What Happened with Lego (2013) | Hacker News Reader

What Happened with Lego (2013)

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97 pointsThomPete76 comments

When I was eleven, three local K-mart stores had a simple drawing to win 1000 dollars worth of Legos. They had these little boxes with stacks of entry forms next to them and a pencil to fill them out while you were in the store.

Each store was going to give away a thousand dollars worth of legos.

Even though there was a store just a few minutes from us, we drove to the one 20 minutes away in a dilapidated shopping center because inspection of the drawing box indicated that fewer people were submitting entries at that store. We would drive to the stores in the morning, take all the entry forms available except for a few and I would spend my summer mornings filling them out. I believe we dropped close to a thousand entries in the various boxes. I put the majority in the low traffic K-Mart but entered a hundred or so in the other two stores as well.

I got a big manilla envelope in the mail with Lego letterhead congratulating me and 3 different catalogs, lego, duplo and technique.

I spent two glorious weeks poring over the catalogs with my brother carefully tallying up to the 1000 dollar total.

A month after submitting the order we received two giant boxes. Few things have ever made me as happy.

I'm supposedly an adult and I'm totally jealous of this 11 year old. :)

As cute as that story sounds... my mother taught me that doing these types of things is unethical.

I'm not really judging, just want to hear how other people feel about "cheating" in these types of promotions.

If the contest doesn't specify how often you may enter then, I see no problem with it. It may not be exactly ethical, and really shitting thing to do if you were an adult in what appears to be a kids contest. If the contest doesn't specify the number of entries go for it, you've done nothing wrong.

If the contest did specify and the kid stuffed the ballot that's pretty low, but at least a kid who was super dedicated and excited got it. I wouldn't do it but I would definitely shrug it off if that were the case. I would be angry as hell if an adult did it, or encouraged a kid to do it.

Its incredibly low to prevent others from entering by taking all the forms.

There is a lot of things in life that aren't explicitly disallowed but make you a selfish asshole if you do them. If a kid was brought up properly by there parent and can assess right or wrong and then sees other kids being unethical and then winning, it only promotes negative behavior.

As a privileged human in many ways, I feel guilty when taking advantages I don't need. It doesn't bother me when others do these types of things though, I just won't.

They didn't cheat.

1 - Based on what was said, multiple entries are allowed. 2 - They didn't remove ALL entry slips, left several

These contests are all about having people come back and apply gain, and again, and again.

How many little things the the parents pickup at KMart simply because they were there and it was convenient? Probably a fair bit.

It's saddening to see how much people have lost sight of doing the right thing regardless of whether it is required (or forbidden) by "the rules".

> They didn't cheat.

Also, use of physical violence isn't explicitly banned by the rules of tic-tac-toe. I think I've just found a new winning strategy that "isn't cheating" :D

This doesn't hold, since all local, state, and national laws must be adhered to by default.

If a contest doesn't limit the number of entries, you're allowed to enter as many times as you'd like. "Cheating" has a specific definition and the definition doesn't apply here.

The "spirit" of the contest is subjective. Perhaps the spirit of an easily gamed contest for me is to teach my children a lesson about math and strategy. Maybe it's to teach my kids strange ethical lessons.

No one would be down voting or calling it unethical if the state lottery allowed you to enter as many times as you wanted for free and you kept entering.

Most of the contests I've seen like this in recent years try to avoid this issue by using receipts as entry forms. You can only enter the contest after purchasing something from the store.

If you live in the US, this is considered a lottery and is likely illegal. The small print will usually have work-around that does not require a purchase

"They set up the rules, and lately I've come to realize that I have certain materialistic needs."

I don't see this as unethical, nor do I see it as poor reinforcement of behavior. He and his brother had to fill out hundreds of entry forms during their summer break to get this to work. Being awarded for putting in the effort to receive something like this is a good exercise.

It prepares kids for the crushing monotony of bureaucracy.

The wealthy parent in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" that paid a large staff to open chocolate bars was obviously contemptible.

You just described my childhood fantasy scenario - rigging a Lego shopping spree. Lego catalogs were crack for me as a child.

