My Last Ever Visit To Maplin

When the stock in their closing-down sale is still way more expensive than the same things elsewhere it's not really surprising!

My overriding memory of Maplin was the catalogue - it was always something of an event to go into WH Smith and pick up the new catalogue, then spend hours looking through it.

Fifty quid for a VGA cable... I'm surprised it took them this long to go bankrupt.

12 quid for a cheap audio jack cable says it all really

I had my last vist the other day, its was sad even with 40% the prices were not even close. The staff were not happy ether they still had no clue when the final axe was going to fall. Even to this day I miss Tandy

It's definitely the pricing that's the problem. I don't think people would have minded a bit of a markup on Maplins stock but they have been sounded trounced by online retailers. Expect more of your favourite stores to go under in the following years unfortunately.

Shame that they're going, I used them quite a lot for soldering bits but with their prices, it's no wonder.

I don't buy the argument which says they needed to put the prices up so high, to pay for the large stores. The standard British retail mentality is that if we want to raise profit margins we just put prices up, but the days when retail stores had the stranglehold over supply to be able to do that, are long gone. There is always a point beyond which, the more you raise prices, the lower your profit margins get, because even a million times nothing is still nothing. To cap it all, they end up having to keep hold of stock, which becomes obsolete and then they have no chance of shifting it - as I type this there is still an Intel Galileo board languishing on the shelves of my nearest Maplin.

I don't mind paying up to 20% more for local business. They employ my neighbors and are always helpful. Beyond that, just can't do it. Radio Shack lost my loyalty years before the closings when they restructured with much higher prices and mostly useless inventory. That said, it is like people lamenting the closing of their local childhood church or institution. They never supported it and are sad and surprised that it is now gone.

I used treat the local Maplin as the place I'd hang out in while my wife was shopping. But yeah, they were way overpriced, I've gone in there looking for some cables that I'd have paid 20% above Internet prices to get it there and then. But they were regularly 400-500% over Internet prices.

Tandy Corporation, who owned Radio Shack, is totally gone. I miss being able to walk into a local shop and buy some resistors/capacitors to fix something. There are still some electronic component sellers in my general area, but just not as convenient as Radio Shack was. :-(

Did a random search for Maplin as I used to work there and, by chance, it seems your local store was the one I worked at! I worked in both Nottingham stores over the 2000s and cut my teeth on retail. I wont say it was a great experience as the pay was horrific (management sometimes were paid less than £14k a year, resulting in LOTS of corruption) and, because both Nottingham branches were in dodgy areas, we were under a lot of stress from violent folks due to there being no security, but it influenced me to go back into education to escape jobs like that. If you went there in the 2000s you may have met old man Alan who worked the components counter. Very knowledgeable, but quite rude and grumpy. He was part of the old guard who were at the core of the business early on, but after the place got taken over by a bunch of ex-Comet executives it drifted further and further into tat-town. I'm glad I bailed when I did as I cant imagine staying in a business like that to the end. Anyhow, cheers for the video and reminding me of the old workplace!

I remember when Maplin used to be all about the hobbyist. If you needed a single resistor, a tri-colour LED or some esoteric component, Maplin would sell it to you without making you buy 50 of them. Of course, they'd charge you more than if you were to buy in bulk, but as a 13 year-old trying to put a simple project together something together, they were the perfect retailer. When they started to pander to the consumer market, things went down hill for them; they never found their niche. Looking at fairly standard computer components, Maplin would always sell middle-of-the-range components. The Nvidia 1060 rather than the 1050 of 1080/1080ti, small-to-mid capacity hard disks and SSDs - and they'd always overprice them, as you say. They also didn't do themselves many favours by selling knock-off gadgets like "fake" GoPro devices that claimed to be just as good (if not better) than the real thing (again, at a price that rivalled the real thing). I feel that if they had stuck to either the bottom-end with low prices or the top-end with pro-sumer prices, they might have fared better. In the end, they just tried to deal in overpriced mediocrity, and I feel this was their downfall. Thanks for the video. I share the exact same sentiments as you; I only ever used them if I was desperate for something the same/ next day. However, with the advent of next-day delivery from the likes of Amazon Prime, there's not much of a market for an overpriced high-street electronics retailer.

I recently purchased a packet of 20 of 4mm banana plugs online for the same money Maplin were charging for 1. Once the company were sold by the original owner the rot set in and it was downhill all the way from there.

There’s this place in Strood and there’s a bunch of retailers. Less than a year ago they opened a Maplin and a Poundworld. They’re both closing.

Last thing I bought from Maplin were 3 mini dehumidifiers. They were on sale so cheaper than ebay/amazon. Worked a treat over the winter.

I am from Germany and studied European Business Administration at Nottingham Trent University in 2000-2001. To be honest, it is the first time that I hear about this retail chain. Whereabouts in Nottingam was it? I remember some places like Broadmarsh City Centre, Old Market Square, Shakespeare Street and (of course) Ye olde Trip to Jerusalem. I really enjoy your videos. Keep up the good work!

I live in Birmingham and as a kid we would always go Maplin, Tandy, Toys R Us then all the game shops like Virgin HMV, EB. Good days.

Big shout out to the Connswater store in East Belfast, the Boucher Retail Park store in South Belfast (formerly Lisburn Road store) - thank you for your assistance over many years. Hope everyone gets a job elsewhere.

It is absolutely amazing to see that maplin went down exactly the same way dick smith electronics went down in Australia. I am originally from the UK and remember maplin well, I worked for dick smith for many years and exactly the same thing happened. Even the crazy embarrassing prices. We used to get old grandmas and grandads coming in with their portable telephones needing batteries replaced, I wonder where they go now.