I can certainly appreciate the precision of Lego pieces, as I too have mixed and matched incredibly old pieces from my parents's era (1970s) with more recent (2000s) stuff. And I think the OP did a decent job collecting precision data for the article.
However I find the post title to be misleading as surely there's a whole lot more that goes into the actual market valuation of a Lego kit. What about the type and quality of plastic used, the rest of the manufacturing process, quality control, the overhead of having to design new kits regularly, etc? Building Lego kits is more than just shipping cheap generic plastic widgets from China straight to store shelves.
For what it's worth, I've found Lego designs to be consistently excellent, with well thought-out part selection, part placement, structural integrity, and so on, in everything from the small $10 kid sets to the $300 Mindstorms NXT kits, so the price has never really bothered me.
In addition, walk down a toy aisle some time. Lego sets aren't cheap but relative to toys in general "legos are expensive" feels more like truthiness to me than truth.
Relative to the cost of manufacturing, all toys are highway robbery. You probably don't want to know what the wholesale costs on di ecast toy cars are, for example (it's effectively zero).
But that's how the economy works, there's a profit margin at every step. If there wasn't people wouldn't sell things or do things.
Profit has little to do with it. Price is determined by supply and demand. Legos are expensive because there is a strong demand, and through branding Lego has made them into a non-fungible good over which they have a monopoly on supply.
The same is true for most toys. Kids don't ask for "dolls" they ask for "Barbies" or "American Girls." These companies use the resulting pricing power to set prices to maximize profits, which is a point higher than it would be if they were competing to supply fungible "dolls."
The financials are similar to the food conglomerates (P&G, Kraft, Unilever, Mars etc.). The businesses are hit-based, and each firm usually has one or two very profitable lines and a lot of lines that lose money or break even.
Low manufacturing costs but very high user acquisition costs. Toy companies rank in the top 10 on advertising dollars spent (after automotive, food, pharma, department stores, fast food, telephony, alcohol). Mattel has $0.7B of net income on $6.2B of revenue. But if you took the Barie and Hot Wheels businesses on their own, the margins there may be 40%+, but subsidiaries like The Learning Company are losing hundreds of millions per year.
The Lego Group[0] has 0.55B euro net income on $2.5B euro of revenue. A better margin than Mattel, but a smaller business. Lego also has new release lines that they depend on to continue growth. For eg. the Star Wars tie-up, Lord of the Rings, etc. some of these work, some don't. They need to keep giving buyers a reason to come back and purchase more - which is why Lego has gone from generic buckets of bricks to specific sets with instructions that you assemble once and don't disassemble.
Not mentioned in OP is that until a year ago Lego had a strong world-wide patent. It has only been the last 12 months that competitors have released similar sets of bricks which are forcing more competition on the company. Lego would be happy to hear that when I took my 3 year old niece shopping she only wanted the Lego brand Lego, and in that case only the sets that were cross-branded with characters she recognized (I think it was Dora the Explorer).
If you want to find out more, the largest toy co's are Mattel, Hasbro, Bandai, Lego, Tiger. They are all large co's and the other 4 besides Lego have suites of brand names and subsidiaries.
According to the wikipedia page, the last Lego patent expired in 1989. There may have been some design patents that expired more recently perhaps (assuming wikipedia is correct) ?
My experience of the Lego knockoff products has been that they use inferior plastic that isn't quite as stiff as the Lego formulation and they don't get the internal moulding right either, so the parts don't lock together in quite the right way: they don't have that secure 'click together' feeling that Lego proper has.
Not really. At this time, 3D printing is too low quality to produce something with tolerances remotely close to what you want. I've seen some 3D printed Legos but the quality is not good.
However, the market for rare pieces will first see counterfeits, and when the counterfeits get good enough, collapse back to the marginal cost of ABS + production.
Interesting article, but did nothing to explain the cost, it merely assumed that tight measurements means they would be that expensive or why they wouldn't keep getting better and better at making them such that the cost would go down over time.
There was a reddit comment the other day answering the exact same question. The person worked in a factory that cast plastic pieces for Lego as well as other companies. He said that Lego had much, much tighter tolerances, that they threw away many more pieces which weren't made to spec, and that they required much more expensive and frequently replaced molds.
