Lego price per part over the years

https://brickinsights.com/statistics/ppp

by janandonly • 2 years ago

352 176 2 years ago

brickinsights.com

zitterbewegung• 2 years ago

This doesn’t take into account for the large amount of parts you can get from eBay .

jbentleylong• 2 years ago

Reminds me how much I love the Power Miners sets -- hate to see the prices, though

bombcar8• 2 years ago

Many people quote that a set should be priced at around $0.10 per part to be worthwhile. Is this the average?

This has been the average, and it's so "perfect" that it has to be that Lego has been aiming for it. They've accomplished this by having more and more detail (read: smaller pieces) in newer sets.

They appear to have been forced (or trying) to jump to $0.20 per piece in some sets (e.g., https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/cinderella-and-prince-cha... )

bleepblop8• 2 years ago

I have a new metric when it comes to lego kits these days. How many stickers are in the kit? And honestly it's too damn high. I have been pretty vocal to lego about this in the past and current times. If they can mass produce an uncountable amount of minifigs with detailed paint schemes; they can do the same for bricks in the set.

I have a hard time believing it's nothing more than a cost cutting measure. And to add insult to injury; I have noticed their quality control slipping over the years. For example: in the past 40 years or so, I might get a kit with a piece missing once a decade? Within the past 10 years I have had at least 7 kits missing pieces. And the frequency keeps growing. As a long time lego enthusiast; they have been slowly losing my trust.

breuleux• 2 years ago

How many sets do you buy per year, out of curiosity? I got into Lego during the pandemic and bought around 50 sets in the past three years. Over that sample, the number of missing pieces was precisely zero.

thatguy0900• 2 years ago

It's kind of funny, I got into buying random Lego knockoffs from alibaba, and they get around not missing pieces by putting a totally random amount of extra pieces in instead. I can usually make a small random person or statue with the random pieces left over from the actual model.

Swizec• 2 years ago

I have a hard time believing it's nothing more than a cost cutting measure.

It's a "keep bricks interchangeable" measure. Every LEGO set designer gets a budget of a few new piece suggestions per year. This includes color and paint schemes.

From a Verge article on how a new set happens: https://www.theverge.com/c/23991049/lego-ideas-polaroid-ones...

And those teams came up with one simple idea to stem the tide of complexity: “frames.”
Want a part in a different color? That costs designers a frame. A new piece? Spend some frames. Bring back an old out-of-print piece? That’s a frame, too. Every year, design leads like Scott are given a limited number of frames that they can spend on their entire portfolio for physical pieces that aren’t readily at hand. “If I have five products or 10 products coming out, I need to allocate where those frames go,” says Scott.

the_mitsuhiko2• 2 years ago

How many stickers are in the kit? And honestly it's too damn high.

I know I'm going against the grain here, but I love stickers. Many of the sets my kids got were "sticker infested" but as they only re-bricked it, we just did not put the stickers on some of them and got just more fun out of it.

Within the past 10 years I have had at least 7 kits missing pieces. And the frequency keeps growing

I never had it. Also if you do, Lego will send you any piece (that is not a minifig) no questions asked. My kid threw my glob down and one of the parts got a bad indentation and looked ugly. I got a replacement part in the mail no questions asked.

mtillman• 2 years ago

I was stoked to find the new Eldorado fortress to be an improvement on the original and free from stickers. I got plenty of extra pieces too.

mc32• 2 years ago

In my experience they tend to add extras for the smallest pieces and have never missed a piece.

bombcar8• 2 years ago

I just wish the stickers were high quality plastic ones, so you'd have a chance in hell of removing and replacing them immediately if you mess up.

I've never had a confirmed piece missing (the few cases had obvious open boxes, etc), but then again I've not bought as many in the last ten years.

doubleg72• 2 years ago

Every set I have bought for my kids comes with extra pieces. And we have bought enough over 100 sets over the past 5 or so years.

r_c_a_d_t_s• 2 years ago

I've only had one missing piece and that was in a 3696 piece set. Luckily it was non-structural so we could finish building it. Then we went on the Lego website - you can report missing pieces and they will send you a new piece in the post - it took about a week to arrive. Which was fine... I guess if it had been a structural piece we may have been less impressed.

