Vee

No, there are not but Jabba's Palace is one of them, unfortunately. I guess people bought it / buy it with a huge discount and then they can try to sell at retail for a profit. Some time after I bought mine at retail from amazon, same amazon had a huge promotion on it that made me fume! I will need a lot of patience... I think that because this set has been under some great promotions, it will take time for it to reach retail price, even after retired. I will wait... I guess... lol

I was about to buy the Tower Bridge when I found out that it uses 600 of those small 1x1 slopes. I gave up instantly! That was when all my Lego madness started. I wanted the Tower Bridge to be placed on top of my 71"x16" cabinet. After my plan failed, because I didn't want to assemble 600 small slopes, I devised a new plan: fill my cabinet top with Modular Buildings! Then, it all started... me... spending tons of money buying modular buildings, getting upset because some of them are not available anymore, etc. etc.... I saw Robie House, looked at its LDD model and also realized: this is crazy... too many small pieces... no way :laugh:

I am not looking for a profit, I am looking into minimizing my losses... As soon as I think I can recover most of what I paid, I will get rid of it.

Yesterday I assembled my 2nd - and last - Architecture set, the Farnsworth House (21009). Three things I thought about my experience: 1 - Assembling those dozens of 1x1 white flat tiles is a PITA, not much of an enjoyment. To makes matter worse, it is impossible to assemble them so that they all become "perfectly aligned". I am a perfectionist and the fact that it is impossible, at least for me, to make them neatly aligned, because they have a certain unavoidable "slack" between them, and by being 1x1 they then can slightly rotate in the stud, does not please my eyes as I was expecting. 2 - So I had an idea to solve the problem. Dunno if this has been talked about before, but one solution would be if Lego would develop a "profiled" flat tile, a 1x2 and/or 1x4 flat tile with a profile on top of it to mimic the design as if that flat tile was like a row of perfectly aligned 1x1 flat tiles (like those bricks that profile a real brick but the profile is in its side, not on top). This would solve the problem of misalignment of rows of 1x1 flat tiles and also would make assembling dozens of tiles much easier because, well, you would have less tiles to deal with. The problem for Lego is that it would decrease a lot the advertised number of pieces of a set like 21009 making it even more difficult to "explain" why it is so expensive. Also, I am not sure it would be possible to profile the top of a flat tile, it could make it too weak. 3 - I am not really happy with this set. After assembling it, I didn't see anything very much special about it. The picture of it in the ads are great but the final product is kind of boring. I will of course keep it and the price I paid for it was very good, $15 below retail (shipping included, no tax!), but it just proves a certain theory that I have that small Lego sets usually look much better in pictures than in real life, with exception of the big ones, the ones with 1000 or more pieces: the big ones look better in real life than in the ad pictures... The ad pictures, by showing them bigger than in real life, fool the eyes.

Yes, At some point I will also be dead... I don't want to open a new thread but I have a question. I was "testing" S@H and I saw that I can choose any country I like and it seems I can buy from any country from those in the list of countries with the exception of Korea. I don't know what would happen if I really tried to go ahead with a purchase at S@H having chosen a different country than the USA, I don't know if it would really go through, but my question is why Korea is the only country that requires an exclusive Lego ID while all other don't? One more of Lego's impossible-to-understand policies/decisions/weirdnesses? My explanation is that it is the only website that does not use the Latin alphabet... :laugh: :laugh:

So I have this set, Jabba's Palace, that I bought as a mistake (don't ask me why, it is difficult to explain... but s% happens) some time ago and never opened. This is the only set I have that is not open because I don't buy Lego sets to make money, I buy for us, for the family. Then, I thought: I will not open this thing, I will wait until it is retired and then, after some time, maybe I can recover the retail price I paid selling it in ebay. So recently I got happy because the set was SOLD OUT at S@H, FINALLY! I thought: "good, now I just have to wait a few years... ". Guess what? The sold out Jabba's Palace is back at S@H, for sale! I am new to following Lego as a fan so I don't have all the info from the past necessary to understand Lego's decisions, to know if this is usual or not, but I have seen during this past two months lots of nice sets becoming SOLD OUT and never coming back, not even one, and now the one that comes back is exactly the one that I was rooting for that it would never make a come back!!! Lego is a very very very very very non-transparent company! GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!! :angry: :angry: :angry: :angry:

Anyway, if your theory is correct, then that Contest to choose the next Architecture set was a sham, right?

Sometimes I ask that to myself and I have no good answer.

Interesting, very interesting, but it does not explain one thing: these sellers are selling _new_ parts and parts from such auctions would have to be sold as used because probably one could easily tell that they have been used already.

Yes. I am talking about a specific part in a specific color. These "Lego Model Shops" do not exist anymore?

You theory makes a lot of sense, I like it. Stupid decision by TLG? Not in a business point of view but yes in a customer relationship point of view. Who won? Money, because money talks, as I said before.

