CopMike

Questions and Concerns for TLG

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I have a question regarding how accessory is attached to minifigures. My focus are Star Wars minifigures, and accessories that are attached to the neck.

The usual way (I think since Classic Space) is 1) to attach the accessory to the neck and 2) to attach the head to the neck. The trade-off is that minifigs wearing accessory are a bit taller than minifigs not wearing accessory.

My question is if anyone ever thought of making the hole in the accessory a bit bigger in order 1) to attach the accessory to the head and than 2) to attach the head to the neck.

For some accessories (such as handkerchiefs) is done exactly that way. But depending on what type of accessory it is, that may not be ideal. The fig could go from looking like their neck is too long to looking like they don't have a neck at all. Additionally, raising those accessories could make them cease to fit with existing helmets/hairpieces (for instance, many helmets are sized to fit snugly against the minifig jetpack the way it fits now).

That's not to say this wouldn't work for some accessories, but there are pros and cons of each, and I don't think having them attach the way you suggest would be appropriate in all cases.

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My concerns deals with Lego's stance towards quality issues regarding color.

In the past Lego was happy to replace parts that did not have the right color. Yesterday, I called Lego about a broken part in 42009 and also mentioned some yellow parts looked almost orange. Their response: we cannot guarantee the correct color when different batches of parts are produced. This is a change in policy; they no longer apologize for it and basically say: it can happens, live with it...

Edited by merman

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My concerns deals with Lego's stance towards quality issues regarding color.

In the past Lego was happy to replace parts that did not have the right color. Yesterday, I called Lego about a broken part in 42009 and also mentioned some yellow parts looked almost orange. Their response: we cannot guarantee the correct color when different batches of parts are produced. This is a change in policy; they no longer apologize for it and basically say: it can happens, live with it...

I think a lot of that came when they started using their newer color injection technology, whereby they use a single neutral color raw plastic, and inject the dye into it as part of the IM process right at the. Point of manufacture. It's a very clean capable system. But you will see greater subtle variances between batches or production sites. Prior to this TLG was getting plastic pellets pre colored. The new system is a huge leap forward in manufacturing tech. But I think it makes addressing some QC related issues a bit more challenging. Basically not all color variations are considered CS issues.

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Lego should return to precolored pellets for the "basic" colours (white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, orange, tan, light et dark grey, and some other). And stay on the non-precolored pellets for the less common colours.

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Introduction

Normally, whenever I have an issue with LEGO products and/or services, I contact LEGO Service. However, I believe this fiasco that has developed regarding LEGO's refusals to ship to my UPS Store, and then home, shipping addresses warrants attention from the LEGO Ambassadors and the general public. Also, this post is too long for LEGO Service's 2,000-character e-mail limit. So without further ado, here's my grievance.

Background Information

I have two addresses: a residential address, and a mailing address at a UPS Store. For many years, I've had LEGO sets delivered to my UPS Store address without any complaints from LEGO.

My Grievance

2016 brought a new challenge. This is the first order I placed with LEGO Shop at Home since August 2014. In 2012, I started my first job, which left precious little time for building, so I haven't been ordering from LEGO as much as I normally would. Apparently, LEGO missed me very much, so they sent me this e-mail along with my order confirmation:

Quote

June 17, 2016

Hello,

Thanks for shopping on LEGO.com.

Unfortunately, your recent LEGO® order couldn’t be processed with the shipping address provided and we’ve had to cancel the order as a result.

Protecting your personal information is very important to us. To ensure your privacy and the quality of our service, we’ve decided to no longer send orders placed with freight forwarding or third-party shipping addresses.

If you’d like to provide us with a residential address, please call us at (800) 835-4386 and we’ll be happy to help you place your order again.

Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns about your order.

Kind regards,

Your LEGO Service team

PS. If you need to contact us, please call us on the phone number above. Don’t reply to this email because your message won’t be accepted by our system.

________________________________________

Merci de votre visite sur LEGO.com

Malheureusement, votre commande LEGO® ne peut pas être traité avec l’adresse de livraison vous nous avez donné et donc il fallait annuler votre commande.

La protection de vos informations personnelles est très importante pour nous. Pour protéger vos informations et la qualité de notre service, nous avons décidé de ne plus envoyer les commandes avec des services d’expédition de fret ou une adresse d’expédition tierce partie non plus.

Si vous aimeriez nous donner une adresse résidentielle, veuillez nous contacter par téléphone et nous serons contents de vous aider passer une autre commande.

N’hésitez pas à nous dire si vous avez d’autres questions par rapport à votre commande.

Cordialement,

LEGO Systems, Inc.

Service à la clientele

I called LEGO to question their decision, and they placed my order on hold that afternoon:

Quote

June 17, 2016

Dear S-----,

With your assistance, we would like to verify some of the details regarding your recent order. In order to help protect your account and ensure that all charges have been authorized by you, it is important you contact us at your earliest convenience.

Please note that your order is currently on hold pending your response and will be cancelled if we do not hear from you within 48 hours. Please call one of our friendly Customer Care Advisors at 1-800-835-4386 (from within the US or Canada) or 1-860-835-2806 (from outside the US or Canada). We are available Monday through Friday 8AM-5PM EST.

