richb

Is there any reason for not having a clearly noted "Taboo forum," either publicly browsable or hidden/group-only where 'anything goes?' I think the image posted previously is hysterical, but I can understand where it, and the line of conversation it probably inspired, might be inappropriate under the Town forum.

My dark ages spanned 20 years, from '88 to '08. I grew up with LEGO and had a HUGE Legoland that covered my bedroom floor through most of the 80s. At its peak (1987-ish) it was probably 5 x 6 road tiles in size, plus some additional 8x32 and 16x32 baseplates around the edges. I began breaking it down when I hit my teens ('88), and packed the whole thing up for good when I eventually found girls to be more interesting than LEGO (how dumb is that?). I sold my collection, with several complete classic '78-'88 era Legoland/Town sets in 1999 when I was starting a family. Even though I was guilty of enjoying play time with my kids' LEGO more than they did through most of the '00s, the day I point to as signalling my dark age being over is Valentine's Day 2008. Sometime back in the Fall of '07 I signed my stepson up for Club LEGO. A few weeks later we received a S@H catalog in the mail. When I saw Cafe Corner I told my wife I had to have it. She wound up buying me the Creator Beach House for Valentine's Day '08, mostly as a gag gift since she thought I was being silly asking for LEGO. Well, I showed her when I broke down and ordered both Cafe Corner and Town Plan for myself a couple of weeks later.

I was born in '74 and played with LEGO pretty much from the womb until the late '80s. I put away my LEGO when I hit junior high, and eventually sold everything on eBay when my first child was born in '99. Dang if I don't regret that now. In the massive set sale I had in '99, one set never got shipped because I got stiffed on the payment. I never bothered to relist it so I still have it. In fact, its still sealed in a white box with a mailing label to the person who won the original eBay auction back in 1999. 6675 Road & Trail 4 x 4 (1988). This was probably the last set I ever bought as a kid, but its the oldest set I have now since everything else sold. My oldest sealed set is a Paradisa 6405 Sunset Stables (1992), which I won with a lowball bid on eBay a couple of years ago. Apparently nobody else was interested, so I snagged it with the opening bid that managed to float all seven days the auction was open.

The large-studded bricks are indeed Mega Bloks. MB sells their Ages 1-5 product under the name Maxi System.

Most Target brick & mortar stores in the US should have their post-Christmas clearance aisles assembled, so if you've not been to your local Target recently now is not a bad time to stop in for a look. The store near me had some LEGO sets on clearance which were obvious returns and/or damaged items that could no longer be sold as new either because the set had already been rotated out of stock or the box was mangled (or both). I scored an Agents 2.0 8970 Robo Attack at my local store for $24.95 (about 50% off MSRP). It was missing sections of its box art, so I presume it was previously wrapped as a gift with liberal amounts of Scotch tape, which caused the damage to the box when it was unwrapped.

How about a retro product any AFoL would really love, a Bill & Mary Idea Book (6000) updated for 2010? Bill and Mary celebrate their 30th Anniversary by moving to a modular town, where the houses have four walls and the sidewalks are paved! It could be done exactly like that classic book (this was easily my favorite LEGO product as a kid, and it wasn't even a brick!), pages of ideas with some call outs showing SNOT techniques, advanced building, and a few abbreviated floor plans/instructions to get people started. If a rep from LEGO told me a Modular Idea Book was in the works, I'd preorder one yesterday.

Jamie, Has it ever been discussed at TLG to offer alternate instructions as .PDF downloads from the Web site, or perhaps as LDD files or something similar? I can understand not doing preprinted, bound, and packaged 3-in-1 Creator-style instructions for the modular line, but I suspect a fair number of MOC-challenged builders would be induced to purchase multiple copies of a set if there were easy to follow "official" build instructions for 'according-to-Jamie' alternate models, or even build instructions that combined sets beyond just restacking multiple copies of a floor. Thanks!