The number of times I fantasized about the Toys R Us 5 minute shopping spree...

I remember on numerous occasions trying to map out my route anytime I was lucky enough to be in a store. I always remember making the video game aisle a high priority.

There was something sort of whimsical about that video game aisle and the slips of paper you would have to bring to the register.

Some caltech students did something like this with a mcdonalds contest back in the seventies, only they did it with a lineprinter in the campus computer center as well as a hydraulic paper cutter at a commercial print shop.

Caltech got a lot of really bad press as a result so when they inevitably won most of the prizes they donated them all to charity.

It is for this specific reason that these contents now say "one entry per visit".

As a parent that played with legos as a kid and now has enjoyed the past 4 years buying my son legos, my answer to the question "What happened with Lego?" is: they became awesome. They managed to find a great balance between having more complex, interesting legos and still being legos. I think the modern legos are just brilliant. If you want simple, you can still get simple. If you want complex, you can get complex, but the complex pieces still feel like lego pieces and not toys with a few lego nubs on them.

Agreed. Whenever I read these pieces complaining about the current state of things it makes me as, "do you even Lego?"

If you want a bucket of bricks they sell that set at Walmart, or better, get on ebay and buy a bag of bricks used. It's awesome.

But did you in fact read the piece?

Yes. 2 years ago when it came out. I didn't really look at it again before commenting, so you I guess you caught me. This is the one where people have complained that Lego bricks have gotten more expensive but actually they have gone down in price. It's kind of a link-baity title, don't you think?

I totally agree. My five year old can't get enough of Legos and I am in continuous awe of the sets that Lego is putting out these days. Even the small sets (mixels I think) are incredible.

While I enjoy the process of building, creating and playing Legos with my sons, I also find myself trying to imagine the business cases that happen at Lego to create each set – like what's the process for creating a new mold? Do people have to lobby or build a case for why a certain shape or connection should be created?

The other thing I start thinking about is the behind the scenes digitalization of Lego as a company. Flipping through the instruction books it's apparent that the ability to design, model, and generate instructions has been streamlined through what I can only imagine is a robust piece database. May be totally unrelated, but when you go down that path it makes the Lego movie seem like they already had the technology to create those scenes, they just needed to animate it all.

Agreed. I have a 6 year old daughter and a 4 year old son. We have bought some specialty sets for younger kids, some regular bricks (I forget what they call these, builder?) and some that are more complicated adult kits (Tower of Orthanc, Hogwarts, etc.).

I just love watching them use their imaginations using the generic builder pieces (love it when they come to me "Daddy, look what I built, it's a ..."), but we also have sit-down "daddy build time" where we work on the harder kits (which are kept in a special place and not mixed in with their own legos). We also do LEGO WeDo robots together as well.

Awesome toys for adults, kids, and adults to interact with kids!

What happened to my LEGO? This is a question I ask myself from time to time... and kick myself (a little) because I know part of that answer. I'm the youngest of 3 and all the various LEGO trickled down to me. My brother and I were big into the space themed sets. We had a bunch of those base boards in grey with moon craters and what not. When I left for college I had amassed a large suitcase full of bricks. One of my best friends in HS had a significantly younger brother that was the coolest little kid I knew. I gave him my suitcase. He was so happy. I think I quadrupled his collection. It felt good then and it still feels good now when I think of how happy little Elwood was. But now as an adult with kids of my own, I kick myself a little bit for not seeing the future. What I would give to go back and tell 18yr old me to hang on to those sets. Even back then I probably had at least $1k worth. Today that suitcase would probably be worth several thousand. But most of all, I would love to be sitting on the floor with my boys, building (non Star Wars themed) space ships with the same bricks I used 30 years ago.

I almost traded my whole collection for an xbox in high school, but I ended up keeping them. I think they're still in a giant bin in my mom's attic somewhere. I'm going to keep your lesson in mind every time she suggests getting rid of them.

I think I still have all my k'nex also.

I very much remember what happened to my own set: I left them in a classroom in middle school before moving away. I was at the age where I didn't use them for much anymore, but I did like to put little projects together every now and then. There was a school project where I brought in everything and stashed them in a closet somewhere, but completely forgot about them after the project was completed. After I had moved from that town it dawned on me one day what I had done and I was very, very sad to realize that I would probably never see the sets again.

