fred67

Aaaarrggghhh... immediately opened up LEGO.com to order a batch... I need people to be more specific! Not available for sale! Anyhow, I'll wait and take my chances ordering batches of 16 from LEGO.com when they're available before I spend $4 at TRU for picked over scraps. And the guy who put the pin for Gwinnett Place Mall TRU in GA on Cygnet's map needs a geography lesson.

I'm not sure why so many people keep mentioning how the hockey helmet could be used as an American Football helmet and fail to mention the shoulder pads... except for the hockey stick, it IS an American Football player. As far as desirability goes, I do hope they ramp up production (and not just tweak distribution), as I think there will be a lot of desirables... I agree with WhiteFang it's hard to pick one as the series "Spartan," so many wanted to recreate 300 (for some reason), but you need to look for anything where multiples are wanted, either for armies or teams. Vikings Sailors Musketeers (3 or 4, anyway) Hockey Players Soccer Players I think this will work out very well for a lot of us, as I'm not into team or army building with any of these (although I want 3 Musketeers), so hopefully trading will be easier. Although I intent to get a complete set and then some, my "must haves" are the Musketeer, painter, geisha, scientist, and to complete the horror collection Frankentstien's Monster and the Wolfman. I'm not going to worry about for some time though... still haven't seen series 3 around here.

It's like the stock market, some sets (stocks) will go up in value more quickly over time. Doubling in 30 years is not that great, especially when you have to baby the set for that time. But, like stocks, buy low and sell high... UCS Millennium Falcon, The modular sets, some trains... all doubled or more, sometimes overnight. Cafe Corner went from MSRP ($140) to $300 within days after selling out; the current minimum price on BL is $445. That's only about year after it was discontinued.

Seems like a bit of a troll post, but I'll bite. First, inflation calculator is not really a very good metric... modern technology has cut the cost of many things even in unadjusted dollars. A basic PC cost $2000 when I first got my 10Mhz 8088 in 1988. Over the course of 20 years we are at the point where you can buy a basic system for $400, including a larger, higher resolution and full color monitor, and the clock speed is literally 300 times faster (and that doesn't account for processor improvements that I won't go into detail about that make it many times faster still), and we're using thousands of times more memory and disk space. It should cost relatively less to make molds and manufacture the bricks; even shipping technology has improved to the point where it's relatively much less expensive to ship. Where you see inflation is only in salaries and some raw materials... the price of oil. In relative terms, the price of oil in the early 80's was just as high is it is now. Plastic is made from petroleum, so it's cost is tied to the price of oil. As far as having superior molds and lower tolerances for error, that only accounts for the higher than Megablocks price. The reason little molded plastic bricks cost so much is simply this: LEGO can only manufacture a certain amount every year, they price their sets to sell at the highest price they can that will still sell (they estimate highest return on investment). Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't (and you see those sets on clearance, sometimes up to 50% off). LEGO is a for-profit company, the price comes down to a simple supply and demand equation. I know there's a lot of people out there who think capitalism is evil and don't like lumping TLG into that category, but the facts are the facts. As a consumer, as it is right now, all I can say is thank goodness I don't have to pay a VAT on top of those prices. Yet.

And, frankly, I can't get over fan-boy apologists when companies do thing that is obviously contrary to what it's customers want. TLG can do whatever it wants... and people vote with their wallets. But people would rather support a good decision by purchasing than have to punish a bad one by not getting anything. But what the hell? Really... people are allowed to complain if they think the company is doing something wrong.

I don't think you need regional forums, but it would help if people would bother setting their locations so when they say "I found some at my Toys R Us!" we know where they are talking about. More specifically, as some of us have done, include at least your state. The U.S. is quite a big place. Our states are almost comparable to countries in Europe geographically (and population wise in a number of cases). It doesn't help me when someone in the U.S. in California (which I don't know unless they say it) says something is available at a particular store. I haven't heard anyone from the South East say they've found them, and if they have I didn't know their location.

Who says it doesn't bother us? As a consumer your choice it to shop elsewhere. I won't justify an unethical action because I don't like the entity I'm committing it against.