You are a valued LEGO® customer and we take your security and privacy very seriously. If you have already contacted us and approved the charges, please disregard this email.

Sincerely,

LEGO Systems, Inc.

Consumer Services

Yikes! I was at work at the time, and LEGO Service is only open Monday through Friday! If I didn't call that day, my order would have gotten canceled! Talk about pressure! Fortunately, a senior employee at my company let me place this crucial call in the lobby, so I was able to switch my shipping address to my residential address. Thankfully, this order was eventually delivered to my home intact. However, I wasn't done. I sent this message to LEGO the next day:

Quote

June 18, 2016

As a person who has been buying LEGO products for many years, I am a person governed by logic. LEGO products appeal to me due to their intelligent design and the logic in their instruction manuals. Therefore, I am trying hard to understand the logic behind the recent decision to refuse delivery of LEGO products to my UPS Store address. If you check my order history, you'll see that I had many orders shipped to my UPS Store address. My family has had thousands of items shipped to my UPS Store address for over 12 years, and nothing has ever gone missing or been damaged. We chose to have all our important deliveries at my UPS Store address because even though we live in an excellent neighborhood, we found that medication, checks, and other valuables were stolen from our locked mailbox. As a loyal customer, I would appreciate knowing the logic behind the aforementioned delivery decision.

Two days later, I got this response (emphasis mine—it'll be referred to later in this post):

Quote

June 20, 2016

Dear S-----,

Thanks for getting in touch with us.

Again, I wholeheartedly apologize for the frustration that our decision to not ship directly to a Freight Forwarding Service has caused you. Certainly S-----, I can appreciate your reasoning for choosing this location as an additional level of security based on your past experiences with shipments and I do fully understand wanting to ensure that your valuables arrive to you in pristine condition. Here at the LEGO® Group, we take great pride in ensuring that our deliveries arrive in perfect condition to our customers, and in order to ensure that we can control as many aspects of the delivery as possible to ensure this delivery condition, we have made the decision to not directly ship to Freight Forwarding Services. This decision is based on historical precedents and past experiences that we have had in shipping to Freight Forwarding Services; it was not an easy decision for us to make S----- and came only after months of deliberation and data analysis.

Again, I deeply apologize for this inconvenience S-----. Certainly, I will forward this contact on to our marketing department and suggest that we reevaluate our current policies, but unfortunately for the time being we would not directly be able to ship to these services.

If you have any further questions or concerns or would like to discuss this decision further, please do not hesitate to contact us directly at 1-800-835-4386.

We want to make sure we're doing a good job for you, so you’ll always find the link to a four-question survey in our emails. Please tell us how we did today:

LEGO Survey link

Please let us know if you need anything else.

Kind regards,

[first rep's name removed for privacy]

LEGO® Service

Since I needed more bricks, I decided to place another order, this time trying to comply with the policy by setting my shipping address to my home address. To my shock, I got another e-mail, exactly like the last one, indicating my order had been canceled due to the freight forwarding policy! I had to place another phone call to LEGO Service! Fortunately, it only took one call before they were able to ship this new order, and it arrived intact as well. But I still sent this e-mail to LEGO Service (once again, emphasis mine—it'll be referred to soon in this post):

Quote

August 8, 2016

I understand that there is a policy in place that prevents LEGO from shipping to third-party addresses. For many years, I had LEGO orders shipped to a mailbox at a UPS Store without any problem. However, even though I provided my residential address with my most recent order, I still got a notice about the policy and I had to call LEGO Service to fix the problem.

On June 20, 2016, [first rep's name removed for privacy] said "Certainly, I will forward this contact on to our marketing department and suggest that we reevaluate our current policies, but unfortunately for the time being we would not directly be able to ship to these services." SrvReqNo: [number removed for privacy]

Has anything come out of the reevaluation? Will I be able to ship my next order to my preferred address at the UPS Store, or at least to my residential address without any hassle?

Like I said, I'll be referring to my emphasis soon. Here's their response from later that day:

Quote

August 8, 2016

Dear S-----,

Thanks for getting in touch with us.

S-----, I would like to first apologize for any inconvenience this situation may have caused you. I can assure you that it is not our intent to make the ordering process difficult or inconvenient.

That is why I am truly sorry that our decision to no longer process shipments to Freight Forwarding Services has caused you frustration. We’re committed to protecting your personal information and ensuring the quality of our service. So at this time we cannot ship to any Freight Forwarding Service, private PO Box companies (other than USPS PO Box), or Currier Service.

If you are shipping to a residential address your order should process without any problems. If you continue to have problems ordering product that are being shipped to your residence please contact us by phone. That way we can review the order and find out what the problem is an provide you with a solution.

Once again I am truly sorry for any inconvenience and greatly appreciate your interest in LEGO products. We know how lucky we are to have such amazing and loyal fans.

We want to make sure we're doing a good job for you, so you’ll always find the link to a four-question survey in our emails. Please tell us how we did today:

LEGO Survey link

Please let us know if you need anything else.