AtlasBarfed• 2 years ago

Yeah, but Lego inflates its part counts with lots of smaller pieces now.

The licensed sets are also a big hit. The best sets Lego makes are the creator ones, some of them I've bought multiple of so my kid could have the alt builds at the same time.

jojobas• 2 years ago

So it should be price per 100g or something unless you want these 5mm parts, or some blend of price per piece and price and weight.

dunham• 2 years ago

It looks like the new D&D set is about $0.10 per piece, including licensing, but it's 3745 pieces so there is economy of scale.

The set you link is much smaller and has Disney licensing, which I suspect is of the "how much money do you have?" variety.

aidenn0• 2 years ago

Be interesting to see median or quartiles instead of just average; licensed sets probably skew the average up.

bombcar8• 2 years ago

I'd like to see it per pound. I suspect (based on my feelings) that licensing is less per set than you might think, and that the price per pound has been trending up as piece size trends down.

NickNameNick• 2 years ago

I'd expect 2 small pieces to weigh more than 1 big one.

So I'd expect you to see the weight go up faster than the part count.

Not sure if that would confound or exagerate the trend.

bena• 2 years ago

Another factor is that Lego is using more greebling than in the past. So you have more "parts", but they're all small pieces used for detailing rather than larger structural components of the build.

yalok• 2 years ago

exactly, that's been my concern as well - more and more parts now are very specialized and hard to reuse in other projects.

Makes me sad for the kids - this limits creativity...

Jean-Philipe• 2 years ago

Well, yes and no. Look at the Ninjago City sets where the designers have used special parts in very creative ways!

Otherwise, I too prefer sets without special parts. The Minecraft and Creator series are excellent for that.

chomp• 2 years ago

There’s actually less specialized parts these days, that’s what put Lego in trouble in the 90s, I think what GP commenter was referring to is a ton of the studs and cylinders and 1x1 diagonal parts that Lego includes, that are “fluff”. These parts are extremely cheap to produce, so you may have data that looks like price per part is flat, but in reality that’s because more of your sets are now from cheaper detailing parts.

gmueckl2• 2 years ago

I'd say yes and no. I find very few parts that are custom shapes for a single set these days. Most part shapes are very generic, but there is an absolutely wild variety of them now. There is an enormous number of SNOT, tile and slope pieces, for example. These can make slick looking builds, but getting a decent and useful collection of those for MOCs is hard.

Where Lego gets tricky is the combination of shape and color: the color palette has been growing over the years, too, but most of the weirder shapes are only available in specific colors and not always the colors you would intuitively expect them to have. I guess it happens because manufacturing/stockpiling the whole outer product of shape x color is just infeasible at this point. So the available colors are just whatever is used in the current sets, however weird it may seem.

paulddraper2• 2 years ago

So buy Lego Classic.

They're not like 80s-era simplicity, but they definitely reuse peices.

They're not rare; they're on every shelf. (But they're not Harry Potter, Star Wars, etc.)

dudul• 2 years ago

Do you have some example? My kid uses "popcorn" parts to make chimney smoke, he uses "wolfverine claws" to make thatch roofs. Yes there are more parts created all the time, but you can still use them in very creative ways.

SushiHippie• 2 years ago

Would also be interesting to see how zhe PPP changes with the amount of pieces in a set. i.e. if small sets with a tiny piece count have a higher PPP than larger sets with hundreds of pieces.

dhosek• 2 years ago

At a rough glance, that does appear to be the case.

hermitcrab• 2 years ago

Top tip. Buy used Lego cheap from ebay (or similar) and stick it in the dishwasher in a string bag. Try to avoid Lego from a smoker's house or that has been heavily gnawed. And keep the dishwasher heat low, unless you want Salvador Dali Lego.

bombcar8• 2 years ago

Hotter tip - if you live near a Goodwill auction site, you can pickup "in store" and so you can bid for their bulk Lego without shipping.

prawn• 2 years ago

In case you never read this at the time - he's talked about it on HN a few times:

Sorting 2 Metric Tons of Lego https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/

JKCalhoun• 2 years ago

The Persistence of Playtime

makeitdouble2• 2 years ago

Another tip: the quality difference between a Lego brand piece and its doppleganger from an AliExpress shop exists, but is usually negligible.