Would it be legal to make compatible bricks which are called differently? If so, why is nobody doing it? If not, there is your answer why LEGO is expensive; to quote the dude from Idiocracy, "ohhh, I like money".
Nice! But note Lego tried their best to fight them.. instead of welcoming friends and competition in this huge undertaking of measuring bricks correctly. Those Lego guys must really have figured out some hi-tech stuff there, so much is obvious; and it must weigh hard on their shoulders to not be able to share that with the world through a medium other than selling colored plastic blocks :(
I don't know about your specific examples but see http://www.brickarms.com for one. Lego doesn't make guns so they filled that void. I believe it was originally just a guy in his home/garage.
I started the Bitbeam project because I was prototyping some things in LEGO, but when it came time to figure out how to make many of them, I wasn't too excited about the cost of LEGO... but I was happy with my LEGO design. So I decided to port LEGO dimensions to materials that are easier and cheapier to source myself.
> Nice! But note Lego tried their best to fight them..
They did, and this was actually pretty hypocritical of lego because lego started out copying a UK design, the "Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Bricks".
On another note, the lego brand is usually explained as 'play well' in Danish, but this is much more along the lines of 'goods to play with' (like in the German spielzeug or the Dutch speelgoed). Of course that doesn't isn't nearly as good marketingwise hence the 'play well' myth.
> the lego brand is usually explained as 'play well' in Danish, but this is much more along the lines of 'goods to play with' (like in the German spielzeug or the Dutch speelgoed). Of course that doesn't isn't nearly as good marketingwise hence the 'play well' myth.
Source?
While I don't speak Dutch, speelgoed literally translates to "toys". Several google searches on the etymology of leg godt didn't turn up any alternative definitions or connotations.
Yes, it literally translates to toys, but it is also a combination of "speel" which literally translates to "play" and "goed" which translates to either "goods" (most likely candidate here as origin for the combination that means "toys") or "good" (as in, well).
IOW, the parent is correct that "speelgoed" pretty much means "goods to play with". I have no knowledge about the Danish leg godt story, though.
Do you speak Danish? I do, and "leg godt" (which is what LEGO stands for) cannot be translated into "goods to play with". "Play well" is an accurate translation.
They're also made of a different kind of plastic - they don't look or feel as smooth and shiny. There are a number of Lego knockoff brands, but I don't think any of them measure up to Lego.
"More expensive to make" doesn't necessarily justify "more expensive to buy". One would need to quantify how much more expensive the tighter tolerances and better molds actually make a package of bricks and compare the resulting margin to that of other plastic toys.
I worked for a toy design firm during the mid-90s. Though I did software, I managed to learn a bit about this stuff (osmosis, helping with CAD/CAM, eavesdropping, etc).
Tool die design for injection modeling is an art, a craft.
Lego's die tools are smaller, meaning they hold many fewer parts. They had more supply channels. So the parts would be formed more uniformly. I forget what they did to ensure the parts cooled more uniformly.
At the time, Mega Blocks were far inferior. The were using larger dies, more parts per die. So their bricks weren't as uniform. We used to bring in lots of other toys for inspection and play testing. I once assembled a Mega Block tank set. It just wouldn't stay together, with ill fitted pieces fighting against each other. The differences weren't even visible to the eye. Lego bricks just had better heft and fit.
Also at the time, and I imagine is still the case, Lego and Playmobile were the gold standards for plastic molding toys.
I'm just saying that you can't claim a price differential is justified by a cost differential without actually doing the math and providing X% cost differential ~+ X% price differential.
Because absent those being equal, we have to consider that there are more factors and without context we can't even determine the relevance of the cost factor.
In my view, the price differential exists simply because it can. People will pay $10, $20, $50 or more for a box of Legos. They grumble, sure. But they still buy them. I buy them because they work well, they're partnered with brands and properties that people also really like and they execute well in the tone and context of those brands.
But I'm of the mind that prices for all non-commodities are set by willingness to pay and costs are a function of how much profit corporations needs to justify their investment.
Ergo, that Lego spends more to make the pieces well is a consideration toward their profit margin. Not the price.