This is what I do. Most sets I buy either to open and build as-is or use as parts packs. As money is available though, I have on occasion bought sets that are desirable and held them MISB until they're out of production so that I can resell to subsidize more LEGO for myself. The modular houses, Castle, Trains, and many seasonal items are all product that typically see 2x (or greater) increases in resale values after they're out of production. e.g., Buy two Cafe Corners for $139, open one and hold the other. Wait 2-3 years, resell the one you held for $300 then roll that into two Fire Brigades. Rinse, Wash, Repeat. Currently, I have no use for holding onto MISB sets longer than what is required to recoup my costs-plus. I have other too-expensive hobbies and hoarding-compulsions to be able to manage long-term LEGO storage too. I would probably change my tune if I could un-invest myself in all the other crap cluttering my man-cave at present (video games, Magic: the Gathering, Heroscape, paintball equipment) but I'm too lazy to lay all the goods out, photograph them, and get them on eBay.

The 'SHOP' lettering itself isn't that bad, but I'm definitely not in love with the bright yellow color. I give the design of it an A+ though, since it opens up a whole world of ideas with modular letters; rearranging the sign without affecting the structure since the letters just pop on and off. I can think of lots of four letter words to put up there. Though it'll be a shame when the 'O' falls off the sign during heavy winds and crushes a person below.

For accuracy there should be two escalators per floor. I guess the minifigs will just have to run down the 'up' escalator.

Oh yeah, I bought every copy they had! As soon as I saw it I grabbed one and walked over to the self scan/price check kiosk and verified it was actually listed at $7.48 in their system. When I confirmed that, I grabbed every box they had and went to checkout. They rang up $7.48 at checkout too. I have no idea if this was a stock error at my local Target, if it's system-wide, or if these were meant to be clearanced and they weren't marked with red tags on the boxes. Figured I'd pass on the info so anyone can check their local stores and stock up.

Don't know if this has been mentioned anywhere else on this forum (I looked, apologies if this belongs elsewhere!) but I noticed something odd at my local Target (Ohio, US) while walking down the LEGO aisle on a mission to find something else. Needless to say, the Lancaster Ohio Target is now sold out of set 7682s.

It is worth mentioning that S@H customers (at least in the US) are further penalized if they have a LEGO store in their state, as the customer then has to pay S@H's MSRP, plus shipping, PLUS sales tax, thereby neutering the one advantage (cost) of large Shop At Home orders. This is exacerbated when my local big box mart occasionally has LEGO-brand sales, such as buy-one-get-one-half-price, where S@H usually only has the deals on discontinued items, if I'm lucky enough to even see the deals before everything is sold out. I placed an order for a little over $80 worth of product the day the golden minifig keychains were made available on S@H. My $80 order wound up being over $100 after S/H and sales tax, which I was billed because the Cincinnati Ohio LEGO Store opened that weekend, meaning LEGO had to charge me the sales tax too. Sadly, I didn't even know it, as the tax wasn't calculated in the online invoice and never appeared as a potential line item. I didn't figure it out until looking at my credit card statement and realizing LEGO billed me $7 over my invoice. Between the prices, the associated fees, and the poor packing that has seen me receive both the Town Plan & Market Street sets MISCB (Mint in Sealed CRUSHED Box), I don't know that I'll order from S@H again.

Recently placed an order through S@H and was charged an amount different from the total presented me during checkout. As it turns out, the difference in overage was sales tax, which was not shown during my online checkout because the Lego Store just opened in my state (I've never been charged sales tax previously), so apparently the Web component of the store was not updated at the time of my purchase. I wouldn't have had a problem with the discrepency if I had been notified by email or phone about the change. I absolutely understand TLG now has to charge sales tax in Ohio. It's just that I shouldn't have to find out about a change in billing practice from a large co. like TLG by auditing my credit card statements. I'll add my complaints about packaging too, with too large boxes being used for set shipping. I know A LOT of AFoLs buy factory direct and want pristine MISB sets for archiving/investement/speculating. It's hard to justify ordering from S@H when sets rarely arrive 'mint.' My boxes from both Market Street and Town Plan look like scratch & dent clearance items.

Lt Stone Grey tiles/bricks - at the very least 1x1s in quantity. PaB currently only offers Medium and Dark Stone, which makes B&W mosaic building a lot more challenging in four colors rather than five. I'm working on a mosaic of my baby girl right now and I'd like to have lt stone grey, and ideally even a sixth shade in the B/W scale that falls between white and lt stone.