I never saw a piece that doesn't fit, and the difference was mostly color and durability, where the no-brand technic bricks would fail earlier than the Lego ones when (ab)used for mechanically straining purposes, like a coat hangers, cup holder etc.

The more interesting part: this opens up access to more original and specialized parts that Lego doesn't want or cares about, like a go pro mount for instance.

4gotunameagain• 2 years ago

How about regulations on plasticizers and chemicals that your kids will put in their mouth ?

Or the environmental impact, for which an EU company will care much more and be regulated for ?

dtgriscom• 2 years ago

I'd love Salvador Dali Lego, as long as the pieces still clicked together.

Biganon• 2 years ago

I feel like low heat would be beneficial to bacteria, instead of killing them...?

bowsamic• 2 years ago

Dishwashing and clothes washing are not designed to kill bacteria, even at high temperatures. They are designed to wash away bacteria. Detergent is a surfactant, it lifts bacteria/stains/dirt out of the material and then we wash them away. They are not usually anti-bacterial unless you buy a specific detergent that is

boplicity2• 2 years ago

Lego is a plastics company; they're trying to become net-zero, but, unfortunately, being a plastics company, this is extremely hard:

https://www.ft.com/content/6cad1883-f87a-471d-9688-c1a3c5a0b...

elzbardico• 2 years ago

Why? As long as people don't burn the bricks....

donkeyboy• 2 years ago

Plastic is made from upstream oil and gas companies. Kind of hard to be net-zero in that sector

boplicity2• 2 years ago

The creation of plastic products causes significant emissions, which is something that I don't think is widely understood.

magnetowasright2• 2 years ago

ft link: https://archive.is/20230924232054/https://www.ft.com/content...

magnetowasright2• 2 years ago

The world’s largest toymaker announced two years ago that it had tested a prototype brick made of recycled plastic bottles rather than oil-based ABS, currently used in about 80 per cent of the billions of pieces it makes each year. However, Niels Christiansen, chief executive of the family-owned Danish group, told the Financial Times that using recycled polyethylene terephthalate (RPET) would have led to higher carbon emissions over the product’s lifetime as it would have required new equipment.

I just thought that particular issue around new equipment was interesting.

GuB-42• 2 years ago

Lego may be the most "eco-friendly" plastics company in existence. Not because their factories and materials are special, but because they are among the most durable plastic items there are.

Lego last essentially forever. 50 year old bricks are still in use today, I don't think I have ever seen people trashing Lego. They are actually quite valuable and very easy to sell. I think the only significant losses beside a few accidents are sets that end up, unused, in attics. But they are not really lost and may get a second life as they get rediscovered.

This may be the ultimate sustainable toy. I mean, name another toy that is still usable and didn't get obsolete after nearly 100 years. The most surprising part to me is that they are still selling. Maybe that thanks to adults, I don't know how long it will last.

As for their packaging, it is mostly cardboard, they use less plastic than almost everyone else. In fact, they are going towards no plastic packaging at all.

mtreis86• 2 years ago

name another toy that is still usable and didn't get obsolete after nearly 100 years

Lincoln Logs are just over 100 years old. An original set, if any exists, should still be usable.

Libcat99• 2 years ago

I also have a hard time imagining Lego didn't inspire Minecraft and similar games, at least a little. An even more sustainable resource.

amelius• 2 years ago

Don't kids want 3d-printers these days?

Arrath• 2 years ago

Sure, but if they're anything like my friend's kid they're not really computer-savvy, just reasonably proficient at driving apps. Thus, when he plugged in his 3d printer and was confronted with some driver or configuration problems he threw his hands up, said it was junk, and went back to roblox.

Trying not to sound too much like a 'kids these days!' rant, but that is what happened (yes, in this one anecdotal case). I think we're doing everyone a disservice by abstracting away all the underlying layers to the point that people don't have to interact with the filesystem, but that's a whole different subject.

gmueckl2• 2 years ago

One thing that is not captured accurately in a simple price over parts count computation is the fact that parts complexity is wildly different between shapes. There's a huge difference between a 1x1 plate and a Technic baseplate with holes pointing in every direction, to pick extreme examples.