I don't know about the current market for building blocks. But my guess is that Lego is benefiting from monopolist pricing. This is just a guess; I don't really have good knowledge of pricing and products that exist in this category.
If there are less well-known brands, with possibly lower quality, that sell for lower prices, Lego's continued success would argue that these competing products aren't perfect substitutes. In other words, Lego extracts a premium for its unique attributes: Quality, the prestige of the brand name, exclusive licenses for movie-themed sets, or patented brick designs might be some of the fences that could be protecting their market share.
Economics 101: If it's easy to build businesses that replicate your goods and services, then competitors will enter the market and bid each other down until prices reach levels that make profits disappear. (If someone's making a profit, then someone else can and will bid a little lower and gain market share in exchange for a smaller per-unit profit.)
If Lego has a unique success formula that other companies can't duplicate for whatever reason, then they can act as a monopoly and charge a price that maximizes unit profit times volume.
So... the article... Hypothesizing that it's primarily due to tight tolerances. Shows that they're indeed tight, and have remained similar to legos made 40 years ago. However, similar to what appear to be "random cheap dollar store building blocks." Best sentence "Honestly, I don’t know much about plastic manufacturing – but the LEGO blocks appear to be created from harder plastic." - This is why they made interviews. Really wasn't so interesting and didn't answer the question.
Lego is ABS which is relitively expensive while most competing bricks are made from polystyrene.
The tolerence is the key thing though - we've got a reasonable selection of lego here as well as a few sets of Mega Blocks, Kreo and the odd chinese brand, and there's a huge difference in fit between brands with none coming close to Lego. Try watching your kid build something only to be unable to play with it because it keeps falling apart because the brick fit is sloppy
"Every single lego brick made has to fit together perfectly with every other lego brick EVER MADE. So the piece you get in your new super star destroyer has to snap together perfectly with a piece from a model house made in 1970. To achieve this, they run size tolerances on the order of .0005" "
Interesting to see how low the standard deviation is. Compare that to K'NEX (I love K'NEX by the way) where a not-so-right angle is commonplace. Sometimes the rods have plastic bulges at the ends which prevent them from making a good connection in a female(?) piece.
LEGOs, however, have always fit perfectly, in my experience.
I remember that from my childhood - K'NEX were fun, but always took what seemed like a lot of effort to put together. Similar to pulling apart Lego pieces without a brick separator.
We have a good supply of both Lego and K'Nex here. I agree with your comment on K'Nex manufacturing but add that it doesn't really matter. K'Nex seem designed to connect well and holdtogether well despite this (I'm talking about the rods/joiners, not their stupid Lego-like bits which are just horrid)
K'Nex and Lego are different and my kids play wth both about equally I'd say. They get used to build different stuff and they're both awesome :)
K'Nex rock my world. About 6 years back, when I turned 18, I finally ordered the 'back of the catalogue' 3000+ piece Big Ball Factory set on eBay, after spending hours imagining how cool it would be to have it back when I was little.
It was awesome. My mates and I still build it occasionally.
Impressive: an article about price without the word "demand" or "supply". Or about the standard for "expensive". This could have been interesting, but didn't quite get there.
Ditto Thailand. I was looking at a set the other day that was just under $1k US. It was a very large set but still one thousand dollars is a lot of money for a plastic building toy. This was a static set too, not anything with motors or controllers.
Remember that Australian prices include 10% GST which the US prices won't have. Similarly, the UK will probably have 17.5% (I think) VAT. Still much pricier, but a shade less so.
At least there's the pseudo-excuse for the increased price of actually shipping physical goods, as opposed to the argument for digital downloads which is "Hey, look over there! scamper"
What's more expensive, a toy that gets used once on Christmas day and then gets discarded that costs $10, or a lego set that costs $50 and that gets passed down three generations or more?
Some of the lego my kids are playing with went through this route: my uncle, me, my brother, my son, my brothers kids. The oldest pieces I've got are from the early 60's, they have a different formulation and didn't keep their shape as good, but anything produced after roughly 1965 is as good as new today.
Some exceptions I've seen are cracks where the hands insert into the arms of minifigures and discoloring, particularly on white bricks. And of course there are missing pieces, but that's not a quality issue.
