They do list an age range of 4 to 99 so he’s well within normal limits.
And Lego fans/dads know there’s a king’s ransom worth of Lego in that picture.
over 2,800 boxes of LEGO sets, each ranging in price from $20 to $1,000.
Not to be reductive and at the risk of pissing off Lego fans, how much could those $1000 sets cost Lego to make? We’re talking about plastic bricks that must cost a fraction of a cent per brick.
Legos are very cool but they seem ridiculously overpriced to me. Especially now that they’re getting fans to design things, so they can’t even claim any sort of R&D going into it.
I’m not going to disagree they’re overpriced, especially the bigger collector sets, but they are built to insanely perfect tolerances and that’s never cheap. Use any generic blocks and it’s easy to see Lego manufacturing is on another level. In addition I’ve built countless sets and despite thousands of tiny pieces I’ve only had one piece missing, once. And customer support sent out that piece immediately, no questions asked.
I believe much of the cost comes from the standards they hold themselves to.
Bootleg Lego are the saddest thing. They have cool designs but the pieces not being built with the same precision makes them a shore to build. Assembled pieces just don’t hold together and it becomes an unfun disaster.
Some things just need that level of insane precision and consistency to work well and comes at a cost.
I tried to give other brands a chance, primarily because Lego doesn’t dabble in war builds, but yeah I built a kit, picked it up to move it and half fell out because the bricks were not able to tightly clasp. I suppose it’s less of a problem if you glue, but notably different experiences indeed.
My kid one a small set one. It was a cool Japanese anime robot but it was impossible to finish. The look of frustration and my own when I tried myself. I had to tell him to give up.
That’s starting to not be true. Several of the brands out of China have better manufacturing quality than LEGO these days.
I know we’re way off original topic, but do you have personal experience with the chinese brands? Any specifically you’d recommend checking out?
In addition to this - brand value and licensing costs or however they structure their deals with other companies.
But don’t they hold themselves to the same standards for smaller sets and use the same machines to make them?
Yeah of course, but I think a lot more design goes into something like Millennium Falcon 75192 ($850) than Millennium Falcon 75375 ($85), it’s 6600 more bricks to build. The collectors builds also tend to have more specialized one off parts.
They’re not all that one-off if they’re making thousands of them. And does that really justify an $850 price tag? We’re not talking bespoke here.
Maybe I’m not the best person to ask because I don’t buy the big sets, I settled for a millennium falcon 75257 ($170). The $1000 kits aren’t worth it to me personally, I’d rather piece together MOC but I guess for someone that wants to flex or is a huge fan of a specific property, it’s available 🤷
By one off I mean they introduce specific pieces for that set, which introduces more cost with a custom mold and run to create the brick. Parts you won’t find in any other set.
Exactly this.
Though I am not sure how much more the designing actually costs in labor, compared to how much more they charge. (Marketing and licensing are other things that would be customized for these specialty/collector sets)
Estimates vary but seem to be between 5 and 10 cents per brick.
Lego definitely makes a profit, but they also haven’t done the usual thing for a business to do, make the product cheaper to squeeze more out of it. In fact, one of the reasons to choose lego over another is the tight tolerances they have for their Legos, they fit better and hold better than a knockoff.
So like, yeah, business, they’re trying to make money, but its not the clear-cut fake inflation thing going on, or even necessarily price gouging, as far as I could determine. Its more, this is what a quality product costs, they haven’t cheaped out, but it just feels so prohibitively expensive because people aren’t paid enough in general.
That’s not exactly true, the manufacturing quality of LEGO has gone down in recent years after moving much of the manufacturing to China. For example, you’ll find more parts with ejection marks in them today than you used to.
Ironically there are a few good Chinese knockoff brands with superior quality now.
That is so much LEGO. Wow.
The product is known as LEGO. The plural is not LEGOs.
The boxes contained multiple pieces of LEGO.
A shipment of glass does not contain glasses. It contains multiple pieces or sheets of glass.
I’m going to call it LEGOs even harder now.
What’s that like $100 worth of plastic? How is this news?
Same like a 3k LV bag is 150 bucks of leather. Or a 100 dollar bill is a few cents of paper.
Agree on the bag. Disagree on the currency. If Legos were used as currency then it would be totally logical if still completely stupid. Even then, there’s human labor involved in making a quality bag, but every Lego brick is exactly the same and made by a machine out of a penny’s worth of plastic.
Each box is easily worth 1-2 hundred. On the low side. They’re legos. and some of those sets are the limited-time only sets
The falcon sets are all 500+, if I’m reading the thumbnail right (paywall, erg.)
If we assume 100 per, that’s still 300k in value. “It’s just plastic”… might be a legitimate reason to not buy the sets, but c’mon. You wouldn’t knock collecting art (“it’s just canvas and paint.”)
Are you comparing mass-produced plastic machine made pieces to art? I will absolutely agree that you can make art with them, but at the end of the day we’re talking about plastic trash injected into a mold. If you want to get me to somehow defend a company that sell s plastic waste for a massive premium, it just isn’t going to happen.