I find the claim that someone has returned the full price set and gotten a complete refund to be quite dubious. It's got the promotion right on the receipt, and I'm certain the computers are programmed to catch it when a refund is requested, and the cashier would have to be an idiot not to catch it on the receipt. It is also unethical, even if you can get away with it, despite my dislike of TRU.

My wife went to the store for me; I was with the kids at my parents and nowhere near a LEGO Store. Discover Mills mall in GA has a midnight madness thing, so the LEGO store there participates. My wife was there when it opened just after midnight. She met several people we knew there... nobody got more than 10%. So it was more like a late night on Thursday. When she got up on Friday, she was pissed to find out that S@H had 10% off. She could have just gotten everything online with free shipping and saved all the hassle. I really think they don't think these promotions through... the people that actually show up at the store should get something. Maybe the pick a brick boxes? Do you get them when you buy online? My wife had my list, and while she wouldn't tell me what she got, she left SIX free pick a brick boxes on my desk (do the math!) I'm actually embarrassed she got me that much LEGO.

I don't see this on S@H. I've seen it in TRU and in person at the LEGO Store, it seems odd to not have it online. Am I missing something?

Saw the movie today with the wife and kids, we all thought it was quite good despite the missing and modified parts - we all know they need to change things a bit to fit into a movie, and it may be because I haven't read the book since it came out, but I think I was the least critical of this one about missing stuff since GOF. Like I said, though, normally I've read the books right before the movies were released, and have been hypercritical of important things I felt they left out. I will say this, up until now, for me, each book was better than the last, and each movie, while I had my problem with them, were better than the last... up until now. It's probably only because you only get half of the story, because honestly, I thought what we've seen so far was very well done... so I'll reserve judgement until I see both parts and consider it one, I think that's fair.

Still... 10%... in fact, anything, off LEGO prices is good. None of the black Friday sets are in my list, although some look interesting. I could wait for another TRU sale, but they exclude Star Wars and HP... those are the major sets I want. Target rarely has those... they have the sale right now, but of course Hogwarts Castle, the most expensive set (and the only one I don't have) is gone from both the ones I looked at. So I think guaranteed 10% on an entire purchase of LEGO is not a bad deal. One problem I have is that the manager at my local store will not give more than 1 pick a brick box for any one purchase, or at least he didn't last year.

It matters a great deal. If you want to pretend not to see it, that's your prerogative, but the chance of something like that randomly happening over the course of millions of figures sold versus thousands of people cherry picking makes a gigantic difference. Yes, it's possible that you get all the Spartans... from what I understand, the figures were often clumped together, but when you have thousands of people cherry picking Spartans it's a very different story for when the next people walk in and buy randomly. You can point out fringe cases, rare exceptions... but that's all they are, a statistically insignificant anomaly overall, statistically. Your whole premise is predicated on the belief that someone with more money has unequally better access... when TLG limits sales to "X" number at a given time, that's patently false. Even with fewer Series 2 than Series 3 (supposedly), S@H didn't run out until when? Yesterday? All of September, October, and 2/3 of November... during that whole time there was equal access to all. Edit: and I might point out that, even though it was less than 3 months, the run was there for everyone to buy... it's not different than when they run out of Green Grocer; when it's gone it's gone, it's just that with the minifigures it happened a lot faster.

Because one of those cases is about a million times more likely to happen, if even possible, than the other. In other words, when other people walk in and truly buy them randomly, it's a million times more likely they will get a random assortment of all of them instead of a random assortment of the dregs that are left. It makes a huge difference. That doesn't make any sense at all. If you can afford to buy 10 random figures or 10,000 random figures... they're still random. The rich guy might end up with 300 Spartans, but he's going to have a lot of crap that nobody wants and is hard to sell. In other words, his money got him what he wanted, but at a premium. If people know what they are buying and can cherry pick, the un-randomize the system for everybody else. I'm not saying I don't like being able to know what we're buying, or buying complete sets (although I like that less, because while I want a complete set or two, there will be ones that I want more of for MOCs). On the other hand, I agree what Green Brick Giant was arguing for makes little sense, either. If anything, it's halfway... the boxes should have 64 figures and have 4 complete sets(*), but the figures impossible to differentiate. (*) That's just one idea... but if they aren't going to have an even multiple of sets, they should be fixed... if they put 60 in a box, for example, they should have three complete sets and 12 different figures, which might vary from box to box. Four boxes off the production line would have 240 figures, and would have 15 complete sets. That would make no figures any more common or rare than the others, overall. The reason is because you don't want one locality, or one store, to not get any of the good figures out of randomness.... it should only be random to a point. EDIT: BTW (don't want to make a new post), has anyone seen these on the east coast yet?