This summer I bought a set I grew up playing with (#6345 Aerial Acrobats). It sits on my shelf for now but I'm sure I'll play with it with my future children.
My son is playing with the bigger Lego pieces at the moment (Duplo), and I have the impression that they wear out a bit. What I mean is that they won't stick together as tightly as in the beginning. For example we bought a used set from ebay that includes a crane, and the crane is very prone to toppling over because it doesn't stick to the base very much anymore.
Anyway: what is the best way to clean LEGO? I've been wondering about that for a while :-)
A dishwasher is the best method I've found for cleaning Lego.
I suspect that duplo is made to be a lot less grippy as it's designed for younger children with much less dexterity. I'd imagine that this means that its deterioration is quicker. Also it gets chewed more.
My boys have Duplo, Lego, and Mindstorms part-recovery parties regularly, and we just chuck everything in the dish washer. Things fit surprisingly better after that!
My son is also starting to enjoy Duplo, he's mostly using my old sets from about 1986 and they stick together really well. For christmas some relatives bought him a new duplo set and it is noticeably less sticky. I suspect they're trying to make it easier for very young children to casually play with, but it comes at the expense of being able to make the really tall structures that kids inevitably want to build.
My hunch is that if Duplo was built out of ABS like the standard Lego bricks, they would be a lot harder, a lot heavier, and an order of magnitude more expensive. The softness of the cheaper plastic, as mentioned above, is a lot more friendly to toddlers as well.
My son had the ultimate Duplo collection. A few push trains. The electric locomative. Lots of extra track, including gates, switches, cross overs, bridge. A farm set. An airplane.
Just creating a new track layout each time was huge fun. Teaching him planning and problem solving.
We'd play "keep away", where you try to use the switches to divert the locomotive to crash his each other's push train while avoiding getting hit. Huge fun.
We'd play "farm riot" where the farm animals break out of the zoo and eat every one. Kind of like a zombie apocalypse.
We'd play "ValuJet!" where the plane would fall out of the sky. Not very complicated. You hold the jet up, swoosh around a bit, yell "ValuJet!" and then crash the plane into the people, trains and buildings below.
We'd play "Amtrak!". That's when the train approaches a crossing gate. Also pretty simple. You stuff a lot of people onto a train, yell "Amtrak!" and then hit the car stuck in the crossing gate, derail the train, everyone dies.
Duplo trains are superior to those crappy wooden Brio in every way.
Our Duplos got more play time than any Legos since, even the Star Wars sets. I just passed them down; it was super hard to let go.
Just to add some details on your parts from the 60s, Lego began switching from Cellulose Acetate to ABS plastic in 1963 and the switch was complete by 1966, so your estimation of part quality during that period seems to be spot on.
1:15 Some indeed preach Christ even of envy and strife; and some also
of good will: 1:16 The one preach Christ of contention, not sincerely,
supposing to add affliction to my bonds: 1:17 But the other of love,
knowing that I am set for the defence of the gospel.
1:18 What then? notwithstanding, every way, whether in pretence, or in
truth, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will
rejoice.
1:19 For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your
prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, 1:20 According
to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be
ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ
shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death.
1:21 For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
----
2nd time God said magnifying glass! Maybe, He likes microscopes. Awe. (tear) God wants to show-off His creations.
God says...
dwelleth lowly ceasest facts tcosa11 demonstrated
I have a way to specify a statement to be done periodically in SimStructure. He's also talking about my budget program with charity and which has periodic entries. Nevermind.
----
The nasty party?
God says...
man to put away his wife? tempting him.
10:3 And he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you?
10:4 And they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and
to put her away.
10:5 And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of your
heart he wrote you this precept.
10:6 But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and
female.
10:7 For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and
cleave to his wife; 10:8 And they twain shall be one flesh: so then
they are no more twain, but one flesh.
10:9 What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
----
Europe and Britain?
God says...
2:13 He took up also the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and went
back, and stood by the bank of Jordan; 2:14 And he took the mantle of
Elijah that fell from him, and smote the waters, and said, Where is
the LORD God of Elijah? and when he also had smitten the waters, they
parted hither and thither: and Elisha went over.