Kind regards,

[second rep's name removed for privacy]

LEGO® Service

Now, about my emphasis: The second rep didn't answer my question about what the first rep said. Because of this, I have decided to no longer order from LEGO Shop at Home. I am committed to shopping from businesses that don't cause me frustration. Even though I needed even more parts, they weren't available from LEGO anyway, so I placed several orders through BrickLink—which was a much better experience, with no policies that frustrated me about shipping addresses. That's where I'll be taking my business from now on, unless LEGO does something about their policy. (EDIT 2: I finally found a reasonable workaround! See the end of this post.) I can understand applying it to first-time buyers, but not to [formerly, in my case] loyal customers.

But wait! LEGO wasn't done with me yet! On Tuesday, August 30, 2016, I went to my UPS Store, and discover that LEGO had sent me their Fall 2016 Shop at Home catalog without my permission, and in spite of the fact that the address got blacklisted by the policy! I called them the next morning to unsubscribe (again—I last unsubscribed in 2014 if I recall correctly), and the rep said that LEGO doesn't maintain a mailing list, and that people get catalogs randomly! But the rep did put a note on my account to unsubscribe me. When I pointed out the irony of this situation to the rep, they offered to transfer my call to someone else. I just told them I wanted to express my opinion, so they placed another note on my account about that.

I should note that I'm not the only person who's been negatively affected by this policy. Entering LEGO "freight forwarding" into Google yielded these threads and more:

Unimpressed with Lego Inc - The Embassy - Eurobricks Forums

Shop.lego.com shipping issue - LEGO Questions & Answers - BRICKPICKER

US Freight Forwarders Accepted by Lego.com - OzBargain Forums

LEGO's policy reminds me of "Enumerating Badness", as discussed in The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. As discussed in With Stolen Cards, Fraudsters Shop to Drop, anyone can provide freight forwarding services, not just legitimate businesses like UPS. This is comparable to "crypting", as discussed in Antivirus is Dead: Long Live Antivirus!, in which cybercriminals disguise their malware to evade detection by signature-based antivirus. Perhaps LEGO (and other merchants) should try a "Default Deny" policy and require additional information from first-time buyers, rather than blocking a whole bunch of addresses that may or may not belong to criminals.

LEGO Ambassadors, what do you make of this?

EDIT: Removed repeated references to my first name.

EDIT 2: In August 2018, LEGO released two awesome sets—Voltron and James Bond Aston Martin DB5—which I wanted so badly that I was willing to try buying directly from LEGO Shop at Home again, instead of paying extra money to third-party sellers. I called LEGO Service, made my case for shipping to the UPS Store, and ordered those two sets. The rep said she would send an e-mail to those in charge of the blacklist. However, nothing seemed to have come of that, so I called LEGO Service again, this time with the idea of shipping to my place of work (with the permission of my employer), which is a small, locked facility. My idea succeeded, and my order finally shipped!

By the way, this page has a very good explanation for why businesses such as LEGO won't ship to freight forwarders. I quoted the key paragraph below.

Quote

Some US store choose not to ship to parcel forwarders due to liability issues. Businesses wish to not be associated with any reshipping fraud or missing or damaged goods. Many stores also refuse to ship to parcel forwarders in the interest of protecting relationships with manufacturers and shipment services.

 

Edited by Toa_Of_Justice
My idea for working around LEGO's freight forwarding blacklist

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I have a question for TLG. Why don't they make mini–doll parts available in LDD? Is it because they think computers aren't for girls? :angry:

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11 hours ago, Hinckley said:

I have a question for TLG. Why don't they make mini–doll parts available in LDD? Is it because they think computers aren't for girls? :angry:

It bothers me too. I think it may be something more technical than that, because they've also been hesitant to add other parts that might require new connection styles (like the 2015 Bionicle heads and masks). Even so, it's annoying to have to use placeholder parts when trying to build anything to scale with mini-dolls.

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15 hours ago, Hinckley said:

I have a question for TLG. Why don't they make mini–doll parts available in LDD? Is it because they think computers aren't for girls? :angry:

I think it may have to do with preventing precise reverse-engineering of the minidolls. Last year they began a legal process against competitor brands (Mega, etc.) that were too closely following the 'dolls distinct design. Since then, they have had some success, but only in the EU. I would suppose that with the ongoing battle against IP theft, LEGO isn't willing to just hand the world a digital roadmap of what is essentially their second-biggest trademark. :shrug_confused:

Edited by rodiziorobs
Edited for clarity

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While this is a minor thing. In EU/outside US the dates of the calendar is either of with the dates or the deals. This has seem to be happing more often than before. I understand that there can be a question of supply making having the same deals at the same time difficult. I also understands that some markets will get some deals other markets don't do for various reason. However it would be nice if EU/non US costumer would get better information about upcoming deals. Is their plans or possibilities there will be a EU/non US calendar? It would make it easier to get an idea of which dates is coming up and thus when to make a order with the best deal. Instead we have to rely on information for third party set since LEGO only has information about the current deals (at least I haven't be able to find any information).

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