(It should be noted that while the economics of Lego hasn't significantly changed, this piece is from 2013; previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9096253)

And further back:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5181406

LEGO just released their "LEGO Worlds" game that is very similar to Minecraft, but with LEGO bricks.

In recent years LEGO is ver much in franchise/brands, with specialised sets reach from StarWars to Batman. Nowadays kids get sets and build them once and that's it.

The joy of LEGO used to be to build what you had in mind with mainly generic bricks.

My whole childhood whenever I would play Lego games, I envisioned something like Lego Worlds, hopefully it becomes competitive in it's own right. I hate that Minecraft has become the center point of all sandbox games. I wonder what kids would say about Garry's Mod? Heh.

I grew up with Lego when it started the franchising, so I've collected a large amount of generic 80s and franchised 90s/early 00s sets, and I'd mostly disagree. Yeah, it made it (sometimes painfully) obvious what franchise a particular brick came from. But mix&match was still fun (because honestly, who wouldn't want Harry Potter with laser swords battling Martians and giant squid?) and most sets I owned were never once assembled according to their manual.

Creativity is what you make of it.

I dunno... anecdata here, but my kids have quite a few sets - Batman, Ninja Turtles, Star Wars as well as some brick boxes and Lego City stuff - and they mixed them all together and now build whatever they fancy all the time. I was horrified actually, they don't care. In fact when I tried to build up a mini Millenium Falcon that's hidden in there I was told to clear off.

The new sets do have a few weird "only for that set" bricks, like batman helicopter blades or weird rubber Jedi hair pieces, but generally everything still fits together with everything else. I will say that there does seem to be a high percentage of small round 1x1 transparent studs. Every set seems to come with loads of 'em.

My problem is my son looks at the sets and says, "Dad! Dad! There's a brick I don't have in that set! You need to buy me the set!"

But yeah, he builds a set by the instructions once, lets it stay together maybe a month, and then it's just parts going into the bins of bricks, to be endlessly remade into whatever catches his fancy.

They LOVE those things in the Star Wars sets. Every one uses them as ammunition for blasters or every shape/size. And they are SO easy to lose. I find the dang things all over my house.

I played with Lego massively as a kid and the generic blocks always sucked. It was way more fun to get something like a space set, build it, and then use all those cool pieces in new ways.

And that hasn't changed now. My son has tons of Star wars, police, etc, and other sets. And just like I did as a kid; the set gets built once and then broken down in a mass of pieces used to build completely new creations.

If you read through the history of LEGO [1], you'll see that these branded sets (together with massive manufacturing outsourcing) saved LEGO from bankruptcy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Lego

> The joy of LEGO used to be to build what you had in mind with mainly generic bricks

It still is—they have more of that style of set out than ever.

The price of Lego isn't the problem. It's the tiny, over specialized parts.

I still would like to buy legos ala cart. Give me 1000 single units in black and 500 half units in black etc...

Actually using a CAD like program that would give a list of pieces needed and than a way to buy the items online would make my kids a wonderful place. Oh wait they killed that in 2012 (http://ldd.lego.com/en-us/subpages/designbyme)

Is this you are looking for? http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Pick-A-Brick-ByTheme#suppressXlin...

You can buy Lego a la carte here: http://shop.lego.com/en-US/Pick-A-Brick-ByTheme . I'm not certain it has every brick, but it definitely has the a bunch of the standard ones I looked for.

Also if you go to a Lego store, you can go to the "pick a brick wall" (http://stores.lego.com/en-us/store-experience), and fill up a cup with whatever bricks you want.

As a tip: if you are building a specific project, and are looking for a large number X of a specific shape of brick, odds are there is an employee there who knows the best way to to pack the cups to get the most brick for your buck. The "shovel it in and pack it down approach" isn't always the best way, especially for oblong pieces. I recall that the best way to pack your average 2x4 brick was to arrange them in two layers in concentric circles, standing up on their tall axis. Also, counter intuitively, at the store that I went to, it was better to buy two smaller containers of 2x4s than one bigger container at the price points they had at the time.