2:15 And when the sons of the prophets which were to view at Jericho
saw him, they said, The spirit of Elijah doth rest on Elisha. And they
came to meet him, and bowed themselves to the ground before him.
2:16 And they said unto him, Behold now, there be with thy servants
fifty strong men; let them go, we pray thee, and seek thy master: lest
peradventure the Spirit of the LORD hath taken him up, and cast him
upon some mountain, or into some valley. And he said, Ye shall not
send.
----
Conner? God likes Highlander. Awwe.
God says...
meanings woundest letters Emperor reverence nine-and-twentieth
occasioned met Okilydokily It_grieves_me partaker corporeally
carest Free What Bride recovery swollen church multiplying
friends flowing shade fetters rage sacrifices betrothed
Accept noon forehead Galatians fifty between evidently
endures Schools prosperity jeering
I too have a fair bit of Lego from when I was a kid in the 60s/70s that my kids play with today. It's worth noting that it was (relatively) expensive even back then.
My observations on the quality of my old pieces is that they are generally excellent and certainly still usable, but:
- Some of the white pieces have discoloured quite noticably
- Some of the white plates (but interestingly no other colours) have deteriorated noticably
- The fit between pieces seems to be a lot tighter, so that prising pieces apart can be a challenge.
But really it would be churlish to overstate these issues - for this stuff to still be usable after 40 years is a testament to the quality of engineering that has gone into it. We have acquired bits of the various "knock off" Lego-esque brands and the inferior quality of these is immediately apparent.
I passed down the same older Space set that was mentioned in the article, along with a few others, to my son, and now it's mixed in with mostly newer Legos. The pieces are indistinguishable except for the unique pieces like the amber windshield. Maybe something changed from the 60s/70s to the early 80s when I was playing with Legos, but I don't see any degradation.
Comparing the deviation of wooden planks to Lego is meaningless. Planks have a heterogeneous internal structure, the structure of each plank is unique - we can even see the grain in the photograph - and wood is more dimensionally sensitive to changes in environmental conditions than Lego.
My brother and about half of all people in my area in Austria work for a company called ENGEL. This company produces Injection Molding Machines (EN-Wiki: http://goo.gl/2fxjB, DE-Wiki: http://goo.gl/NS9F8). This company is also main provider for Tupperware and LEGO. One machine cost around 1Mio. Euro and the mold has always more or less the same price than the machine. That means that every product created with Injection Molding should have a very high quality because of the price and the effort you have to put in to create a mold. The only reason, my bother says, why some products have a bad quality is, the plastic material is not as good as the one from LEGO.
Coming from Billund (where LEGO is made and invented) ... having friends and parents who worked +25 years at LEGO. My dad having worked both with construction and design of the plastic molds for all those years. I can say that the only reason LEGO is more expensive, is because its a high quality product made in Europe (mostly Denmark) and not in China.
I just wanted to point out that while this was true in the past, a number of the lower volume Lego parts (minifigs, animals, etc) are actually now manufactured in China.
110 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadHowever I find the post title to be misleading as surely there's a whole lot more that goes into the actual market valuation of a Lego kit. What about the type and quality of plastic used, the rest of the manufacturing process, quality control, the overhead of having to design new kits regularly, etc? Building Lego kits is more than just shipping cheap generic plastic widgets from China straight to store shelves.
For what it's worth, I've found Lego designs to be consistently excellent, with well thought-out part selection, part placement, structural integrity, and so on, in everything from the small $10 kid sets to the $300 Mindstorms NXT kits, so the price has never really bothered me.
But that's how the economy works, there's a profit margin at every step. If there wasn't people wouldn't sell things or do things.
The same is true for most toys. Kids don't ask for "dolls" they ask for "Barbies" or "American Girls." These companies use the resulting pricing power to set prices to maximize profits, which is a point higher than it would be if they were competing to supply fungible "dolls."
Low manufacturing costs but very high user acquisition costs. Toy companies rank in the top 10 on advertising dollars spent (after automotive, food, pharma, department stores, fast food, telephony, alcohol). Mattel has $0.7B of net income on $6.2B of revenue. But if you took the Barie and Hot Wheels businesses on their own, the margins there may be 40%+, but subsidiaries like The Learning Company are losing hundreds of millions per year.