Sorry for your frustration... I guess a lot of us that are saying it shouldn't cost too much (me included) already have a lot of electronics we need to do stuff like this, so the cost is really the LEDs, resistors, and battery holder... if you're just going to make the one it might be a much higher initial investment... a soldering iron and solder, wire...

My son gave me his Christmas list. One of the items is a DS game bundle TRU exclusive, so I printed the coupon, made sure I had my TRU loyalty card, and thought I'd go see if I could find anything. As lady_bricker points out, even BOGO50 is pretty lame at usual TRU prices, but I found a couple of sets I'd given up on... King's Castle (I already have the fantasy castle, and while I think King's Castle is great, I just wasn't ready to spend another $100), and Toy Story 3 Train Chase... similar to how I felt about King's Castle, I collect trains, but just wanted this for show, and gave up on it as too expensive. So they were both already on sale below MSRP... King's Castle was $85 ($15 off MSRP) and the train was $68 ($12 off MSRP), and that was before the BOGO50. I ended up with those two, plus two Knight's Showdown sets(*) which were $1 over MSRP ($8/each) so got two for $12, and the stupid free play mat, for $130 before taxes. MSRP would be $194. So... not stuff that was very high on my list, but not too bad.

I'm not disputing it's a nice sale for some sets.

The problem is not that they overcharge, it's the blatantly misleading email.

You got the smooth tapered effect from vinyl... I'm not knocking it, it looks fantastic, but while your intent may have been merely to cover certain colors, it had a whole other effect as well.

I think some of you misunderstood... I know we have it good in the U.S. as far as sales and LEGO pricing goes... I also know that TRU sales usually exclude Star Wars (and now, apparently, Harry Potter). But the point is that first thing is what I got in the email... ALL LEGO construction sets & board games! Then you click on the link to get the coupon, and coupon itself says "ALL!!!!" "ALL!!!" Woohooo!!!! It's no better than any scam spammer, IMO.

The first half of this image shows what you get in the email; the second shows what you get when you click on it to get the coupon. This is just plain SPAM, IMO. In what universe can you say "ALL"... ALL, in BIG LETTERS, twice as BIG as all the others, and then with a straight face list exclusions on the coupon you have to click to get? I'm sick of this... Barnes and Noble is on my crap list, too... any sets I want are shown "Note: This item does not qualify for coupons or promotional discounts unless expressly stated." When was the last time I saw one "expressly stated?" HOW ABOUT NEVER! Sorry... venting over.

A battery? I doubt this guy is using these, but wiring a simple LED with a watch type battery is quite simple, and it's hidden under the plates somewhere. I agree with Carbohydrates... you could probably do this better yourself for less money (or at least looking a lot better). EDIT: By the way, the darker lights are probably ones he simply had trouble with, or had bad wiring, so he arranged it like it was supposed to be that way, but all you would need is a bigger resistor for those lights. Piece of cake.

That's beautiful, no doubt, but it's got a lot of hacks, like the boiler being covered with red vinyl. The carriages are spectacular. I'm definitely down with modifying the EN to make it look more like this... I just wish I had more time.

That's just whack... that's worse than the other series.

Good post, Mojo. I still think the vast majority are essentially "here's your set, I'll help you build it" and then that's it. I think LEGO knows what they're doing more than they did 10 years ago, and I know there's only a limited amount of LEGO that can be made in a year (I know they could expand, but the last time they over expanded they almost went out of business... better to keep demand high). It certainly would be better to get 16 straights per 8 curves, IMO, but then we could argue about what the best ratio is all day, too... There will always be disagreement, which is why selling separately makes more sense because you make everybody happy. To expand on my answer to Andy, if I paid $10 or $12 for a pack of 8 straights, it would be preferable to me than paying $16 and getting a bunch of track I don't want. Moreover, I'm likely to buy more. I have shelves of trains that sit on straight track. No curves at all. That's not even part of my train layout, it's just for display.