Why Are Lego Sets Expensive?

What's more expensive, a toy that gets used once on Christmas day and then gets discarded that costs $10, or a lego set that costs $50 and that gets passed down three generations or more?

Some of the lego my kids are playing with went through this route: my uncle, me, my brother, my son, my brothers kids. The oldest pieces I've got are from the early 60's, they have a different formulation and didn't keep their shape as good, but anything produced after roughly 1965 is as good as new today.

There was a reddit comment the other day answering the exact same question. The person worked in a factory that cast plastic pieces for Lego as well as other companies. He said that Lego had much, much tighter tolerances, that they threw away many more pieces which weren't made to spec, and that they required much more expensive and frequently replaced molds.

I can't find it at the moment, unfortunately...

I can certainly appreciate the precision of Lego pieces, as I too have mixed and matched incredibly old pieces from my parents's era (1970s) with more recent (2000s) stuff. And I think the OP did a decent job collecting precision data for the article.

However I find the post title to be misleading as surely there's a whole lot more that goes into the actual market valuation of a Lego kit. What about the type and quality of plastic used, the rest of the manufacturing process, quality control, the overhead of having to design new kits regularly, etc? Building Lego kits is more than just shipping cheap generic plastic widgets from China straight to store shelves.

For what it's worth, I've found Lego designs to be consistently excellent, with well thought-out part selection, part placement, structural integrity, and so on, in everything from the small $10 kid sets to the $300 Mindstorms NXT kits, so the price has never really bothered me.

Besides the obvious answer that cost is not a first order determent of price?

Interesting to see how low the standard deviation is. Compare that to K'NEX (I love K'NEX by the way) where a not-so-right angle is commonplace. Sometimes the rods have plastic bulges at the ends which prevent them from making a good connection in a female(?) piece.

LEGOs, however, have always fit perfectly, in my experience.

I too have a fair bit of Lego from when I was a kid in the 60s/70s that my kids play with today. It's worth noting that it was (relatively) expensive even back then.

My observations on the quality of my old pieces is that they are generally excellent and certainly still usable, but:

- Some of the white pieces have discoloured quite noticably

- Some of the white plates (but interestingly no other colours) have deteriorated noticably

- The fit between pieces seems to be a lot tighter, so that prising pieces apart can be a challenge.

But really it would be churlish to overstate these issues - for this stuff to still be usable after 40 years is a testament to the quality of engineering that has gone into it. We have acquired bits of the various "knock off" Lego-esque brands and the inferior quality of these is immediately apparent.

Taken from http://www.reddit.com/r/geek/comments/14ccan/lego_super_star...

"Every single lego brick made has to fit together perfectly with every other lego brick EVER MADE. So the piece you get in your new super star destroyer has to snap together perfectly with a piece from a model house made in 1970. To achieve this, they run size tolerances on the order of .0005" "

I've built lots and lots of lego over the years and tried several competitors as well. In fact I built a megablocks porsche last night for my son. The difference between lego and the rest is quite big. First the bricks are perfect on lego, perfect colour and no scratches or flaws. Next the instructions for lego are clear and easy to follow. Then you've got the parts bagged up in sensible sized packs which allow you to complete the steps required without having too much lego about you.

The megablocks kits was cheap, but the instructions were truly terrible. There was even a small addendum sheet thrown in with corrections one of the corrections was wrong itself!!

Add to this the blocks were not of great quality and the colours weren't consistent.

I almost never pay full price for Lego as there are always offers to be had, but the extra is well worth paying. I have kits from the 80's mixed in with todays stuff and it all fits perfectly.

Not to mention that Lego's support is great.

You have no idea about expensive Lego. In Brazil, a simple firefighter airplane in Walmart will cost you more than US$130,00! The list price in the USA is US$60,00. See for yourself: http://www.walmart.com.br/produto/Brinquedos/Lego/Lego/34301...

My brother and about half of all people in my area in Austria work for a company called ENGEL. This company produces Injection Molding Machines (EN-Wiki: http://goo.gl/2fxjB, DE-Wiki: http://goo.gl/NS9F8). This company is also main provider for Tupperware and LEGO. One machine cost around 1Mio. Euro and the mold has always more or less the same price than the machine. That means that every product created with Injection Molding should have a very high quality because of the price and the effort you have to put in to create a mold. The only reason, my bother says, why some products have a bad quality is, the plastic material is not as good as the one from LEGO.

This is the location of their headquarter http://goo.gl/maps/9EOIk http://www.engelglobal.com/

Coming from Billund (where LEGO is made and invented) ... having friends and parents who worked +25 years at LEGO. My dad having worked both with construction and design of the plastic molds for all those years. I can say that the only reason LEGO is more expensive, is because its a high quality product made in Europe (mostly Denmark) and not in China.

So... the article... Hypothesizing that it's primarily due to tight tolerances. Shows that they're indeed tight, and have remained similar to legos made 40 years ago. However, similar to what appear to be "random cheap dollar store building blocks." Best sentence "Honestly, I don’t know much about plastic manufacturing – but the LEGO blocks appear to be created from harder plastic." - This is why they made interviews. Really wasn't so interesting and didn't answer the question.

Can I print open source lego-compat pieces from my 3D printer yet? Basically, my dream at age 6.

I don't know about the current market for building blocks. But my guess is that Lego is benefiting from monopolist pricing. This is just a guess; I don't really have good knowledge of pricing and products that exist in this category.

If there are less well-known brands, with possibly lower quality, that sell for lower prices, Lego's continued success would argue that these competing products aren't perfect substitutes. In other words, Lego extracts a premium for its unique attributes: Quality, the prestige of the brand name, exclusive licenses for movie-themed sets, or patented brick designs might be some of the fences that could be protecting their market share.

Economics 101: If it's easy to build businesses that replicate your goods and services, then competitors will enter the market and bid each other down until prices reach levels that make profits disappear. (If someone's making a profit, then someone else can and will bid a little lower and gain market share in exchange for a smaller per-unit profit.)

If Lego has a unique success formula that other companies can't duplicate for whatever reason, then they can act as a monopoly and charge a price that maximizes unit profit times volume.

Impressive: an article about price without the word "demand" or "supply". Or about the standard for "expensive". This could have been interesting, but didn't quite get there.

As a consolation prize, I offer: http://gizmodo.com/5019797/everything-you-always-wanted-to-k... Also light on analysis, but full of fun trivia.

Comparing the deviation of wooden planks to Lego is meaningless. Planks have a heterogeneous internal structure, the structure of each plank is unique - we can even see the grain in the photograph - and wood is more dimensionally sensitive to changes in environmental conditions than Lego.

Would be interresting to check if the cheaper Lego clones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_clone) have the same qualities.

How many karma points do I need to vote down something?

This might sound fairly stupid, but I always thought longevity had something to do with price. It's plastic, and will last many, generations.

This might also be why they keep coming up with new shapes for blocks.

ps.: longevity assumes one doesn't use ones teeth to pry apart blocks.

Try buying them in Australia where the RRP is almost exactly 2x the US RRP for most models :(

It won't be long till everyone is making their own legos at home with 3d printers.

Surely the price of Lego will plummet if 3D printing ever lives up to its promise.

Interesting article, but did nothing to explain the cost, it merely assumed that tight measurements means they would be that expensive or why they wouldn't keep getting better and better at making them such that the cost would go down over time.