What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick • Hacker News Board

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#31

Post by briannickel » Tue, Feb 24, 2015, 6:03 AM UTC

hangonhn wrote: post #30

I purchased the Lego Space Shuttle in October, 2012 for my nephew for $94.99. I had so much fun putting it together with him a couple years later that I decided that I want one myself and it's now at $300: http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-4657599-Shuttle-Expedition-10231/... I know this because Amazon has a notification at the top to tell me that I purchased it in 2012 and I can see the order. In the span of 2.5 years, it'…

For your specific case you can look at camelcamelcamel: http://camelcamelcamel.com/LEGO-4657599-Shuttle-Expedition-1...

The last first-party price change ($84.97) corresponds to a steady and sustained increase in third-party price, so I'm assuming they discontinued the product in December of 2013 and the price is now driven by market forces. Just looking at other recommended space sets, I'm seeing prices jump 2x to 3x between when they were discontinued and now.

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#32

Post by briandh » Tue, Feb 24, 2015, 6:14 AM UTC

noonespecial wrote: post #16

kijin wrote: post #5

In the early 80s, my parents went to garage sales and bought me tons of used Lego sets. None of the sets were anywhere near complete, and most of them didn't even come with a picture of the set they belonged to. My parents just dumped everything into a large bin and gave me no instructions other than what the shape of the blocks themselves suggested. There were parts of cars, parts of airplanes, parts of castles and…

That's exactly what I found with my kids. You've got to buy far more expensive modern sets to get the same number of generic any-pieces than you used to. So the price of free form creativity with lego has indeed gone up. Follow the instructions Emmet...

As mentioned by other commenters, the Creator series has sets with more generic pieces. And you can easily buy large quantities of generic pieces, at least in the US.

For instance: http://smile.amazon.com/LEGO-Classic-Large-Creative-Brick/dp...

And the City series strikes me as striking a decent balance between generic and speciality pieces.

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#33

Post by WalterBright » Tue, Feb 24, 2015, 7:17 AM UTC

I had a Gilbert Erector Set, a competitor to Lego. I confess I always thought the erector sets were better, and looked down on Lego. Metal held together with nuts and bolts! vs plastic bricks. It was no contest. But who has heard of erector sets these days? Gilbert lost the marketing war.

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#34

Post by dxhdr » Tue, Feb 24, 2015, 7:42 AM UTC

kijin wrote: post #5

In the early 80s, my parents went to garage sales and bought me tons of used Lego sets. None of the sets were anywhere near complete, and most of them didn't even come with a picture of the set they belonged to. My parents just dumped everything into a large bin and gave me no instructions other than what the shape of the blocks themselves suggested. There were parts of cars, parts of airplanes, parts of castles and…

I think it actually takes more creativity to re-purpose the 'heavily customized' sets. Here's some of those ship pieces you mentioned: http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5286/5377659338_18f315850a_z.j...

As a counter point, I loved all of those specialized sets as a kid -- Blacktron and M-Tron were especially awesome. Plain rectangular bricks can be boring and need some custom pieces to spice things up.

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#35

Post by prawn » Tue, Feb 24, 2015, 7:59 AM UTC

kijin wrote: post #5

In the early 80s, my parents went to garage sales and bought me tons of used Lego sets. None of the sets were anywhere near complete, and most of them didn't even come with a picture of the set they belonged to. My parents just dumped everything into a large bin and gave me no instructions other than what the shape of the blocks themselves suggested. There were parts of cars, parts of airplanes, parts of castles and…

You can buy buckets of generic bricks but they're hard to find in toy and department stores. I'm in Australia and gave up trying to find generic stuff in stock here and ordered in Duplo from Amazon for my two year old.

He has airport and train sets (gifts from family), plus bulk bricks, which means he can get a mixture of general building experiences, plus specific things to combine with them. Works well.

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#36

Post by colechristensen » Tue, Feb 24, 2015, 8:27 AM UTC

city41 wrote: post #29

> Not all old LEGO sets fetch such high prices, but of course all the popular ones do. These are the ones that we wanted when we were younger, and now that we have a bit of our own money we want to buy those dream sets from our childhood. Many toys from our youth now command incredible prices because of this phenomenon. Retro video games can command absolutely obscene prices (four and even 5 figures sometimes). My Ne…

The thing is, most old video games (at least the especially popular ones) are available as emulators and sometimes are refreshed by the publishers too.

Lego sets need not be old to be fun as I can attest from a recent impulse purchase.

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#37

Post by Intermernet » Tue, Feb 24, 2015, 8:43 AM UTC

> The prices of the toys we had as kids comes as a shock. $150 for a toy? $200 for a toy? These prices are outrageous.

I remember having an encyclopaedic knowledge of the prices of Lego sets (and Transformers) during the 80's. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. Most of my friends in primary school knew how much the latest Technics racing car, or indeed the original G1 Megatron (banned in the state I lived in, so notorious and highly coveted amongst us [1]) would have cost our parents.

One of my friend's dads drove to another state and paid $90 for Megatron before it got banned in that state as well. For that act, according to us at the time, he won dad of the year.

[1]: http://www.otca.com.au/boards/showpost.php?p=354736&postcoun...

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#38

Post by DanBC » Tue, Feb 24, 2015, 9:11 AM UTC

hangonhn wrote: post #30

I purchased the Lego Space Shuttle in October, 2012 for my nephew for $94.99. I had so much fun putting it together with him a couple years later that I decided that I want one myself and it's now at $300: http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-4657599-Shuttle-Expedition-10231/... I know this because Amazon has a notification at the top to tell me that I purchased it in 2012 and I can see the order. In the span of 2.5 years, it'…

How many unique pieces are there in the space shuttle set?

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#39

Post by onion2k » Tue, Feb 24, 2015, 9:41 AM UTC

Another factor that the article doesn't consider is the utility of each Lego brick - if there are a large number of unique pieces in each set then you need to buy more Lego sets to get the available bricks, and the bricks have less reusable value in models built from your imagination. For example, a child can't as easily take a set that's designed to build a car and use the bricks to build a dinosaur instead because there are too many "car specific" pieces.

Measuring the usefulness of pieces would be tremendously hard to include in any mathematical model (pun not intended).

Re: What Happened with Lego: The price of a brick

#40

Post by gambiting » Tue, Feb 24, 2015, 10:34 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #39

Another factor that the article doesn't consider is the utility of each Lego brick - if there are a large number of unique pieces in each set then you need to buy more Lego sets to get the available bricks, and the bricks have less reusable value in models built from your imagination. For example, a child can't as easily take a set that's designed to build a car and use the bricks to build a dinosaur instead because…

You are underestimating how creative children are. I used to get a lot of Lego sets as a kid, and they would get assembled and then disassembled within two days max. And yes, I can confirm that a Lego Technic excavator with an electric motor and pneumatic controls can be used to make a dinosaur(and then to make a city block. And a spaceship. And a train.).

And in fact, it looks like Lego company is encouraging you to experiment too - look at the Lego Movie sets. Every single one uses weird, "specific use" pieces which are used for something completely different than what they were originally intended for.