Maplin's landlords - cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

From The Evening Standard:

Landlords to collapsed retailers Toys R Us and Maplin could be left with empty stores totalling more than two Shard skyscrapers and lose tens of millions of pounds in rent, property experts predicted on Thursday.

Agent Colliers International has calculated that the failed chains use more than 4 million sq ft of space in the UK. That comprises around 300 shops... Industry sources estimate that collectively landlords were getting an income of around £73.8 million a year from the failed tenants...

If no rescue deals are agreed, a long list of landlords could be left with vacant space, including LandSec, British Land, Hammerson and Intu. 

Ho hum, let's take one of my favourite shops, Maplin.

Their 2017 accounts show a net loss of £3.9 million after paying £21.7 million in rent. Maplin also own some long leaseholds, but most of their shops were rented.

Sane landlords would just reduce the rent by a quarter, leaving Maplin at least marginally profitable. But instead of accepting £16 million a year easy money*, they decided to push Maplin into insolvency. As a result, they can whistle for the last quarters' rent and will be stuck with long void periods until they finally decide to accept lower rents.

* The average paid by both businesses was £18.45/square foot. The actual costs to the landlord is south of £10/square foot, so a one-quarter reduction would still have left them with some unearned location rents.

I hope that the landlords can't wangle themselves any Business Rates discounts beyond the normal three months for empty premises (which is three months too long, if you ask me). If local councils waive the rates, this just enables the landlords to hold all these units out of use for longer, with a corresponding depressing effect on other shops on the same High Street or in the same shopping centre or 'retail park'.

Some things just work

People are always quick to whine when something goes wrong, especially if it is maliciously bad service at the hands of British Gas etc who never turn up when they promise, so I think it's only fair to point out when something goes smoothly.

As previously mentioned, the broadband had been intermittent for the past week or two. I 'phoned Virgin NTL on Thursday morning, who tested the connection remotely, agreed that it was dodgy and promised to send a chap out on Saturday between 8 and 12 a.m. Said chap duly turned up shortly after 9 a.m. and established that the problem was to do with the box in the street, as other people had complained as well. He promised that an engineer would attend to it within the next few hours, made his excuses and left.

Said engineer was on the spot within an hour. I popped out to offer him a cup of tea, which he declined, and he explained that he would have to replace a twelve-year-old transformer-amplifier-splitter-type-thingymajig in the green box, which would take him about five minutes.

Five minutes later, I tried t'internet again, and hey presto, it worked. The engineer even rang the bell before he set off to make sure.

Suitably emboldened, I went into town and bought a new router* to replace the Linksys one that we'd had for years and which had died a death. I followed Step One on the Quick Installation Guide, Step Two looked a bit tricky so I just clicked Explorer on the off-chance it worked, and again, hey presto, it had sort of installed itself.

There. I've said it. Hardly makes for a gripping post though, does it?

* Sitecom DC-202, from Maplins, £25 a pop. It is amazingly teeny-tiny.

Those little foam pads you put over in-ear headphones

I bought a pack of six from HMV a year or two ago for 99p, and I lost the second-to-last one yesterday. HMV no longer sell them. Neither do Zavvi (fka Virgin) altho' the bloke was very helpful (he spoke to two other members of staff). At this stage, I was sorely tempted to just buy some more headphones, but they didn't sell Sennheiser MX-500 (the best mid-price headphones there are - my current pair has lasted over two years) so on I marched to Comet. Nope, they didn't sell them either, but the lass referred me to Maplins. Who did sell them - pack of six for £2.49. So I bought two packs.