Richard Siegel and Blanca Gudino, 39, were arrested on Wednesday after detectives found more than 2,800 LEGO boxes at Siegel's Long Beach, California, home.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I remember seeing something that said that while the price of a Lego set has gone up. The actual price per brick hasn’t.
There’s also licensing that needs to be considered.