In article ,
"Brian Gaff" writes:
Maplins big mistake was to open high street stores. They obviously did not
look at history and see what happened to Tandy. Tandy used to sell a lot of
good stuff. I bought one of their cassette decks and it was the best one I
ever owned. dead now of course as it actually wore out in the end.
However you could buy almost anything electronic based there, including
transistors and toys.
The high rents and rates on high streets scuppered it and this and the
Internet scuppered Maplin as well aas to some extent Comet who hoped that
selling large appliances would be lucrative of course.

My guess is they've had no one technical high up in the company for
years, so they had no direction to go in. They survived the big
downturn in the 90's and 2000's which was good going, but they
completely missed the resurgence of the maker movement in the last
10 years, and there's no excuse for that - they were ideally placed
to make the most of it with a high street presence which would have
enabled them to do lots of things their mail-order competitors
couldn't, but they had completely forgotten what their roots
where, and didn't recognise when demand for that came back in a big
way.

Things like the component ranges dropped so low you were unlikely to
be able to source what you want there for any significant project.
They could have got away with being more expensive than mail-order
because of the value of immediacy and advice, but not 5-10 times
more expensive than next-day mail order.

I've heard it said that the big financial problem was a load of money
was pulled out of the business by the recent owners, requiring the
business to borrow back from them and pay interest, but those payments
were crippling. Without them, the business was profitable, but it was
never going to be able to meet the repayments.

BTW, my local one has got loads more stock in - the staff said more
has come in than they've seen in years. It looks like the sale is
doing so well they think there's a chance of emptying much of the
excess stock in the warehouse through the shops, which was not
originally thought likely. My local one now has loads of giant 12V
electric toy cards which they presumably over-ordered at some time,
and several shops I've been in are stuffed full of C8 mains leads
which someone over-ordered by several orders of magnitude (although
still at 10 times the price from anywhere else).

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]