I believe that even factoring in the extra handling costs and margins, the prices on Pick a Brick give a decent approximation of the actual price span (<$0.10 to >$2.00 per piece).

sxp• 2 years ago

Is it just me or does the data aspect of the site feel horribly designed? E.g, the main graph is hard to read since most of the data points are in the $0.10/part range but the graph's y-axis is overwhelmed by the right side with it's $3.11/part train set. And if I click on that, https://brickinsights.com/sets/categories/26 shows 4 data points and it's overwhelmed by a single outlier from 1991. And the time-sequence chart near the bottom uses a line graph rather than a scatterplot which overwhelms the useful data.

A better graph would be a time-sequence scatterplot of price/part on a log scale like https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/5oanki/leg...

oofbey2• 2 years ago

Of course very few people are experts in visual display of data, but this one is so horribly bad. Log scale please? The title of the post should be a simple chart, and there are charts on the page, but it's completely impossible to get the useful data out of the charts. Sheesh.

rylittle• 2 years ago

You can turn off some of the series to make it easier to read.

ryukoposting3• 2 years ago

I made a script last year that scraped LEGO pricing data from their website. Besides finding out that the Bugatti Bolide Technic set is a pretty good deal as a parts bag, I found that there's only a weak correlation between set size and PPP. The Dots sets throw a wrench in things, of course, and large Technic sets often have expensive electronic and pneumatic parts that must be considered.

My conclusion was that PPP is useful as a bargain-hunting tool, but not as a model for broad price analysis.

Here's that for anyone interested:

https://old.reddit.com/r/lego/comments/1328f52/detailed_lego...

bombcar8• 2 years ago

Just like the article, you really have to correct for outliers to make PPP work. It's more of a "rule of thumb" that you can use to determine if something is, as you said, a bargain worth getting even if it is outside your main area.

Bricklink's "part out" tool is more accurate, but some pieces get priced "wrong" and you have to know enough to determine that.

samstave3• 2 years ago

Epic! thank you!

I loved going to Valley Faire Mall in San Jose and scooping parts by the pound.

I didnt see any of the lego store by-the-pound model.

An interesting method for sus-ing up what parts they had would be looking into the shipments to-from lego entities in NL and USA - sea shipping bills of lading can be found on import yeti (now obviously unless someone has digitized historic bills of lading, etc (and we all know that ship hands (pirates) and long-shoremen (mob) have famously been the definition of corruption - so we can hardly ever trust any bill of lading...

So with that in mind though:

Lets look at the shipments of LEGO https://i.imgur.com/HgLlBuF.png

Nathan appears to be a top importer of Lego https://i.imgur.com/xYDvko5.png

Ships mostly a container a month to LA. https://i.imgur.com/7ZALaMi.png

LegoLand is his customer: https://i.imgur.com/I0oS1wu.png

But I cant find out contents of shipment .... AH Check this out: https://i.imgur.com/7CjqVBW.png

So you can see that they are ~1,000 lbs per shipment... rounding up - then remove ~30% for weight of packaging and basically you have 750 pounds of plastic bricks - then apply part existance probability and you can see how much of each part is being imported and a costing idea...

We could probably map out all lego sets and shipments with some dilligence.

Should also look at the environmental impact of lego long term. its a LOT of plastic.

dsr_• 2 years ago

Part existence probability changes every couple of months, probably not enough time for you to be able to make good estimates.

LEGO tends to get hoarded, resold or donated, not thrown away. I believe I have more than 99% of all the LEGO I or my parents ever bought, going back to 1976 or 7.

brazzy• 2 years ago

large Technic sets often have expensive electronic and pneumatic parts that must be considered.

On the other hand, Technic sets contain large numbers of pins, which are basically worthless.

oaiey• 2 years ago

Exactly. And motors are massively overpriced compared to what is in them.

dclowd9901• 2 years ago

I had no idea this was even a thing. I always just think “would this set make me $x happy to have?”

Of course, the answer is never “no” so I think I probably am not very bargain conscious when it comes to LEGO. And I may have a problem.

sharkweek• 2 years ago

Any advice for someone developing a problem?

