The Maplin that you see today is just a sad reflection of what the modern marketplace wants...... I am a dinosaur in the eyes of some strident youngsters, but I am a happy old dinosaur who has skills and world experiences that they can only dream of, so no worries .... I'm happy 
I agree with most of what you say but there are fundamental problems for the general retail industry as a whole before you begin to tackle the industry specific issues, in the UK in particular the main problems are.
Rent: Traditionally there has been a limited amount of retail space available making the rental costs high. Although rents are coming down gradually many retailers are locked in to long upward only rent review leases. The landlords use these income levels as an expectation for new leases so they are asking unreasonable rents and wondering why so many of their properties are sitting empty.
Business Rates: Ironically the business rates paid on these premises are based, not on what rent you pay but the average value of rent from a few years ago, long before the global economic downturn. So you will be paying approximately 50% of the official rent value as valued by the valuation office in addition to your rent.
For example rent might be £12,000 PA but the rateable value is £15,000 so business rates will be an additional £7,500 PA rather than the somewhat fairer but still ridiculous £6,000 if it was based on actual rent paid.
Local Authority Profiteering: Despite the local authorities receiving huge amounts of income from the business rates paid they see parking as a way of generating income. They claim they are trying to reduce congestion and pollution in towns and cities by removing a majority of on-street parking and at the same time greatly inflating the parking charges. They are trying to get money from both ends by taking it from the retailers in business rates and from their customers through parking charges. The net result is that customers stop visiting the shopping areas due to inability to park (or high charges) as it becomes easier to just order on-line.
Imagine having to make £2000 of profit per month on your sales just to cover the rent and rates. If your profit margin is an optimistic 30% that is over £6000 of sales a month just to cover this basic overhead. Unless you are going to work 7 days a week and can do everything all by yourself you need at least one employee, probably two. That is at least another £1000 per month per employee making it another £6000 of sales a month. This is before you add things like utilities, insurance, store maintenance etc. So it is not entirely unreasonable to say that a relatively small store needs to turn sell £15,000 worth of goods @ a 30% margin each month just to survive before making any profit.
The competition however is on-line retailers that operate out of low cost warehouses likely in low rent cities with tax breaks for bring work to a troubled local economically. The large warehouse can hold many more products as they don't have to be displayed neatly.
Even worse is that the cost of posting goods from China is subsidised by the Chinese government and these products do not have to meet stringent standards that would be required if sold in the UK and as everybody knows the Chinese workers have very little in the way of workers rights compared to Europe.
So how do you make a retail store work ? There are only a few ways of doing it.
1. Increase your profit margins. The reason we see a prevalence of coffee shops in our shopping streets is simply because the cost of making a coffe or a slice of cake is a tiny fraction of the sales price giving great margins. While you can buy coffee from the supermarket and make your own people are willing to pay to sit in a cafe. In the case of Maplin the few electronic components they do stock are significantly higher than from most places. Their gross margin on these items are probably 200%+ but some people who need it in a hurry or don't know where to buy the items at a lower price will pay it. But still even if Maplin makes £1 on every £1.50 capacitor they would have to sell many thousands of them every month just to stay in business. No matter how high they increase their prices this will never sustain them, and the higher they push the prices the more customers they loose.
2. Increase the average sale value. If you can sell a £50 toy instead of a £5 cable you need to make far fewer sales to achieve the same profit. Again in the case of Maplin you can clearly see this trend, the number of components has fallen and the number of toys and gadgets has grown, most directly imported from China to maximise margins.
3. Showroom Store. Stores like the Apple stores and mobile network stores need not make a profit as many of the customers who go there will later buy the product on-line and as the product is unique to that company it doesn't matter as the company still profits from the sale regardless of where the customer buys from. If you are an independent retailer who sells branded goods, for example you sell iPhones then if someone comes into your store and looks at the phone and then goes and orders from amazon you gain nothing and actually your staff time has been wasted when they could have been helping a paying customer.
These issues apply to all types of retail now electronics (component) retailing has its own additional issues.
First the hobby is a niche market, you are unlikely to find 1000 regular customers in a town of 10,000 people so you have to sell more than just components. Diversify too far from this product line and you will get criticised like Maplin do for bing nothing more than a gadget and toy shop with overpriced components.
Second the average sale is low value, even an enthusiastic hobbyist is not going to buy a great deal of stuff from your store. You don't need 500 discrete components to build a project any more, you can do it with 1 micro controller or application specific IC and half-a-dozen common passive parts.
Third is the fake market, while a store based in the EU will have to ensure all products are genuine and meet safety standards etc the market is flooded with cheap fake products via eBay and the like.
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