The Lego Group[0] has 0.55B euro net income on $2.5B euro of revenue. A better margin than Mattel, but a smaller business. Lego also has new release lines that they depend on to continue growth. For eg. the Star Wars tie-up, Lord of the Rings, etc. some of these work, some don't. They need to keep giving buyers a reason to come back and purchase more - which is why Lego has gone from generic buckets of bricks to specific sets with instructions that you assemble once and don't disassemble.
Not mentioned in OP is that until a year ago Lego had a strong world-wide patent. It has only been the last 12 months that competitors have released similar sets of bricks which are forcing more competition on the company. Lego would be happy to hear that when I took my 3 year old niece shopping she only wanted the Lego brand Lego, and in that case only the sets that were cross-branded with characters she recognized (I think it was Dora the Explorer).
If you want to find out more, the largest toy co's are Mattel, Hasbro, Bandai, Lego, Tiger. They are all large co's and the other 4 besides Lego have suites of brand names and subsidiaries.
[0] Lego Group 2012 financials - http://cache.lego.com/r/aboutus/-/media/About%20Us/Annual%20...
My experience of the Lego knockoff products has been that they use inferior plastic that isn't quite as stiff as the Lego formulation and they don't get the internal moulding right either, so the parts don't lock together in quite the right way: they don't have that secure 'click together' feeling that Lego proper has.
http://bo-ne.ws/forum/read.php?7,32149,32149
https://plus.google.com/+ChrisPirillo/posts/Df3JbGjdNe4
Apparently they prolonged their IP protection with a trademark, which was dissolved in court last year:
http://boingboing.net/2005/11/17/judge-to-lego-your-p.html
http://boingboing.net/2010/09/15/lego-cannot-be-trade.html
Not that it matters, it just always feels just out of reach.
Your non-programmer background is most likely an asset on HN, simply because you can offer a point of view that most others here can't.
You can melt a Lego, use it as a paste, and form something else. If you know the right way to cook it, of course .. and Lego do.
So, there's that.
Looks like the 6-year old you is going to get a robot, finally, to do all the assembly. ;)
I can't find it at the moment, unfortunately...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Brands#Lego_lawsuits
* A Lego compatible case, that can accept an Arduino board.
* A range of Lego compatible sensors and actuators
* Other components following the theme of integrating open-source with Lego.
* and so on...
---
Edit: formatting
I started the Bitbeam project because I was prototyping some things in LEGO, but when it came time to figure out how to make many of them, I wasn't too excited about the cost of LEGO... but I was happy with my LEGO design. So I decided to port LEGO dimensions to materials that are easier and cheapier to source myself.
Some that are blessed by Lego: http://www.hitechnic.com/products
... and some that are not: http://www.mindsensors.com/ http://www.techno-stuff.com/
Also, this exists, targeted at the education market: http://www.vernier.com/products/interfaces/bta-nxt/
They did, and this was actually pretty hypocritical of lego because lego started out copying a UK design, the "Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Bricks".
On another note, the lego brand is usually explained as 'play well' in Danish, but this is much more along the lines of 'goods to play with' (like in the German spielzeug or the Dutch speelgoed). Of course that doesn't isn't nearly as good marketingwise hence the 'play well' myth.
It's "legetøj" in Danish though, so I'm not sure how that becomes Leg go'. I've never heard "godt" in danish used for "goods".
Source?
While I don't speak Dutch, speelgoed literally translates to "toys". Several google searches on the etymology of leg godt didn't turn up any alternative definitions or connotations.
IOW, the parent is correct that "speelgoed" pretty much means "goods to play with". I have no knowledge about the Danish leg godt story, though.
Source: Native Dutch speaker
Tool die design for injection modeling is an art, a craft.
Lego's die tools are smaller, meaning they hold many fewer parts. They had more supply channels. So the parts would be formed more uniformly. I forget what they did to ensure the parts cooled more uniformly.
At the time, Mega Blocks were far inferior. The were using larger dies, more parts per die. So their bricks weren't as uniform. We used to bring in lots of other toys for inspection and play testing. I once assembled a Mega Block tank set. It just wouldn't stay together, with ill fitted pieces fighting against each other. The differences weren't even visible to the eye. Lego bricks just had better heft and fit.