But seriously, the cost is so worth it for me. As someone who has attention span challenges from time to time, LEGO puts me into a flow state like almost nothing else. I love a good 2-3 night session putting together a big set.

sumtechguy• 2 years ago

I have sort of got out of lego because of this very issue. Some of the end sets look cool but do not feel 'lego' anymore to me. Take something like the latest millennium falcon. I have the previous version of that behemoth that someone gave me. Most of the set is 'filler'. Basically empty void with a fragile shell on the outside that looks cool and incredibly tedious to put the gribblies on. The worst of these was the star wars star destroyer. It was huge. But mostly empty void on a frame and hundreds of very tiny decorative parts. The newer incarnations look a bit better but, I feel sort of ripped off. The Lamborghini looks very lego'y. I just do not want a lime green one. Precisely because of that detracts from the lego'y bit of it. Those pieces are pretty much only good for that one set. Lego has leaned hard into the model style of 3d puzzles with their sets. It probably saved their company. But it at this point is getting rather silly price wise. I can get the knock off brands and have a much more interesting selection of models if I want to go that way.

garyiskidding• 2 years ago

This is really cool. Thank you.

sandreas8• 2 years ago

LEGO is indeed pretty expensive these times. Not every set is that bad, but the most cars are not only expensive, but not even the best sets on the market...

There is a lot of comparisons, but the most convincing one maybe the LEGO Ferarri (42125) vs. CADA Italian Super Car (C61042W) video[1] of "Held der Steine" (german youtube channel). The LEGO is "parts only" - the CADA is remote controlled with led lights near double the parts of the lego one for the same price.

Many of the newer manufacturers are 100% compatible and provide near double the part count for a similar set. Even if some of them are shameless rip-offs and illegal to have in some countries, most of them are smaller companies with great part quality, prints (no stickers) and innovative designs (see CaDA® C61503W AMG One).

There is also the world of Trains or Tractors, where LEGO tends to fail every time.

There are

  - CaDa
  - BlueBrixx
  - Cobi
  - fischertechnik
  - Unico
  - Mould King
  - burgkidz
  - Wange
  - Sluban
  - Q-Bricks

Just to provide you some alternatives :-)

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXphWMPWsZw

beAbU• 2 years ago

I don't think you can compare LEGO with not-LEGO...

Firstly it feels a little sacrilegious, but religion aside quality is often uncomparable and there was this common meme from my childhood that your parents did not love you if you got knockoff LEGOs. Part of the reason why we buy LEGO is because it's LEGO. Buying some other brand (regardless of quality) does not hit the same way.

bluetomcat3• 2 years ago

In general, their brick quality isn't on par with Lego. The clutching of Lego bricks is finely weighed and consistent. The colouring is brighter. They don't have nasty toxic smells and paints. The set catalogues are more diverse with many more themes. Set designs are original and matching the age group. There is also historical significance and nostalgia for certain sets and themes, and they can be re-released as new sets with modern building techniques and new parts.

vr462• 2 years ago

I’ve seen how much attention Lego puts into designing and making their bricks and sets, as well as their general outlook, so combined with their better quality, fake Lego bricks is not something I want polluting or diluting my/my kid’s Lego.

exar0815• 2 years ago

Just one "Datapoint", but I have a colleague that works in injection molding. Granted, he works on the "other end" of the size scale (complete car underbodys in one part), but he always said it was more or less a given fact that the two companies wo had "dialed in" their molding processes to near perfection and quality were Lego and Games Workshop in the UK.

GatorD42• 2 years ago

The Cada cars definitely look good, the Amg one and Alfa Romeo f1 car are licensed too. Has anyone here actually built them? The interiors seem to be all black parts which could be a headache to get the right piece. Technic sets have good instructions and helpfully colored pieces which makes for a great build experience. Just wondering what it is like to actually bulls a Cada set.

j452• 2 years ago

Technics is badass though. Still remember my set.

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

Someone should figure out how to quantify how “creative potential” a piece has so you can measure how reusable pieces in a set will be for building unique things.

bombcar8• 2 years ago

I suspect you could do something quick and dirty with "connectors" - a 1x1 brick would have two connectors, a 2x4 brick would have 16.

Apply some form of modulo by piece count (8 1x1 bricks are more "creative" than a single 2x4) and you'd be close.

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

I suspect you’re right, and would like to add that perhaps the physical weight of the piece may also provide some insight. Small light weight pieces with many connectors likely have large amounts of use cases. Big pieces with small amounts probably not as much.

