Tell what legos are good

[severalcatsdancing]

Yeah. I really want to get some more lego, but I can't really figure out what to get. It would really sweet if I could get a few recommendations.

[Apollyon]

The sets you owned as a kid or always wanted but never got are always a good start.
Also, large amounts of used, unsorted bricks. First of all they are cheap. Second it is fun sorting them and discovering cool pieces or pieces you never knew before. Third, you can built all sorts of stuff from them.
That's is where i have ended up right now and i know i want more space parts.

[tahthing]

go to a store that has a large selection of lego, then buy some. find out what pieces you use the most and mainly buy sets with those pieces. I normally just buy sets which i like or if they have some nice pieces.

[RoC77]

Figure out what you like to build.... Me for instance, I like to build vehicles & ships, also I like grey so that effects what sets I buy..... More than half my Lego is grey.... And if you're near Lego stores Pick A Brik section is pretty kool for certain pieces....

[IVhorseman]

Honestly, just go to your local toy store and see what lego stuff they have. Buy whichever ones look the coolest and then go to town.

[severalcatsdancing]

Thanks and junk.

[piltogg]

Never buy lego from the lego company, the sets theese days all suck and are over priced. Unless your collection is very small, use bricklink.

[AdrianTheGeek]

Never buy lego from the lego company, the sets theese days all suck and are over priced. Unless your collection is very small, use bricklink.

Whaaaaaa??? THere are plenty of great sets, and they are hardly over priced. Lego has been pricing their sets at around 10 cents a piece for a while now.

[Strana]

tomorrow ill tell you how much piece to dollar cost lego is cheatin ya by, but its late raining and im not going outside just to count how many 2x4's fit in a pab bucket (L)

[Magic Soap]

Bulk buy Kg bags.

[Strana]

i wish, though every now and then when they have top change displays, they will put out lego grab bags which is the sets on display + unwanted PAB slections, i think thier Kg bags (we use the pound but the bag sze is brobably set to Kg), if i remember correctly are like 6 bucks and you get <a href='http://tinyurl.com/y42zurt'>alot</a> for that bit o change, so when i can i do that. its also why i have a ton of black submarine propellers.

[stubby]

tomorrow ill tell you how much piece to dollar cost lego is cheatin ya by, but its late raining and im not going outside just to count how many 2x4's fit in a pab bucket (L)

It's not cheating, Lego in retail boxes costs more because

• 6. They have to ship it in retail boxes of mostly air, which is a hell of a lot less efficient
  7. The retail boxes themselves cost money for production, design, photography, localization, etc. etc. etc.
  8. Even more than the boxes, the instruction booklets cost a crazy amount of money for development and kid testing. One of the reason basic sets have such a less expensive per-brick price.
  9. retail sets have to also make up their advertising and marketing budget
  10. retail sets go to retailers, so after lego makes a tiny profit margin selling them to retail outlets, the retailers have to add another margin on top of that so that they make a profit, taking into account the possible overstock they won't be able to sell
  11. Despite #10, the Lego stores can't sell Lego for less than the retailers, because if they make the retailers angry then Lego is out of business

Meanwhile on the PAB buckets and bulk sacks you really are getting screwed, because those pieces have none of the overhead of the list above. Lego could afford to give those away almost for free. In fact before PAB was introduced, brick overstocks like that just got donated away or ended up in landfills, so that Lego wouldn't have to pay warehousing costs on bricks it wasn't using.

The one thing controlling the price of PAB bricks is that they can't price them too cheap or else no one will want to buy the retail sets anymore.

[Strana]

didnt we have the whole discution over legos would be cheaper if they were in smaller boxes already

It's not cheating, Lego in retail boxes costs more because

• 6. They have to ship it in retail boxes of mostly air, which is a hell of a lot less efficient
  7. The retail boxes themselves cost money for production, design, photography, localization, etc. etc. etc.
  8. Even more than the boxes, the instruction booklets cost a crazy amount of money for development and kid testing. One of the reason basic sets have such a less expensive per-brick price.
  9. retail sets have to also make up their advertising and marketing budget
  10. retail sets go to retailers, so after lego makes a tiny profit margin selling them to retail outlets, the retailers have to add another margin on top of that so that they make a profit, taking into account the possible overstock they won't be able to sell
  11. Despite #10, the Lego stores can't sell Lego for less than the retailers, because if they make the retailers angry then Lego is out of business

Meanwhile on the PAB buckets and bulk sacks you really are getting screwed, because those pieces have none of the overhead of the list above. Lego could afford to give those away almost for free. In fact before PAB was introduced, brick overstocks like that just got donated away or ended up in landfills, so that Lego wouldn't have to pay warehousing costs on bricks it wasn't using.

