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Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility

manufacturingdive.com

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Re: Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility

#261

Post by vidarh »

TexanFeller wrote: post #146
obblekk wrote: post #6

Interesting learnings for me from this article: - Lego operates multiple $1B+ factories around the world - they are not just a design and marketing company - 1400 manufacturing jobs in Virginia expected - not just an automated thing. Anyone know what changed economically to justify the high US labor costs? Particularly compared to MX - 100% Carbon neutral via on-site Solar in Virginia (not particularly sunny). No off…

> Anyone know what changed economically to justify the high US labor costs? Based on prices I've seen shopping for my nephews they seem to be a luxury brand now that can afford to. Lots of elaborate and expensive sets sold for $50-200. In my day they were closer to plain bricks.

You're right that there are lots of elaborate and expensive sets, but the basics are still available.

E.g. you can still buy loose bricks from LEGO, so can make it as simple as you like. If you want basic stuff packaged up, the LEGO Classic line has sets starting very small that consists of a batch of bricks and a small set of themed special parts. On the UK site at least they also have more than 500 sets under 20 GBP/25 USD (you can search by price) including a number under 10 GBP / $12, but the majority of these sets will be full of special parts simply because there's little point in packaging up the same small selection of basic bricks in umpteen different sets.

Overall, the price per piece of LEGO varies greatly by set (average per category of set varies from less than 20 cents to nearly 2 dollars per piece) because of different weighting of types of pieces, but the inflation adjusted cost of the basic/cheapest pieces have remained consistently stable [1]

[1] https://brickinsights.com/statistics/ppp

Re: Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility

#262

Post by vidarh »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #169
TexanFeller wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone know what changed economically to justify the high US labor costs? Based on prices I've seen shopping for my nephews they seem to be a luxury brand now that can afford to. Lots of elaborate and expensive sets sold for $50-200. In my day they were closer to plain bricks.

I’ve posted before that Lego in the USA in the 1970s consisted of multi-colored bricks of different sizes. That’s it. And usually someone replies “You’re wrong” and points to some Lego mini-figure or elaborate kit that existed in the US in the 70s but in reality, I never ever saw one and neither me nor any of my friends ever had anything besides basic bricks. It’s like there is some alternate 1970s Lego reality that…

I agree it was mostly basic that early, but already by the 80's, LEGO ads were full of elaborate sets. Not nearly as elaborate as now, but certainly much more. The proportion of special pieces in each set were certainly much smaller, and made getting those special pieces a lot more exciting.

This [1] from LEGO Movie specifically plays on the 1980's space sets, for example, and I personally had quite a few of these [2] sets in the early 80's.

[1] https://www.lego.com/en-gb/product/benny-s-space-squad-70841

[2] http://www.doubledumbassonyou.com/2016/02/19/lets-enjoy-a-lo...

Re: Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility

#263

Post by Mashimo »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #186
foobarian wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you mean not particularly sunny? Even Boston is at a similar or lower latitude than Southern Europe, can imagine Virginia being even better for solar.

Have you ever been to Virginia? Have you compared it to the American southwest for sunshine?

You can find solarfarms in Denmark. Which latitude wise is in the middle of Canada. If there make sense here, why not Virginia?

I don't know much about solar panels, but just looking up sunshine hours it seems Virginia has a similar amount as Texas? And more than double as Billund.

Re: Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility

#264

Post by vidarh »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #251
majormajor wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 90s are when fancy sets with specialized pieces REALLY took off. The 90s space stuff compared with the 80s was a big shift. But that's still 30 years ago so Lego has been fancy pieces and custom kits for a couple generations of kids now.

I think in 00s they didn’t abuse special pieces so much as they do now. Their sets looked more like “see what can be done with our pieces” rather than ”you have to buy this exact set because only it contains the pieces you need to build it”.

There are very sets that contains exclusives, and then usually minifigs, and you can also pick and buy individual pieces. But they are certainly leaning far more into the special pieces. That said, there even when I was buying LEGO sets for myself or begging for them for christmas and birthdays in the early 1980's, it was still on the basis on wanting a specific set because of how they made it look assembled, not for "just" the collection of bricks.

Re: Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility

#265

Post by varjag »

meibo wrote: post #115

They really need to work out their quality deficits first, a lot of recent mishaps have been inexcusable. You can't sell a $600 display model(which is a ridiculous price in the first place) with very visible gate locations from the molding process and uneven colors. These are purely caused by cheap molds and plastic mixes - it didn't used to be this way, but somehow they decided that they had to start jeopardizing th…

This is bizarre. At the scales they produce they gain literally nothing by going thrifty on the tooling.

Re: Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility

#267

Post by varjag »

amelius wrote: post #82
casion wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they are the best quality, in every dimension, and when something is almost purely a hobby then many people are willing to pay a premium for a friction-free experience. There are other brands that are just fine, but you will occasionally get missing pieces, poor fitment, poor/strange construction etc... With LEGO you'll not get any of those (except the occasional strange construction). I used to buy ~50/50 LE…

That might be true, but it's still insane that a LEGO brick costs more than a small microcontroller which requires like 1000x the engineering effort if not more. The free market is clearly failing here.

At the production scale and yields both for low end microcontrollers and LEGO bricks, the costs are largely material-bound as engineering is amortized over tens of millions units

Re: Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility

#268

Post by TheFragenTaken »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #214
drstewart wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's striking is that every time I talk about moving to Europe I have to cut my salary expectations in half. Talk about backwater expectations.

Then perhaps you're being paid too much compared to the other people in society

US software dev salaries are, way higher than European, even when subtracting "mandatory" payments usually paid through taxes in Europe, like child care, healthcare, pensions, maternity leave, housing costs (which to a degree is depressed due to property taxes).

Re: Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility

#269

Post by Dextro »

simse wrote: post #160
Dextro wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember right, they were forced to sell the theme park business when they were in dire financial straights in the early 00s. While Legoland still exists, it's now a license and the parks owned by a separate company

That is correct, but has since been bought back. Well it's a little more complicated, but it's 50% owned by the Kirky family.

Thanks! I had completely missed that development. TIL

Re: Lego breaks ground on first US manufacturing facility

#270

Post by iso1631 »

nonethewiser wrote: post #233
Dylan16807 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultra high voltage lines can reach all the way to the east coast with 10% losses and supposedly about 10 cents per kWh for construction and maintenance. And that's AC, which HVDC might beat. So it seems to me like you could power the US off california solar if they had enough.

That’s pretty incredible to think about. I didn’t think that was feasible.

Brazil has two or three 1200 mile plus HVDC lines in operation

The longest curently runing line is over 2500km, which from Los Angeles would cover the entirety of 17 states as well as cities like Vancouver, Calgary and even Winnipeg

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