I used to love reading the Maplin catalogues when I was a kid in the late 70s and early 80s - rarely used the shops though - they mostly seemed full of rather tacky electronic toys/gadgets rather than components.
In the modern era their shops were useful for the "need a Usb cable/external disk/whatever today and will pay the premium for getting it immediately". But I'm not too surprised that that kind of thing wasn't sufficient to keep them going.
But as you say, nowadays there's no reason to go to Maplin unless you need to go to retail. Online shopping, especially direct-from-China, overtook them. I think also there has been a generational shift in the people doing electronics; the old "ham" culture and the new "maker" culture look superficially like they're both doing things with soldering irons, but the people and community are very different.
Brexit and the associated fall in Stirling are mentioned as proximate causes, but they're the hard winter that's going to kill off a lot of already week UK firms.
Can you elaborate? I'm not familiar with either of those cultures.
Ham culture predates the internet by a long way, when talking over the radio was a sensible option for making friends with interesting strangers in faraway places. Very analogue. Slightly hierachical, generally older, and believe in the importance of theory and credentials.
Maker culture is self-taught off youtube and other places. It involves a lot of tinkering and trial and error with Arduinos, Raspberry Pis and breadboards. Very "open source", very digital, very much anti-hierarchical. Although not free of their own gatekeeping issues. ""Millenials"" (+).
My feeling is that the wider set of people who were customers for Maplin or Heathkit kits are a lot more like the former than the latter. In some ways it's the difference between people who will build a lego set to the picture on the box and the people who'll freestyle something else with it.
(+) I'm so gen X that I have a signed copy of Coupland's book. I also made a couple of Maplin kits when I was younger.
It's a shame :(
I wanted to do computer programming with these input and output, switches and LED, but I.T or Programming wasn't really a thing in the UK education system at the time, so electronics and programming were separate subject. When I went to university I finally get to write and make a Security / Measuring System, using components I bought from Maplin with full menu. I still remember getting simple signals on/off from parallel or serial port was the easy and fun part. Getting the system results shown in a web page, constantly updating was 10 times harder.
Nowadays things are millions times more abstracted and in some way complex. I am not sure if we can do that with USB pins anymore. But thinking back it was a lot of fun.
Sad to see Maplin go.
Celebrating and riding the wave of maker/hacker culture is something they have ignored and failed on. A place that has locations everywhere? Could have opened up for hacker to collaborate? Had tech bars like Apple? I hope they get rescued somehow.