I'll miss it too, but I've been missing it for half a decade now. Once they started focusing on selling you drones and CCTV cameras for 10% more than the RRP we knew where it was headed.
It was nice back then to have somewhere to go to buy random bits for projects, and even now you can still do that but they charge you horrendously - I paid nearly a tenner for a single CR123A last month from them. But I needed it then and there.
There's still a radiospares near me, at least, but it's a forty minute drive. I hope whatever Amazon does it means I can get a resistor at 11pm.
>>2396 RS does free next day delivery with no minimum order. There's literally been no reason to buy anything at Maplin for years other than needing something before close of business that same day.
>There's literally been no reason to buy anything at Maplin for years other than needing something before close of business that same day.
That happens to me a lot. I'm often not patient enough to wait a day for stuff to be sent to me, usually I get on a roll with something and hate to have to give up because it's the middle of the night and I've ran out of solder or something equally as daft.
I need to properly stock the shed, really, but I'm not consistent enough to justify having the broad scope of stock I'd want. Maybe I need to establish one of them trendy hackerspaces and hope enough wonks come to it that I'll always have access to a basement full of parts.
Maplin only just opened a new shop in conurbation I reside in. Really fucking annoying because they closed down the one a five minute walk away from where I live in the bargain.
Fucksticks. Now the only shops I can go to to buy electronics are PC World and Asda. That's like being forced to buy electronics from either Satan or your Mum.
I don't like the idea of buying electronics online, sometimes you just need to open a packet and see if the connectors fit. Sizes and standards change just slightly faster than the rate at which I need to buy new things, every time I feel like I've got the insides of a PC sussed, I go to upgrade something or build a new PC, and my graphics card suddenly needs to slot into something else that my motherboard doesn't have, monitors won't plug into whatever my graphics card has, hard drives don't plug into the the wires that plug into hard drives any more. It's a fucking nightmare.
Spie isn't involved in the business any more. He sold up in 2012 and moved to Jersey to pursue his lifelong ambition of being a full-time racist. OcUK is now a subsidiary of Caseking Group.
The farm takes up most of the day and at night I just like a cup of tea.
I'll miss Maplin for all the aerosols they have in.
When I need a new tin of electrical solvent cleaner or something like that, it's a massive pain in the arse trying to buy one off the internet, the royal mail wont deliver them. Click and collect services like Amazon lockers wont deliver them. I could get them to deliver to my place of work, but I don't trust the numbskulls in goods in to not immediately take a knife to the box before bothering to read the label.
>>2407 Yeah, I figure that if they do have a fire sale that it'll be the first time in years that it'll have been worth buying anything from them. That's "if" of course - the administrators would be well within their rights to say "no discounts" as is often the case, since they've got a duty to raise as much money as possible, even if it means cunt's tricks like refusing to honour credit.
I don't know much about this sort of thing, but surely Maplin stock is something that can be easily sold on or bought up by other companies? It doesn't seem wise to keep stores open for months while trying to shift a few diodes when RS could just send a lorry round.
>>2409 There's a bloke on ebay already who shifts RS's unsellable stock. I can't tell if he's RS themselves, or just gets the gear to resell. Had some cracking diodes off him, though, and loads of reels of good stuff.
Wouldn't be surprised to see Maplin's stock go the same route.
I was going to post something about buying out all Maplin's stock and making the mother of all Ebay stores, but then I realised that having the up front capital to do that probably wouldn't be feasible, at least for most people this thread.
How much do you think it'd cost to buy all of their stock, the components anyway? It's probably not a huge price tag, right? My bank manager likes me, we might be able to swing it.
A bank loan wouldn't be the way to go, there's no way that the interest and your general overheads wouldn't outweigh your profit margin.
Your best bet would be to find someone willing to pitch in the capital for X% of the shares of your brand new LTD. In return for his startup cash and your legwork he'd get X% of your profits.
Anyway, fair's fair, who's up for necking eight cans of Strongbow each and going on Dragon's Den and pitching our startup Ebay shop Marple-ins? Anyone? No?
>>2406 A very good point and reminds me I must stock up - I too have a large collection of isopropyl alcohol, various air and cleaning sprays, all from Maplin because nobody else posts them.
I worked there for a long time, and in a different timeline I might still have worked there. I always said they were circling the drain.
Management were a complete set of tossers, and to make matters worse they took on a load of plonkers from Comet when they shat the bed. Within a decade it went from a handy shop to get a 15p battery connector, to a poorly staffed rip-off where the same connector would cost you £1.69, if they even had it in stock. Too much reliance on min/max stock levels and margin over volume, which drove away near enough all the trade business.
Still, I'm going to laugh when it turns out they'd been siphoning off the pension scheme too. I might go and visit my old boss just to laugh at him about it.