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Lego price per part over the years

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Re: Lego price per part over the years

#31

Post by andruby »

Larrikin wrote: post #17
breuleux wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many sets do you buy per year, out of curiosity? I got into Lego during the pandemic and bought around 50 sets in the past three years. Over that sample, the number of missing pieces was precisely zero.

My experience is in fact the opposite. I usually buy the larger sets, and have nearly always had left over smaller pieces. It made me worried the first time it happened and I spent the time tracing back through the model only to find I didn't miss anything.

Every tiny 1x1 piece always comes with an extra. That must be by design.

I think that’s calculated in their cost of doing business. Add one extra of each 1x1 probably eliminated most of the missing parts issue at a fraction of the cost.

Re: Lego price per part over the years

#32

Post by andruby »

robinson-wall wrote: post #22
jacurtis wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also always questioned this. I have purchased about 60 sets in the past 4 years. I have a friend who has purchased well over 100 (he runs a Lego YouTube channel - he spends > $6,000 a year on Lego by his estimation). I have never had a missing piece. There have been two times when I thought I was missing a piece and then found it stuck in a bag or hidden under another piece. I've never had to write to Lego to ge…

Perhaps set size is a contributing factor? I've bought two sets over the last few years, and both of them have had a piece missing. One was 1969 pieces (no prizes for guessing which set that is!) and the other 1222 pieces. Both occasions the pieces weren't structurally important, and were small decorative elements.

The Saturn V was a fun build :)

Re: Lego price per part over the years

#33

Post by bleepblop »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #24
bleepblop wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a new metric when it comes to lego kits these days. How many stickers are in the kit? And honestly it's too damn high. I have been pretty vocal to lego about this in the past and current times. If they can mass produce an uncountable amount of minifigs with detailed paint schemes; they can do the same for bricks in the set. I have a hard time believing it's nothing more than a cost cutting measure. And to add…

> How many stickers are in the kit? And honestly it's too damn high. I know I'm going against the grain here, but I love stickers. Many of the sets my kids got were "sticker infested" but as they only re-bricked it, we just did not put the stickers on some of them and got just more fun out of it. > Within the past 10 years I have had at least 7 kits missing pieces. And the frequency keeps growing I never had it. Also…

I am fully aware of the customer service side of lego. That's why I still use their stuff. But I suppose that is where our agreement will lie. Knowing what they are capable of and where they are now is noticeable.

Re: Lego price per part over the years

#35

Post by gmueckl »

yalok wrote: post #10
bena wrote: post #6

Another factor is that Lego is using more greebling than in the past. So you have more "parts", but they're all small pieces used for detailing rather than larger structural components of the build.

exactly, that's been my concern as well - more and more parts now are very specialized and hard to reuse in other projects. Makes me sad for the kids - this limits creativity...

I'd say yes and no. I find very few parts that are custom shapes for a single set these days. Most part shapes are very generic, but there is an absolutely wild variety of them now. There is an enormous number of SNOT, tile and slope pieces, for example. These can make slick looking builds, but getting a decent and useful collection of those for MOCs is hard.

Where Lego gets tricky is the combination of shape and color: the color palette has been growing over the years, too, but most of the weirder shapes are only available in specific colors and not always the colors you would intuitively expect them to have. I guess it happens because manufacturing/stockpiling the whole outer product of shape x color is just infeasible at this point. So the available colors are just whatever is used in the current sets, however weird it may seem.

Re: Lego price per part over the years

#36

Post by skipkey »

breuleux wrote: post #11
bleepblop wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a new metric when it comes to lego kits these days. How many stickers are in the kit? And honestly it's too damn high. I have been pretty vocal to lego about this in the past and current times. If they can mass produce an uncountable amount of minifigs with detailed paint schemes; they can do the same for bricks in the set. I have a hard time believing it's nothing more than a cost cutting measure. And to add…

How many sets do you buy per year, out of curiosity? I got into Lego during the pandemic and bought around 50 sets in the past three years. Over that sample, the number of missing pieces was precisely zero.

For me, 100 percent of the sets with over a thousand pieces have been missing at least one, during the pandemic. Now that’s only 4 sets, admittedly.

The smaller sets have all been fine, tho.

Re: Lego price per part over the years

#37

Post by paulddraper »

yalok wrote: post #10
bena wrote: post #6

Another factor is that Lego is using more greebling than in the past. So you have more "parts", but they're all small pieces used for detailing rather than larger structural components of the build.

exactly, that's been my concern as well - more and more parts now are very specialized and hard to reuse in other projects. Makes me sad for the kids - this limits creativity...

So buy Lego Classic.

They're not like 80s-era simplicity, but they definitely reuse peices.

They're not rare; they're on every shelf. (But they're not Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc.)

Re: Lego price per part over the years

#39

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

bleepblop wrote: post #33
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many stickers are in the kit? And honestly it's too damn high. I know I'm going against the grain here, but I love stickers. Many of the sets my kids got were "sticker infested" but as they only re-bricked it, we just did not put the stickers on some of them and got just more fun out of it. > Within the past 10 years I have had at least 7 kits missing pieces. And the frequency keeps growing I never had it. Also…

I am fully aware of the customer service side of lego. That's why I still use their stuff. But I suppose that is where our agreement will lie. Knowing what they are capable of and where they are now is noticeable.

I don't know. It very much depends on what you are into. I feel like a lot of the stuff that Lego does got way better in recent years. For instance the manuals in the app are a step above and beyond of where they were, and the build together element means that my kids are playing together and rebuilding old sets.

Re: Lego price per part over the years

#40

Post by mtillman »

bleepblop wrote: post #9
bombcar wrote: post #4

> Many people quote that a set should be priced at around $0.10 per part to be worthwhile. Is this the average? This has been the average, and it's so "perfect" that it has to be that Lego has been aiming for it. They've accomplished this by having more and more detail (read: smaller pieces) in newer sets. They appear to have been forced (or trying) to jump to $0.20 per piece in some sets (e.g., https://www.lego.com/…

I have a new metric when it comes to lego kits these days. How many stickers are in the kit? And honestly it's too damn high. I have been pretty vocal to lego about this in the past and current times. If they can mass produce an uncountable amount of minifigs with detailed paint schemes; they can do the same for bricks in the set. I have a hard time believing it's nothing more than a cost cutting measure. And to add…

I was stoked to find the new Eldorado fortress to be an improvement on the original and free from stickers. I got plenty of extra pieces too.
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