Also at the time, and I imagine is still the case, Lego and Playmobile were the gold standards for plastic molding toys.
I'm just saying that you can't claim a price differential is justified by a cost differential without actually doing the math and providing X% cost differential ~+ X% price differential.
Because absent those being equal, we have to consider that there are more factors and without context we can't even determine the relevance of the cost factor.
In my view, the price differential exists simply because it can. People will pay $10, $20, $50 or more for a box of Legos. They grumble, sure. But they still buy them. I buy them because they work well, they're partnered with brands and properties that people also really like and they execute well in the tone and context of those brands.
But I'm of the mind that prices for all non-commodities are set by willingness to pay and costs are a function of how much profit corporations needs to justify their investment.
Ergo, that Lego spends more to make the pieces well is a consideration toward their profit margin. Not the price.
This might also be why they keep coming up with new shapes for blocks.
ps.: longevity assumes one doesn't use ones teeth to pry apart blocks.
If there are less well-known brands, with possibly lower quality, that sell for lower prices, Lego's continued success would argue that these competing products aren't perfect substitutes. In other words, Lego extracts a premium for its unique attributes: Quality, the prestige of the brand name, exclusive licenses for movie-themed sets, or patented brick designs might be some of the fences that could be protecting their market share.
Economics 101: If it's easy to build businesses that replicate your goods and services, then competitors will enter the market and bid each other down until prices reach levels that make profits disappear. (If someone's making a profit, then someone else can and will bid a little lower and gain market share in exchange for a smaller per-unit profit.)
If Lego has a unique success formula that other companies can't duplicate for whatever reason, then they can act as a monopoly and charge a price that maximizes unit profit times volume.
The tolerence is the key thing though - we've got a reasonable selection of lego here as well as a few sets of Mega Blocks, Kreo and the odd chinese brand, and there's a huge difference in fit between brands with none coming close to Lego. Try watching your kid build something only to be unable to play with it because it keeps falling apart because the brick fit is sloppy
"Every single lego brick made has to fit together perfectly with every other lego brick EVER MADE. So the piece you get in your new super star destroyer has to snap together perfectly with a piece from a model house made in 1970. To achieve this, they run size tolerances on the order of .0005" "
LEGOs, however, have always fit perfectly, in my experience.
K'Nex and Lego are different and my kids play wth both about equally I'd say. They get used to build different stuff and they're both awesome :)
It was awesome. My mates and I still build it occasionally.
As a consolation prize, I offer: http://gizmodo.com/5019797/everything-you-always-wanted-to-k... Also light on analysis, but full of fun trivia.
Average Brick Price
So yes, the price is almost double in Australia what it is in the US.Average Licenced Brick Price
If the link works, you can see all my numbers on my Facebook page: http://rick.ph/lego_price_analysisAt least there's the pseudo-excuse for the increased price of actually shipping physical goods, as opposed to the argument for digital downloads which is "Hey, look over there! scamper"
Some of the lego my kids are playing with went through this route: my uncle, me, my brother, my son, my brothers kids. The oldest pieces I've got are from the early 60's, they have a different formulation and didn't keep their shape as good, but anything produced after roughly 1965 is as good as new today.
This summer I bought a set I grew up playing with (#6345 Aerial Acrobats). It sits on my shelf for now but I'm sure I'll play with it with my future children.
Anyway: what is the best way to clean LEGO? I've been wondering about that for a while :-)
There seem to be some pro tips on the Lego StackExchange.
http://drj11.wordpress.com/2012/05/17/bosch-the-constructor/
I suspect that duplo is made to be a lot less grippy as it's designed for younger children with much less dexterity. I'd imagine that this means that its deterioration is quicker. Also it gets chewed more.
Just creating a new track layout each time was huge fun. Teaching him planning and problem solving.
We'd play "keep away", where you try to use the switches to divert the locomotive to crash his each other's push train while avoiding getting hit. Huge fun.
We'd play "farm riot" where the farm animals break out of the zoo and eat every one. Kind of like a zombie apocalypse.
