10 ms·
What happened with LEGO
- mrspeaker 14y agoWow - a lot or work went into that article. Very impressive! On a vaguely related note, here's the video that the quote at the top is taken from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVCOAFKjaoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVCOAFKjaoY
- fnazeeri 14y agoI love it! Summary: Legos seem expensive now because the first time you got them they were free! ;p
- beobab 14y agoFirst one free, and once you're hooked it's exorbitantly expensive? Sounds familiar. :)
- speeder 14y agoAgain this post? Well, at least this time I can comment. I must say that Lego in Brazil is ABSURDLY expensive, it is just ridiculous. And this is very bad, since I love Lego!! And I miss "Tente" (a Lego clone that existed here, and had some nifty stuff, like wheeled blocks with metal axles)
- AlexMuir 14y agoI can't find it previously posted to HN, is that your meaning?
- GFischer 14y agoI didn't find this post, however there are similarly-themed articles by Wired and others: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5040545 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5040545
- AlexMuir 14y agoYeah, I've seen them. The key point I took from this is that Lego is at an all-time low in pricing terms, even though it seems expensive.
- pilsetnieks 14y agoTo go even deeper, actually the value of money is at an all-time low.
- speeder 14y agoI saw about 3 weeks ago, this exact same post. I am pretty sure of that.
- ufo 14y agoEverything imported has ridiculous taxes here in Brazil. I wonder if Lego is just "normally" absurdly expensive or if its even worse.
- jacquesm 14y ago> I wrote a web scraping program Better to ask beforehand, many websites are quite happy to hand you data if you ask nicely and your goal is something non-competitive.
- DoubleCluster 14y agoScraping a website is absurdly easy. You can have the data before you'd have finished writing the email.
- user24 14y agoBut it's not very polite to do (someone runs that website that you're hammering), and it doesn't open you up to a conversation that might get you even more access/data than you originally thought was accessible.
- desas 14y agoYou don't have to hammer a website to scrape it. You can write scraper programs to limit the number of HTTP requests per second.
- cantrevealname 14y ago> Better to ask beforehand, many websites are quite happy to hand you data If they say "no", what then? If it was within your rights to scrape the data, and you go ahead and do it anyway, then you're going to (a) look like a jerk, and (b) if the company is litigious, they're going to use this as evidence that you knew what you were doing was wrong. I'm not saying that you shouldn't ask, but pointing out that there are sometimes downsides to asking.
- ecopoesis 14y agoAs long as you obey their robots.txt, who cares? Google is scraping them far more often then your one-off script is going to.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- Tloewald 14y agoI don't have a problem with the price of lego, having — as a child in the 70s — saved my own pocket money to buy lego. The real criticism of lego is that it's gone from being a collection of parts that can make the thing on the cover of the box but also many interesting variations, to something that isn't very malleable. First, lego no longer has a consistent color scheme, so only pieces from one genre go with other pieces of that genre. Next, there's the proliferation of zany specialized parts. I remember getting a lego cargo ship as a kid (the hull was four specialized pieces — bow, stern, and two mid sections and thinking this was awful. Lego doesn't do ship sections any more but many similar things. It's not a get off my lawn thing. I still love lego. But it does seem to have exchanged its DIY charm in the pursuit of merchandising. That said, you can build much better looking models now — just not out of any reasonable selection of pieces.
- estel 14y agoOne of the graphs shows that LEGO have increased the number of different sets they're producing a lot, but I frequently still see boxes of "just bricks" for sale, so it just seems as if they're offering the consumer more choice.
- stoolpigeon 14y agoIt's all rather subjective and I can't say you're wrong. But I have a 9 year old son who loves lego. When he gets a set he builds what is on the box, that usually lasts a couple hours (maybe longer if it is a bigger/more difficult set) and then it gets torn down and put into the bin. Then all kinds of different stuff comes out. He and his friends have a great time with that bin. I do too. I don't think there are many one-off pieces. In fact he gets rather creative repurposing a lot of what might be thought of as specialized pieces. So my experience at this point is that he can do a lot more and be a lot more creative than I could when I was a kid.
- bmj 14y agoI agree, and this is my experience with my own kids. Some sets stick around longer than others (the Quinjet comes to mind), but they are happily building new things with the more specialized pieces from other sets.
- alanctgardner2 14y agoWhat I find amazing in the linked article (from the footnotes[1]) about Lego's financial situation was that every product engineer used to have carte blanche to go out and acquire tons of resin, just to make one set. That, and the effort they went to to service small, local stores. It's both amazing and depressing; obviously it doesn't scale at all, but it really sounds like a kickass corporate culture. Wired had a similar article about people who design Nerf guns; they also had an amazing lab-area dedicated to cobbling together new toys[2]. My point being, toy-making sounds like an awesome job. I wonder if the people who do it are mech/materials/structural engineers, or if it's still a craft? I would totally go and design toys and write Python scripts to model Nerf trajectories for the rest of my life. 1. http://www.strategy-business.com/article/07306?pg=1 http://www.strategy-business.com/article/07306?pg=1 2. http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/how-nerf-became-worlds-best-purveyor-of-big-guns-for-kids/ http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/how-nerf-became-worlds-b...