You can do exactly that on Bricklink (http://www.bricklink.com/). You can buy new or used parts (bricks, boxes, manuals, stickers, catalogs, and more) from sellers located all over the world.

I should have down voted you. I lost my lunch time without eating!

Edit: Why the down votes? This link caused me to just surf instead of eating? This was something I didn't realize actually existed. I actually gave him a vote up.

Down votes without explanation is always frustrating

The LEGO catalog always had this option. You could specify the bricks and colors you wanted and place an order to them directly. Now you just do it through their website.

That's what I believed, they added a lot of surface curvy pieces. But the article mentions complexity, and indeed, some sets are HD when the one I grew up with were 360p (70s being 16 colors VGA as everyone knows).

There were overspecialized parts early on. I have a forklift part from the early 80's that can only act as a forklift (it has a spring). I also have some boat parts from that era that really float. I got a train set around 1984 that included train tracks, carriage cars and bases that can't easily be used to make anything other than a train set.

Things got really bad in the late 90's and early 2000's before Lego turned it around. My wife got our kids a Lego airplane set with parts that can pretty much only be used to build an airplane fuselage, wings and landing gear. Very sad.

Since then, Lego has drastically cut down on the number of parts they make. There are still specialized parts. Minifigs and car wheels pretty much need to be specialized, and there are a few large parts that obviously exist only to create a larger toy at a cheaper cost. But things are much better than they were 15 years ago. Most sets now consist of mostly generic parts with just a few specialized pieces thrown in.

Everyone please print your bingo card and let's begin:

https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7143/6521189607_59acddd58b_o....

I officially banned Chima and Ninjago sets from my house. Just awful, miserable experiences to build and hopelessly unable to repurpose because of the overwhelming number of insanely tiny pieces. The City sets you can still do a lot with though.

http://www.newelementary.com/2014/08/when-lego-was-never-jus...

Disagree! You should see the amazingly creative things my kids can make using only the Chi pieces from the Chima sets! We have a lot of chi.

Kids seem to find ways to be creative no matter what. It gives me hope; the Lego masters of today are the tech geniuses of tomorrow!

Reminds me of the 'POOP' problem[1].

[1] http://www.howtospotapsychopath.com/2008/07/31/the-worst-leg...

You can get a knockoff "Big Bag of Bricks" 1000 pc set for $39.95 on Amazon[1], but at ~4 cents/brick it's only 23% cheaper than the 580 pc generic LEGO set from Walmart[2] for $30 (~5.2 cents/brick). It doesn't seem like there's an exorbitant margin on the cost of making a small plastic brick. You're just paying a small premium for the LEGO brand. I agree with the author that the pricing seems fair (and has even gone down!) but we don't perceive it because we didn't buy our first LEGO sets and we acquired huge collections over a long period of time.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Building-Bricks-Blocks-Pieces-Compatib...

[2] http://www.walmart.com/ip/LEGO-Creative-Building-Box/4291088...

the tolerances and quality assurance on the off brand bricks seems to be lower according to reviews. tolerances are super important if you're making something relatively big and complex. it's up to you to decide if the difference in price is worth it.

You can't compare piece count. My son has several creative boxes and at at least 2/3 of the pieces are smaller than a regular 2x2x1 brick. I was quite disappointed to not get more 'regular' pieces.

This is not one of those pieces bemoaning that Lego is all specialist parts and complaining about the lack of big buckets of bricks - the tl;dr of this article would be "What happened with Lego? Nothing, you just grew up.".

Yeah, doesn't seem like many people read the article, just the title.

While this has been posted before, one thing I'd like to see considered that wasn't in the analysis is whether a 2015 Lego piece is on average the equivalent of a 1980 Lego piece, or if the increase in average set size has been accompanied by shrinkages in average piece size (to go along with the profusion of smaller specialty pieces).

Wasn't this covered? He looked at the average price per gram of Lego in addition to price per piece.