The one thing controlling the price of PAB bricks is that they can't price them too cheap or else no one will want to buy the retail sets anymore.

Making cheaper, smaller, and baseplated sets is a priority.

heck making any at all would be nice. I remember that the old sets had small baseplates, 16x16 and such. lego needs to take a close look at what its doing and what people want. Also they are inflating shipping costs by having such big boxes, heck the TWILIGHT set could be up to 50% smaller (box wise), and still fit. and why can't lego put the really small sets in plastic bags, rather than boxes. ie the one man and some stuff sets. these used to be put in plastic bags but not now, and it costs a lot more to package twice than once.

Pfft. They've probably run the numbers and figured that bigger boxes equals more sales from people who aren't smart enough to check its weight and part count before buying. I don't fall for the box trick myself, since I mostly buy sets that I've researched and read reviews for, but unfortunately us more intelligent people mustn't make the majority of Lego's customer base.

I'd love to see Lego just flat-out remake Rock Raiders, Ninja and Classic Space, since I came in a little too late to pick up on these wonders. It'd probably be cheaper too, since the older sets tend to use the more common pieces and Lego won't have to make very many new molds, but Lego prefers to release new lines than reuse old ones.

Nope, turns out Professor Ken's right on this one. If you drop below a certain size-to-price ratio, sales dry up completely. People like to think they're rational about their purchasing decisions, but they're just not, and Lego has decades of real-life data about buying patterns to prove it. If they think it's worth the extra shipping expense, it's because they've sat down and done the math with real numbers to see which way loses them more money.

Re: baseplates -- if you've ever bought a pack of just baseplates off the shelf, you know that baseplates are way, way more expensive than bricks. This isn't because Lego's trying to gouge you, it's because the manufacturing process for baseplates is a lot more expensive; the only reason they have to be made that way is because trying to injection-mold something that size (at Lego quality) is more expensive still.

For every set at a certain price, Lego set designers have to hit a certain production cost to produce the set (including manufacturing, distribution, testing, etc), which is measured down to the hundredth of a cent. They don't get to add or remove a couple of dozen parts and call it "close enough," the tiny profit margins and the demanding customer base leave no room for error. They have to hit that production-cost target.

What it means is that every baseplate you put in a set equals 50 bricks you don't get to put in. So if you do want to include a baseplate, you need a really big set to hide the diminished piece count.


just a history leson of cost versus OMG


also wierdly enough in southern cali the retail stores charge a buck more than the lego stores even when they are less than 15 min to a lego store. weird then again im hunting legos not impulse purchasing sets

[Apollyon]

10. retail sets go to retailers, so after lego makes a tiny profit margin selling them to retail outlets, the retailers have to add another margin on top of that so that they make a profit, taking into account the possible overstock they won't be able to sell

I really wonder where the overstocks of retailers are going. Only once i have seen some Bionicle sets ended up in a "99-cent shop" but where is the rest going? I thought Lego takes them back maybe and the bricks are recycled... but that may be too expensive?

also wierdly enough in southern cali the retail stores charge a buck more than the lego stores even when they are less than 15 min to a lego store. weird then again im hunting legos not impulse purchasing sets

It's the opposite over here. The recently opened Lego store sells everything at catalogue prices while the retailers sell everything but the smallest sets about 5% to 15% cheaper than the Lego store does.

[stubby]

I really wonder where the overstocks of retailers are going. Only once I have seen some Bionicle sets ended up in a "99-cent shop" but where is the rest going? I thought Lego takes them back maybe and the bricks are recycled... but that may be too expensive?

I've seen whole pallets of sets end up at Goodwill, but usually they just go to overstock stores. I remember KB Toys' overstock would go to KB Toys Outlet stores and Toy Liquidators, for example.