We'd play "ValuJet!" where the plane would fall out of the sky. Not very complicated. You hold the jet up, swoosh around a bit, yell "ValuJet!" and then crash the plane into the people, trains and buildings below.
We'd play "Amtrak!". That's when the train approaches a crossing gate. Also pretty simple. You stuff a lot of people onto a train, yell "Amtrak!" and then hit the car stuck in the crossing gate, derail the train, everyone dies.
Duplo trains are superior to those crappy wooden Brio in every way.
Our Duplos got more play time than any Legos since, even the Star Wars sets. I just passed them down; it was super hard to let go.
What kind of toy would He suggest?
God says...
1:15 Some indeed preach Christ even of envy and strife; and some also of good will: 1:16 The one preach Christ of contention, not sincerely, supposing to add affliction to my bonds: 1:17 But the other of love, knowing that I am set for the defence of the gospel.
1:18 What then? notwithstanding, every way, whether in pretence, or in truth, Christ is preached; and I therein do rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.
1:19 For I know that this shall turn to my salvation through your prayer, and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, 1:20 According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death.
1:21 For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
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2nd time God said magnifying glass! Maybe, He likes microscopes. Awe. (tear) God wants to show-off His creations.
God says... dwelleth lowly ceasest facts tcosa11 demonstrated
http://tsakalis.faculty.asu.edu/
God wants me to show off SimStructure maybe.
What's good to look at in the body, God?
God says... etext90 languages outrageous peculiarly charity periodic sleepest Guinea burnt caught Good speaks a_likely_story receiving knocketh wills displace feedeth accepted damnable mentioned Bridal reproachful sciences ministers Etexts impossible Power marked assailed fires chaste stirrest Simplicianus ETEXTS requitest daunting to_infinity_and_beyond employ
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I have a way to specify a statement to be done periodically in SimStructure. He's also talking about my budget program with charity and which has periodic entries. Nevermind.
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The nasty party?
God says...
man to put away his wife? tempting him.
10:3 And he answered and said unto them, What did Moses command you? 10:4 And they said, Moses suffered to write a bill of divorcement, and to put her away.
10:5 And Jesus answered and said unto them, For the hardness of your heart he wrote you this precept.
10:6 But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female.
10:7 For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife; 10:8 And they twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh.
10:9 What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
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Europe and Britain?
God says...
2:13 He took up also the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and went back, and stood by the bank of Jordan; 2:14 And he took the mantle of Elijah that fell from him, and smote the waters, and said, Where is the LORD God of Elijah? and when he also had smitten the waters, they parted hither and thither: and Elisha went over.
2:15 And when the sons of the prophets which were to view at Jericho saw him, they said, The spirit of Elijah doth rest on Elisha. And they came to meet him, and bowed themselves to the ground before him.
2:16 And they said unto him, Behold now, there be with thy servants fifty strong men; let them go, we pray thee, and seek thy master: lest peradventure the Spirit of the LORD hath taken him up, and cast him upon some mountain, or into some valley. And he said, Ye shall not send.
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Conner? God likes Highlander. Awwe.
God says... meanings woundest letters Emperor reverence nine-and-twentieth occasioned met Okilydokily It_grieves_me partaker corporeally carest Free What Bride recovery swollen church multiplying friends flowing shade fetters rage sacrifices betrothed Accept noon forehead Galatians fifty between evidently endures Schools prosperity jeering
Tell us something about William the Conquerer?
God says... souls wasting downward hear pride-swollen believed Presence lawyers virtue deceived pitiful continently fruitless inferior began models straitness drank cellar interpreted boldly staff content troublesome mirthful desires precedes beggar-man summing fluidnes...
My observations on the quality of my old pieces is that they are generally excellent and certainly still usable, but:
- Some of the white pieces have discoloured quite noticably
- Some of the white plates (but interestingly no other colours) have deteriorated noticably
- The fit between pieces seems to be a lot tighter, so that prising pieces apart can be a challenge.
But really it would be churlish to overstate these issues - for this stuff to still be usable after 40 years is a testament to the quality of engineering that has gone into it. We have acquired bits of the various "knock off" Lego-esque brands and the inferior quality of these is immediately apparent.
This is the location of their headquarter http://goo.gl/maps/9EOIk http://www.engelglobal.com/