Now a terrible place to work, continuously on the decline
Pros
The staff are very often decent people trying to make a living or work their way up. You get to be around a lot of techie products. If you're a tech geek, you'll enjoy that much. The customers often provide interesting and comical stories which distract you from the job itself.
Cons
The pay is absolutely miserable. Rather than compensate workers for their knowledge and input with a decent basic salary and good commission, workers receive minimum wage and are rewarded with store credit, store gift vouchers or drinks. This is pathetic and insulting. Regional managers are patronizing, down-talking and ineffective and are continuously being replaced - to add insult to injury, every new regional manager comes in demanding higher targets and the stores to be run a different way with different policies - this is ineffective and disruptive to store culture as every six months it seems that the rule book changes completely. The job itself it seems consists more about flogging tape measures, screwdrivers and cheap plastic trinkets at the till rather than satisfying the customer's needs. You will become rapidly fed up with the constant up-sell mentality the store managers try to impart on you and rapidly disillusioned when performance targets aren't hit. Staff are taught to perceive customers as a walking £20 note. It is a joke. The internal computer system is akin to a toaster from the early 70s held together by gaffer tape. Very frequently the website will stutter and stop working, tills will freeze and the illusion that Maplin is a leader of high-tech goods is shattered by its own inability to invest in high tech. Much is said about the money being spent to modernize the system, very little is seen in improvements. Because of the above and many other reasons, staff turnaround is high and new staff do not receive adequate training to compensate for the loss of the previous staff members. Actually to be perfectly concise, there is no staff training whatsoever. Staff dropout is SO high that it renders any kind of training pointless and not cost effective, at least in the company's eyes. Thus you learn from messing things up and are punished when you make mistakes (even though no one is trained in how to do things properly). In short, VERY bad training and recruitment policies.
