a very long time, at least since the 80s. There's no way anyone can make money by having 100s of inventories of something small, like resistors, of over 100 different values, costing less than a penny each, in 100s of locations and make a profit. Think about how many different resistor values are needed, even for the most basic inventory, say E12 values from 1R to 10R and 1M to 10M and E24 values from 10 to 1M, totalling 144 values and the overhead of maintaining a stock in over a hundred stores: it will easily add to to much more than the cost of each part, even if they're sold in multiplies of 100, which Maplin didn't do. Now consider the proportion of the population who are either electronics hobbyists or professionals. There isn't that much of a demand, compared to consumer electronics, which nearly everyone needs. It just isn't economical.

The only way to make money is to have a few central distribution centres and a mail order, whether it be via the Internet or the old system of catalogues. Maplin might have been more successful, if they had kept their stores for consumer electronics, with a few hobbyist items such as some test equipment and Arduinos and kept the component side of business online/mail order only, except for perhaps one or two stores in big cities, with lots of engineering companies. The store fronts could have also acted as platform for the mail order bossiness too.

Unfortunately for Maplin, it's not even economically viable to sell consumer electronics in retail stores any more, due to competition with the Internet. Supermarkets can do it, because they also sell food and traditional electronics stores do it because they sell white goods and act as pick-up points for Amazon click & collect. It's far too late for Maplin to get into any of the aforementioned. At best, they should close their unprofitable stores, focus more on the ones which do make money and work towards building a quality online businesses.

[hopski]

They started going downhill as soon as they started opening stores. They were the place to go for hobbyists when they were mail order only.

[Howardlong]

They started going downhill as soon as they started opening stores. They were the place to go for hobbyists when they were mail order only.

That would’ve been in the 80s, certainly over 30 years ago, I remember going down to the one on Oxford Road in Manchester in those days when I was a student.

[Zero999]

They started going downhill as soon as they started opening stores. They were the place to go for hobbyists when they were mail order only.

That would’ve been in the 80s, certainly over 30 years ago, I remember going down to the one on Oxford Road in Manchester in those days when I was a student.

It depends on what you mean by downhill. In my experience, they certainly did expand their range of components, when I first discovered them in the mid 90s. When I first got into electronics properly, in the early 90s, I used to go to Tandy, which was just three miles from where I lived. It was very expensive: two red LEDs cost £1 in packs of two, which would be more than double that ,in today's money. Their range was very limited. I couldn't buy half the components I needed to make many of the projects in the Forrest Mims books.

When I first went to Maplin I was amazed at how much cheaper it was and the huge range of components they sold. I rememberer looking at their, then new 1995 catalogue, which was massive and noted how it doubled in size by 1997. I didn't go to Maplin very often, because it was over 10miles away and couldn't drive, so relied on my dad to take me occasionally. I remember not going for a year or two and when I finally got round to it, must've been around the year 2000, I discovered their catalogue had shrunk to below its size back in 1995 and the all important data and pin-outs had gone. In the late 2000s, Maplin opened a store 3 miles away and I've hardly visited it, even though I was living within walking distance, at one point. The last time I went was to buy some spray on conformal coating, for a non electronics application (to varnish a wooden measuring stick for horse riding stirrups), a teenager working at the checkout, asked me for proof of age ID (you need to be 18+ in the UK to buy solvents) even though I was in my early 30s at the time. She was miserable and didn't smile when I attempted to make light of the situation.

[hopski]

Maplin used to do their own electronics magazine as well, which had some interesting articles/projects. I'm gonna have to go in the loft now and see if I can find them.

[Cerebus]

Damn, I'd completely forgotten the Maplin magazine. There's an online archive of them here