Needed a new CR2025 battery for a remote. EBay 99p delivered for 2 Duracell. Currys £4. Maplins £4 EACH (and a brand I'd never heard of).
99p less 61p postage makes them 19p each. Proper retail packaging (best before 2023 etc). One wonders what the factory gate price for these things is (and how long Maplins can survive in the high street).Matey from Dragons Den thinks he's saved Jessops but the place is always empty when I walk past
In message , stuart noble writes
Not very long if they don't change their business policy. I'm not too sure of the exact figures now, but a few months ago I wanted a 2,4AH 12V SLA and Maplins were about 3 times the price of Screwfix, and others locally. Plus the stock turn over was likely very low at Maplins so the battery could well have been on the shelf for months, if not years!
Did you check Boots? I've found they are about the cheapest for that sort of battery of the High Street stores.
Maplin charge 36p for a single resistor. Costs about 2p elsewhere.
I have read some very adverse reviews e.g. on Amazon about badged batteries which just don't last. Not sure if the issue is incorrect storage or if they are fakes.
I followed the advice and went to Poundland where you can get a card of batteries for (no sh*t) £1.
Cheers
Dave R
Maplin have very little chance of survival. IIRC they are owned by a hedge fund, so they're doomed.
The pound shops sell packs of such coin cells. I can't recall whether any CR2025s were on the card amongst all the other sizes which included the ubiquitous CR2032 as used in over 90% of PC MoBos and, I've noticed just recently, some modern laptops. It might be worth a look.
That's the thing, isn't it? I think most of us appreciate the staggering mark up between factory dispatch price and end user retail pricing, particularly peculiar to the UK.
Presumably this "Matey from Dragons' Den" will be making quite sure that the _only_ type of NiMH AA cells being stocked will all exclusively be of the LSD type (as opposed to the opposite case where they only stocked the high self discharge type).
No wonder they went bust with such a total lack of interest in what the punters wanted from their rechargable AA cells, let alone everything else. If they couldn't get that simple inventory choice right, they deserved to go under imho.
Is it peculiar to the UK though? Isn't it just a normal western world thing, and also related to the cost of retail?
Eg the resistors at 35p each - that's actually a sensible price when sold singly in a shop.
Marketed at hippies and ravers no doubt. :)
Who said anything about a shop? That's the Maplin website price - the 2p one being from other electronics suppliers, although you'd have to add VAT to that. But then they also do a cheaper rate for bulk.
To put it in real money, I usually buy resistors by the hundred. So 2 quid versus 35. ;-)
At one time Maplin were fairly competitive with the big suppliers. Not any more.
You think! "Jeesus H Kriste!". No wonder the UK is awash with retail parks. The major retail chains must think the UK is "Retail Operators' Heaven". :-(
Why am I not surprised at that interpretation of that particular TLA. I meant, as I'm sure you're well aware, Low Self Discharge (implied when I mentioned High Self Discharge a few words later on).
I stand corrected :-) Though 35p for a single resistor on the web is also a fair price - time picking etc. P+P on top of that. I notice the
2p resistors are only sold in tens on RS - that's got to be easier to handle than singles too.I've never been aware of Maplin being any good - I've never lived near one so never got used to them if they were competent in the old days, and I've always been impressed at how crap their shops are when I've seen them.
Do you have any idea how much it costs to run a shop and make a profit? Especially on low volume components such as single resistors?
You've got to make at least ten quid an hour out of a person in a shop, probably a lot more. That means for 35p, they can't spend more than about a minute and a half on a sale, and that's assuming the cost to the shop is zero.
For a screw, that's feasible - open box, put on shelf. It's obvious when screws get swapped between boxes, and they're generally big enough not to get confused. Though for a tiny grub screw, you're probably going to have to put them in packets.
Resistors are rather harder to identify. You'll not be able to keep them loose in boxes. You could keep them on tapes, and make sure you put the right tapes in the right place. If you let customers near them that'll go wrong, so you'll have to serve them yourself. There goes your profit instantly - while it may take a few seconds to retrieve from the tape, the volume won't be such that you can have a person dedicated to that so you'll have to get somebody to walk to the right place and sort it out. You could keep them in bags with labels - that means customers can deal with it, but the time taken bagging means you're into that 35p each straight away.
Now you could sensibly have quite a sharp taper for buying more than one
- eg a quid for ten resistors would be a fair price for a retail shop. Alternatively use the small things as loss leaders. But the surprisingly large costs for singles are how much these things actually cost if you want to turn a profit.
That is still only 20p. Almost half the Maplin price. And RS manage to deliver the next day. Maplin can take 5.
It's a while since I bought resistors but the idea of buying them singly (apart from the big wirewound ones) seems daft. If memory serves, in the places I used to buy from (Henry's Radio, Electrovalue), the minimum order was ten, which were supplied on tape. They're so cheap it's not worth buying less than ten, and it's always good to have a wide selection in the store cupboard.
It's not a shop. They charge the same for mail order.
But in any case probably no one would ever buy just one resistor. If they did, the postal charges would be silly too.
Any such cell that costs more than £2 is a misnomer. (OK - I know about the special issues.)
And? So they're overpriced for mail order. What's that got to do with the costs of running a shop?
I'm talking about shops, JBG is too.
Yes, which is why they can't survive in the high street. They're relying on a dwindling number of people who can't or won't shop online.
The high street problem is complicated by lack of parking, weather, high shop rentals and business rates which are not turnover related. I use Toolstation a lot, because I have a local branch, with good stocks, easy parking and nothing gets broken in transit. It also avoids having to stay around to get delivery. But, they have enough turnover to avoid the business rates problem and their rent is quite low because of their location. The local Maplin has close to zero customers and they cannot survive.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.