- wglb 14y agoI have an acquaintance who by profession is a toy designer. She is independent and highly thought of, but all the work is speculative. If your design doesn't make it past the first review, all your work is for naught. She is very creative and bright and is quite resourceful in putting ideas into prototype phase and has had some big wins. But there is a certain stress level associated with any creative endeavor. The situation you are noting is within the big toy companies, and no doubt that they have an awesome job.
- panacea 14y agoWhen swapping a plastic cat in place of a plastic iron makes BBC news because 'social media', I reckon the market is saturated by nostalgia trips and unless you get the gig to design a plastic cat and social media strategy? Nostalgia tralalala
- alanctgardner2 14y agoI can imagine in her case, it would require a very well-rounded individual to design the toy, come up with marketing/branding, build it and pitch it. I was definitely thinking of working in the pipeline at a larger company, like you said, where someone could be more specialized and focus on one aspect of the design. Does she have any interest in moving to a big company? As in, doing spec work until she demonstrates she's competent, and gets hired on? Or is there a career in freelance toy design? Like any self-employment it would be stressful, but you'd be more exciting at parties than the millionth person building FarmBookVille Freemium.
- shocks 14y agoI've always called them Lego. Not Legos. Is that an American thing? (UK citizen here). Just curious.
- koralatov 14y agoI'm in the UK too, and it's always been `Lego' for both singular and plural, so I suspect `Legos' is something they say Across the Pond. I'm pretty sure I've heard it used in American films in the past.
- dalke 14y agoIt's a bit of an annoyance. The company really wants people to say "Lego", not "Legos", out of trademark concerns. Starting in the 1980s, "Susan Williams" from Lego included a message in the catalog saying that they don't use the name "Legos" but instead "Lego bricks or toys." As http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10839/legos-not-lego/47223#47223 http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/10839/legos-not-l... says, it became a shibboleth; if someone said "Legos" then they weren't a true fan. This was in Miami in the 1980s. Others at that link tend to say that "Legos" is an Americanism. My information could easily be insular and outdated.
- Nursie 14y agoLego is definitely, definitely a collective noun like 'sand'. You have a grain of sand or if you have a lot you just have sand. You have a Lego brick or if you have a lot of them you have Lego. I am also British
- dalke 14y agoI agree with the thesis that the presumed expense of Lego sets as an adult is based on an incomplete economic understanding of child experience. I say this by comparing to personal history. The author writes "The 1990s and before were a nostalgic heyday of affordable LEGO sets." but as a teenager in the 1980s, really interested in the new "Expert Builder" sets, with gears, axles, motors, I was astonished at how expensive they would be. I really wanted the Auto Chassis/956, but it took a lot of lawn mowing (and help from my parents) before I could afford it. That's a high-end set, but even in the late 1970s, when my parents found that I liked Lego, it was expensive enough that they would go to garage sales to find old collections rather than buy new ones. Which also meant I had some of the 1960s gears and wheels which really didn't go with the rest of the collection. So I, at least, never regarded Lego as being "affordable." On the other hand, that same collection, augmented, was often used by my sister's kids, making it affordable on an amortized basis.
- gfunk911 14y agoAverage set size has gotten bigger, so the average set costs more, so they seem more expensive. Seems straightforward.
- algorias 14y ago> There is no way LEGO sets have always been this expensive; it is just molded plastic. This is the worst kind of fallacy. First of all, plastic is more expensive than you think when many different pieces in many different colors need to be produced, stored and packaged in a precise manner. Secondly, the cost of development obviously gives huge added value to those pieces of 'just' plastic. What happened to lego prices? The company is figuring out ways to stay viable in the market, that's what happened.
- EliRivers 14y agoIf you read the rest of the article instead of just the first few lines, you'll discover that "There is no way LEGO sets have always been this expensive; it is just molded plastic." is simply part of the conversational setup leading into the discussion that disproves that part of the setup.
- sliverstorm 14y agoDon't forget tolerances. LEGO pieces have pretty sharp tolerances for a toy.
- bonsai80 14y agoProfitable companies charge what the market will pay for their products. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5039567 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5039567
- hugs 14y ago... and leave room for new entrants at the low-end. (This is why I think (someday) the Maker/3d-printer market will be trouble for LEGO (someday).