Still, I can give my opinion, even if I am not interested in the set, because it may happen to a set that I would be interested which would upset me. Fortunately for me, 21021 is cool but too expensive and far from a priority, and this lego house is just ugly and I do think that Lego uses exclusivity as a tool to give some sets a higher value than it is worth, like the annual gifts to employees (Lego spends like 30 dollars manufacturing something that in the hands of their happy employees will be valued 300+), and the ones discussed here, etc. And Lego count on their fan(atic)s to make this happen and Lego is never disappointed. It is a crazy world. I don't play this game.

All it takes for Lego to make a highly desirable set is to give it some strong exclusivity. Then, how it looks does not matter anymore. Crazy world.

http://www.tvsyd.dk/artikel/223593:LEGO-forkaeler-lokale-butikker This Lego House set looks like a random pile of bricks that a 4 year old put together... http://www.flickr.com/photos/toomuchdew/11221486046/

LEGO, Lego, Lego, why oh why... Anyway, I am cursed, I don't know why I like so much pieces that are so expensive! Right now I could make good use of a certain piece, I need 4 of them, it's a small piece. My research shows me it was never produced, never part of any set, still there is this one seller that has 70 of them, new, at 3 dollars each! To buy the four that I need, would cost me 17 dollars, the seller charges kind of a flat rate of $5 for shipping even the smallest order and he is not in another country...

Some things in life we are not supposed to understand and never will. Why are we here? Where do we come from? If there is a Creator, who created the Creator and so on? Why Lego makes apparently stupid decisions? Some things we are not supposed to understand.

Dream Americans, dream... :laugh: Out of stock! US$ 75 (converted). Another thing I don't understand is why Korea? Why not Australia that is technically closer to Singapore? There is so much oddness in this release... My explanation is that Lego wanted to make it REALLY difficult to get this set... Why oh why... “The Lego Co. has its reasons which reason knows not.”

Please, see PM, I don't want to post the part here because people will have enough info to pinpoint the seller and I don't want people thinking that I am suspicious about this seller. I am not, so much so that I have an open order with him full of items. Also, this was just one example: I have seen this happen more than once with other parts and sellers. Due to my fondness for rare colors, I get into this situation more often than I would like.

So you mean that the part MAY be a fake? Adulterating a Lego piece makes it a fake piece even being still a Lego, right? In the case of the piece I am talking about, according to Brickset, it was only available in a set that retailed at 30 dollars. The seller would have needed to buy 150 sets to get the amount of parts he has. Even if he managed to buy with a discount, still he would be investing 4k in just one set? Crazy guy...

Hi, Can someone offer me some explanation on why there are some pieces that are rare, you can't easily find them in new state, even used there are not many sellers carrying it, when you find sellers they generally have just a few and then you find one seller that has one thousand or more of such piece, new. How is it possible that one seller can have so many new pieces of the same part while no one else in the world (well, no one else selling at Bricklink) has even a fraction of that, be them new or used? I can't understand. The only logical explanation is that this one seller bought hundreds of the one and only set that carried such piece. Is this possible, sellers buying hundreds of a new set, betting its unique pieces are going to keep being unique for the time being?

Another of Lego's weird incomprehensible thing. When I tried to log to Korea website, it complained that I could not use my current Lego ID and blah blah blah blah. I tried to log in to other countries and none that I tested complained but Korea's did. You need to log off your current Lego ID, then you will be able to access it as a regular visitor. If you want to buy from it, you will need a specific Korean Lego ID. Probably you will need a Korean bank account and a Korean delivery address. Korea seems to be very "special" and it is not even the Northern one!

It is out of stock which just prove how dumb Lego's decision is, or was.

I visited the Korean website to see this infamous set on sale. What I found was that its retail price is almost 80 US dollars, which I found already expensive considering it is a set with 600 small pieces (and considering prices usually practiced here in the US). Anyway, what surprised me was that I found that many sets that are regularly sold here in the US are not sold in Korea. I thought that not selling a set in some country was an exception but it seems it is not so much. When I say "evil" I am actually making a joke to myself, I don't really believe Lego is evil as in a demon that wants to slave us and lead us to bankruptcy, they are just doing business as usual, I understand, but that doesn't mean I have to agree and say Amen to all their decisions.

Touché! :laugh:

I have this thought that buying from those that know what they are selling will never get you a good deal. People that read this forum are mostly Lego collectors, Lego big fans, and as such, they know how much this or that set is valued, how much it is wanted, and so you will never get a good deal from them. If you happen to be fortunate enough to find a John Doe that is not much into Lego and happens to have what you want, then you may get a good deal, because John Doe is not aware of how valuable his set is. In other words, I don't expect to find good deals in this site, as a rule. And asking someone to go to someplace and buy something for you and send it to you for a price that would be much "fairer" than the normal street price is like asking this someone to lose money. He or she could do the same thing and sell it for much more so why do it for less? I am not telling you nobody would do that but chances are that almost nobody would do that, and again, specially here where people know how much Lego sets are worth. A friend would do that... That is what friends are for.