I think the way I'd go about it is number of full 1x1 cells per set rather than grams, which could change based on manufacturing or the replacement of "real" pieces with specialty pieces likes shields or antennas (which would not contribute towards the cell count).

I'd like to see an analysis by set type. My girls really love "LEGO Friends", which I suppose is the least offensive of "girl-oriented" crap people push out (at least it's not Disney...).

But the size of the sets seem rather small for the price, compared to creator. Creator seems to have more value, a substantial set for the same price as the Friends ones.

Bought my daughter 4 bags (red, green, blue, yellow) with 1000 bricks in each bag. 500 transparent bricks (4x2) for windows. Made in Italy, manufactured according EU standards, contaminant-free according EU code, indistinguishable from the originals. Cost: about 200 EUR

Our local LEGO store sells buckets for 11 EUR and you can fill them with whatever you like. One bucket with figurines and tools and other stuff was enough, so far.

What happened to LEGOS? More choice for less money (If you and your children don't fall for the ads)

Is LEGO struggling today? Probably not.

This article is from 2013-01-17.

Quite the opposite (it wasn't struggling in 2013 either). The move into franchise-branded sets (Star Wars, etc.) hasn't been popular with purists, but has been great for business, catapulting the company from a strong niche company to either 1st or 2nd largest toy company in the world (possibly behind Mattel). Revenue over the past decade has approximately quadrupled! [1]

[1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/282870/lego-group-revenue...

It's pretty impressive how LEGO has changed its destiny in the last 10 years, given this: [1]

  In 2003, The LEGO Group faced a budget deficit of 1.4 billion DKK (220 million
  USD at then current exchange rates; equal to EUR 175 million),[40] causing
  Poul Plougmann to be replaced by Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen as president. In the
  following year, almost one thousand employees were laid off, due to budget
  cuts. However, in October, 2004, on reporting an even larger deficit, 
  Kristiansen also stepped down as president, while placing 800 million DKK of 
  his private funds into the company.

Right now, LEGO is the largest toy company in the world, surpassing Mattel since late 2014. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lego_Group#Financial_resul...

[2] http://time.com/money/3268065/lego-largest-toy-company-matte...

As someone with a lot of these pricy adult sets I find the presentation in this article weird. Lego described as a "victim" of aging consumers etc. vs. this being a deliberate calculated strategy by Lego to go after the adult/hobbyist/collectors market. It's actually the latter, and the result of a deliberate effort to turn the company around from near disaster early in the 2000s. There have been several good articles written about this. I have no problems paying for the big sets. If you don't like that, buy the smaller sets, they're just as much fun as they were when you were a kid.

That was one hell of a non sequitur. The citation at the beginning of the post talks about the complexity of the sets. The post is all about their price.

Frustrating.

Sidebar: for those of you who are unaware, the Lego platform has actually spawned a business facilitation technique, Lego Serious Play (LSP). There's a certification and lots of application in various industries. It ain't cheap.

To the author's point, it's very interesting how the adoption of Lego decades ago is now affecting product sales, perceptions, and spin-offs today, as those kids become power users and buyers.

As a parent who loves having kids play with Legos, I'm all for "Just Duplos". I've already had one trip to the doctor for stepping on a sharp toy. I'd much rather have them play all day and night with their imagination. Legos are a fun way for teaching letters too. My older likes to get in on the game with the younger. (Teaches the abstractions behind what are otherwise perfect shapes)

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What I personally wonder is what happened with Lego Technic. Where are the old generic studded pieces, gears, axles, etc? I learned so much with those...

I was brought up with Lincoln logs then Tinker Toys. When I saw Lego blocks I thought "Those are for dumb kids" and kept on tinkering. It's an easy step up to chemical models from Tinker Toys.

The difference is generational: the ultra-bright and creative Boomers used Tinker Toys and Erector Sets; the comparatively dull bricklaying Lego generations followed in the Boomers' wake. So much had to be changed to suit the latter:

- TinkerToys abandoned; Legos promoted.

- Cursive writing discarded; printing promoted.

- Pen & paper downgraded; typing promoted.

- SAT tests downgraded; quotas promoted.

- The rise of illiteracy and innumeracy in the USA falls in there someplace.

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