- gwern 14y agoYour link doesn't work for me: > We've limited requests for old items. If you're running a crawler, you can get this data a lot more easily from http://hnsearch.com/api http://hnsearch.com/api. In any case, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_clone#Legal_challenges http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_clone#Legal_challenges
- bonsai80 14y agoIt was a HN link to this: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3394-how-to-price-something http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3394-how-to-price-something
- tcbawo 14y agoLego is now competing for attention with applications such as Minecraft. It will be interesting to see if pricing trends hold, or whether they attempt to preserve market share by cutting costs. Maybe Minecraft will start to move into the themed application market (Lego Star Wars, etc.).
- DanBC 14y agoOne frustration with Lego is the difficulty with buying it in wholesale quantities and prices. A small charity wants to buy up a lot of Lego (and Duplo) to redistribute to children of poor families. There are some suitable sets, but they're expensive, and you need to buy eye-wateringly huge amounts to get a price break on it. And the second-hand market keeps value, meaning they can't even buy loads from auction / parent websites or car boot / yard sales for redistribution. Still, it's a good idea and they're working the problems out before going any further.
- unthunk 14y agoThey might want to try talking to the local LEGO Users Group/AFOL group and see if the group participates in buying bulk from LEGO and would be willing to order for the charity. The members of the group in my area, NCLUG, jointly and annually order in bulk at a discounted rate. It is a slow process, but saves them a bunch of money.
- fduran 14y agoA little off-topic but I find LEGOs are usually over 50% more expensive in Canada than in the US :-( http://www.amazon.ca/LEGO-Star-Imperial-V-wing-Starfighter/dp/B0063WFEC8/ http://www.amazon.ca/LEGO-Star-Imperial-V-wing-Starfighter/d... http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Star-Imperial-V-wing-Starfighter/dp/B004478GNI/ http://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Star-Imperial-V-wing-Starfighter/...
- gee_totes 14y agoThat is bizarre. I always attributed the higher Canadian prices to the fact that the Canadian dollar was weaker than the US dollar, but nowadays they're about equal.
- Zarathust 14y agoI don't think that the prices are adjusted for inflation. I remember asking my dad for 100$ sets in the 80s, which would amount to gazillions of today's dollars
- trhtrsh 14y ago$200 - $250.
- nhebb 14y agoAs the father of two boys, I'm amazed people are willing to pay these prices. After buying a couple of sets, I refused to do it again. The pieces come apart easily and wind up as vacuum fodder in the carpet. And in my experience, they didn't actually get played with very much. The plain bricks, though, got played with a lot over the years.
- startupstella 14y agothere is a great planet money podcast on this issue: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/12/13/167055503/why-legos-are-so-expensive-and-so-popular http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/12/13/167055503/why-lego...
- cbr 14y agoAlternate hypothesis: pieces are getting smaller. Cost per piece looks like it's falling because we've gone from http://brickset.com/detail/?set=WEETABIX1-1 http://brickset.com/detail/?set=WEETABIX1-1 to http://brickset.com/detail/?set=10223-1 http://brickset.com/detail/?set=10223-1
- Avshalom 14y agoThe article mentions this and also shows that cost per gram has gone down as well.
- cbr 14y agoSmaller pieces are probably also more dense; less internal air.
- MichaelGG 14y agoI agree. I think there may be a dimension that's missing that isn't accurately captures in weight/pieces. I remember the Lego castles of old being large - the ones I see today in shops for $70 are like one piece of a wall. OTOH, it might be that I was physically smaller when I made those memories, so they just seem smaller today.
- T-hawk 14y agoLego prices were my introduction to economics and budgeting as a kid. My parents worked out and explained that you should look for value per brick in the sets when choosing purchases. I learned how to rapidly estimate mental arithmetic largely from wanting to get the most Legos for my allowance. The benchmark was 10 cents per brick (in the mid 80's), sets which worked out below that were good buys, sets above that were a ripoff. Surprisingly, it didn't correlate much with set size, bigger sets weren't always so economical. There were quite a few very small sets in the Space line, things like one figure and a spaceship composed of about thirty pieces for $2.49, which were good buys and I accumulated several. Side note, I actually didn't play with Legos as much as with a different builder set called Construx. Anyone else remember that?
- wiredfool 14y agoThe thing Im noticing with the sets these days is that overall, there are a lot more tiny pieces, variations on a 1x1 or a 1x1 flat, round, or light or something. That can really drive the piece count up on a set. I was just looking at the Fire Plane that my 6 yr old got yesterday (yay, birthday, 5 presents, 3 lego sets), and it's got a ton of little pieces to be the water that fills the plane's hold. (Also, Compare the Tower Bridge @ 4k pieces for $250, vs the Death Star at 3k pieces for $400, though there's some licensing difference there as well)
- Persephone404 14y agoIt would be interesting to see price per brick variation with pack size - those $500 dollar sets have prices per brick under $0.05. The increase in volumes of larger sets could be balancing the increased pricing of small sets, leading to the stable average.
