The problem with consignment is that the consignor wants the maximum price but the consignee wants a quick sale because 10% of a few bucks more means very little and they have to hold the inventory.
If I'm a lego trader and I buy your set for $900 hoping to sell it later for $1000, in the meantime that's $900 I can't invest in anything else. And maybe I guessed the set's value wrong and I end up unloading it for $800, taking a loss.
On the other hand, if I agree to sell that same set on consignment? Zero capital outlay, zero risk of me taking a loss - just some shelf space and admin work.
Unless the store owns its building and has too little inventory to cover the shelves, the cost of not filling the shelves with the right goods is quite serious. In a low-margin business like retail, "just some shelf space" reads almost like "just some gold bars".
Stores also wanted to look full. We actually had parameters in our inventory management logic to increase inventory just for presentation reasons. If inventory is expensive, having some free, quality inventory can be valuable in and of itself even if it moves slowly.
However, in this particular case, the legos were initially displayed as a customer attraction, and then kept in storage. Presumably there's still some inventory cost in storage, but the shelves are clear.
>> The collection will be on display in the store's party room from 10am till 6pm on Saturday, November 11th, and 11am till 6pm on Sunday. The collection will be available for sale immediately, so the best time for pictures will be Saturday morning. The collection will not be stored on-site after hours for security reasons, and after Sunday the sets will be available for purchase but stored elsewhere.
Most of our business is selling low-price, entry-level products. There's a 80-20 distribution of people getting into the hobby versus people upgrading after a couple years. Consequently most of our floor space and inventory is devoted to high margin, quick turnover, entry-level products.
In my experience the floor space is less of an issue for high end products than the capital expenditure to bring in the inventory. On the consignment side we only take products aimed at the remaining 20%. These are specialty items we wouldn't have in regular stock. It's a win-win because we don't have to deploy capital to bring the product in-store, but we do have space to showcase some higher end used product.
I know this from a few friends who are deep into tabletop and boardgames, and they would regularly work with the one or two small stores around to get some special, expensive item (to help keep the shop afloat).
The annoying thing is people with lots of money and no experience who want the special expensive thing but they want it now and they don't know what options they want. I'm sure other fields are good at separating fools and their money but niche hobby retail isn't the Audi dealership, we're not just trying to upsell you for fun.
But instead of costs = (product purchase + shelf space), the costs are only (self space).
So "just some shelf space" is correct in fact and implication.
Depreciation: not going to happen on Star Wars sets that are not longer in production.
Water damage: Lego is water proof.
Breakage: being easy to take apart and put back together is Lego’s core principle.
Edit: wait, the whole collection was sealed and new in box. Yea, just water damage to those boxes would cut the value by at least 10%. Collectors are picky as shit.
I didn't realize people bought Lego to leave in the box. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised because it's a common thing for collectors to do in other hobbies.
Given this was a set of full star wars legos with decades of age a lot of those bricks are already going to have degraded somewhat and technix style components are likely to be significantly damaged from internal sediment accumulation. If you drop your water proofed water in a stagnant pond for three weeks it's likely that the internal seal will hold up and protect the delicate components but you'll probably need someone to pull the glue or other sealant out and replace it as well as going over the exterior surface with cleaning solutions to get it back to the quality it was in before being submerged - and flooding is rarely an instantaneous affair.
I wouldn't underestimate just how damaging to goods storage can be - and if you're doing it at scale you're going to be paying that cost constantly just as a percentage of value stored.
So I don't think I'm underestimating the resilience of Lego bricks to flooding.
There was an article a on HN a while back about the plastics chosen by Lego. They put an exceptional amount of time and effort into choosing durable materials for their bricks.
That said, I'm surprised Lego survive outdoors. My understanding is that ABS is not UV-resistant.
1. Even if the original consignment contract was poorly drawn up without a clear exit clause I think it'd be reasonable to expect a resolution somewhere close to this in mediation.
I thought it was interesting to, from the assumption that the corporation actually banned consignments, still work through how it doesn't free them from wrong doing. Even in the best light B&M has acted in bad faith.
So you "absolutely believe" something that was already proven false, and which you would know if you had even _skimmed_ the facts.