I used to work for the company and before anyone thinks im just out to rant because of bitterness I left on my own accord for better prospects and on good terms, but its a disgrace how its gone downhill, the company lost experience in favour of youthful joyfulness, it sacrificed specialism with random tat not worthy of selling even in China and opened dozens of new units to help its bottom line for short term success.
They lost respect from customers by using said youth to punt £120 HDMI cables (I kid you not, those monster cables they (used?) to sell for about £40-120, yup, buy price of 30p-£1.30. Many of the sales persons refused to sell it in favour of repeat customer sales but these folk were slowly thinned out until we were left with polite and joyful sales persons who literally couldn't wire a three pin mains plug.
Maplin is going through an identity crisis, much like woollies did, it wants its fingers in everything, toys, electronics, music, tools, comms and networking, computers, you name it, but without any worth while staff to back it up its largely seen as a joke, its not landing anything at all with any real success and needs to be more directed and focused, it will never compete on toys with the bigger stores.
The stores do look better, I give them that, but it needs to drastically change because its market base is forever shrinking, the one thing Maplin has the potential to do that the internet cant compete with is competent staff capable of helping customers, I think we need to get back to a smaller refined company that delivers service, that can installer that car radio they just bought if they choose to pay for it, scale back now, before they lose the lot, then look at strategy for moving forward. Sadly the people at the top that can make a difference are the ones that can cut and run, the people on the sales floor, numpties or not, take the brunt for their bosses mistakes.