- rhplus 14y agoThe average price per gram chart is interesting, as it shows price fluctuated quite wildly 1980-1995 and then smoothing out to a much more stable curve 1996 onwards. http://therealityprose.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/pricepergram2.gif http://therealityprose.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/priceperg... I have some possible ideas: 1) There's more data in recent years, so the smoothness is just reflecting less variance in the data 2) The author didn't consider currency exchange rates when most production was done in Denmark 3) LEGO got better at managing shock from fluctuations in supply costs (i.e. buying futures in petroleum) 4) LEGO got better at managing production costs with more larger, cheaper factories (central Europe, Mexico) 5) It's harder for the supplier to experiment wildly with retail costs because everyone (distributor, retailer, consumer) has access to year-on-year comparison information now (no need to look up last year's prices in a huge catalog)
- ianb 14y agoWhere I think this analysis is wrong is using the general inflation number. If your inflation basket of goods was full of products similar to Lego – plastic toys – the real price of Lego would not appear to be going down. Well, "wrong" isn't perhaps the right word, but it doesn't address the perceived price of Legos in a world where plastic goods are constantly going down in price relative to other goods.
- waqf 14y agoExactly. Pace the article, the reason that Lego seems expensive to us is that other toys are now much cheaper (in real terms) than they were in the '70s. If you corrected for "toy inflation" instead of "general inflation" this would be apparent.
- danielhughes 14y agoA little off topic but last weekend I had the privileged of watching an FLL (First Lego League) event. This is a robotics competition for kids ages 9-16. And it's AMAZING. The energy from the kids and parents was exhilarating. Details are here http://firstlegoleague.org/ http://firstlegoleague.org/. There are also a lot of videos from the competitions posted on YouTube (search First Lego League). If you have children I definitely encourage you to introduce them to FLL. And if you don't have kids consider volunteering to coach one of the teams.
- schreiaj 14y agoAnd if you are an adult and want to get involved volunteer! I've volunteered at several levels ranging from helping a local team all the way up to judging at their World Festival and it's probably the best reminder of why I went into engineering. Plus, hearing a student be excited to explain the concepts of torque is just awe inspiring.
- TorKlingberg 14y agoI think any perception that LEGO has become more expensive is because other toys have become cheaper. Or more correctly, cheap low quality toys have taken a larger part of the market.
- joering2 14y agoUnfortunately, with the 3D printers on the raise, the faith of a LEGO(r) brick is doomed. In the near future, there will be printers especially designed to print small LEGO pieces. Of course none of those 3DP will market as "print your own LEGO bricks", but kids will figure this one quickly. It will work a bit like a baking machine. Turn it on, leave it overnight and bunch of blocks roll out when you wake up in the morning. theLegoBrickBay.se will arise where kids will be able to download any STL file for any brick, LEGO set, minifig, etc, and LEGO with their tiny revenues (comparing to MAFIAA) will not be able to shut down the site. Even if, arguendo, price of that printer will be $2,000 or more, its a cost of couple StarWars sets and any parent understanding the basics of financials will go with "print your own" instead of "keep buying new sets" thought. Material will be cheap and reusable. After you are done with playing or simply dont need so many 1x4 bricks in grey color, you will put them all in a "melter" and within couple of hours all your grey bricks will become one solid cartridge ready to be used in printing new bricks, trees, horses, flowers, or whatever you want to. You will see this coming in <> 5 years. Whatever the future holds, its probably wise NOT TO buy LEGO stock nowadays.
- kejadlen 14y agoThat seems unlikely to me, given the precision required to make a LEGO brick that's actually fun to play with. I bet it will be quite a while before we get commodity 3D printers that can produce bricks that consistently hold together and come apart.
- emddudley 14y agoI'm not holding my breath. There is no way that home 3D printers will be able to maintain the same manufacturing tolerances as the LEGO factories, definitely not within the next 5 years.
- tlrobinson 14y agoI agree. On the other hand, 3D printing itself could displace LEGO as a creativity outlet for kids. But there's something about physically snapping blocks together and experimenting that couldn't be replaced by CAD software.
- michalu 14y agoThe question should be what happened to the US dollar not lego. Lego is manufactured in Denmark, where they managed to spare themselves from several rounds of quantitative easing. The author could really spare herself all the time and effort and just post a chart of dollar. He/she took it from the wrong end.
- bostonpete 14y agoHow does this explain the trend of legos getting cheaper?
- DannoHung 14y agoThe one thing I'm thinking is this: Didn't the pieces used to be a bit bigger? Like, not the studs, just the number of studs on each piece? Seems like a lot of pieces now are 1 and 2 stud-ers.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jyap 14y agoI'll tell you what happened to LEGO. They stayed in business.