The axis upon which connections attach to may be another important variable.

fuzzy_biscuit• 2 years ago

I love the idea, but the year axis starting so early makes the days more difficult to read, esp. on mobile.

Triphibian• 2 years ago

I didn't see any mention in the cost of licensing impacting the price of sets. That's a huge factor. Kits from Lego's own IP such as Ninjago, etc can offer a better PPP value because they aren't cutting in Disney or some other media brand.

shmeeed• 2 years ago

This. We know for a fact that there's a huge gap in PPP between licensed and unlicensed sets. Unfortunately, without this distinction, the data is basically worthless.

ragazzina• 2 years ago

Observation 4: Licensed IP isn't always expensive...
Piece count and part size have a much larger effect on PPP than licensing royalties. There isn't a huge difference between licensed themes and Lego's own internal themes. This makes a bit of sense- Lego is big enough that their own IP can command markups on a similar level as big-name entertainment franchises. Ninjago and minifigs are great examples of this.
Observation 5: ...except for Star Wars
Despite averaging over 1000 pieces, Star Wars sets rank near the bottom in PPP. Every theme below Star Wars features low piece counts and/or lots of electronics. Long-time Lego people already knew the Star Wars sets had a heavy markup, but it's interesting to see how Star Wars compares to another Lucasfilm franchise, Indiana Jones.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39760878

pubby• 2 years ago

As a kid I did the math on all the lego sets, and came to the conclusion that the 500 piece bucket was the best bargain, beating out the 1000 piece bucket by a decent amount. Most other sets were an awful value in comparison.

As an adult, I realized buying new was idiotic when I could just buy used. I ended up buying a former lego employee's collection for $60, selling the monorail it contained for $1000, and keeping the massive washing-machine sized rest for myself. Too bad deals like that come once in a lifetime!

oofbey2• 2 years ago

I'd love to see a chart of lego part prices over the years. Instead, what I saw was a couple charts showing only the outliers of the most-expensive parts over the years.

Data visualization fail.

kromem• 2 years ago

What happened in 2010? Spike in both system and electronics.

bhouston• 2 years ago

You can buy bulk lego compatible parts from AliExpress that are basically identical to real lego pieces.

ivanech• 2 years ago

5 years ago I did a similar analysis of price per part because I remember there being a big controversy around the price of the new Star Destroyer set. I analyzed price per piece but also price per gram, estimated in a few different ways. I was surprised to see that price per gram was stable through the 2010s on an inflation-adjusted basis and that it went down fairly significantly over the 1990s.

I did this before I learned how to finish projects, so it's been sitting in a private repo the whole time :)

I just made the repo public. Perhaps the author or someone else can make use of it: https://github.com/iechevarria/lego-price-analysis/

The plots and code are in this file: https://github.com/iechevarria/lego-price-analysis/blob/mast...

NilsIRL• 2 years ago

I did this before I learned how to finish projects

Very curious about this. As do many people I struggle to finish projects.

How does one learn this skill?

Moru• 2 years ago

1. Pick something small that you know you can finish.

2. Finish it.

3. Feel the rush of actually finish something!

4. Repeat.

Ok, not that easy but that is how I got around to it eventually.

parentheses• 2 years ago

The higher PPP is well explained by the fact that the actual blocks are bigger. Plus, younger age targeted sets have more figurines and less small pieces. For example, the duplo train set I bought for my daughter has several very large train car bases.

coin• 2 years ago

That is one slow chart

seanvelasco• 2 years ago

What happened with Legos? They used to be simple. Harry Potter Legos, Star Wars Legos, complicated kits, tiny little blocks. I’m not saying it's bad. I just wanna know what happened.

crooked-v• 2 years ago

Extremely profitable licensing happened. They're much better these days at making everything reusable than they used to be, though, and it's rare for anything beyond prints/stickers to be set-specific. Even prop pieces like Harry Potter wands or Star Wars blasters regularly get reused in unrelated sets as part of the bric-a-brac.

micheljansen• 2 years ago

Their patents have expired, so now anyone can make the simple kits and compete with LEGO. LEGO avoided this by building lots of exclusive IP partnerships: https://iposinternational.com/resources/articles/the-buildin...

j452• 2 years ago

Brand partnerships are a part price multiplier

dna_polymerase• 2 years ago

The first data point in the time series seems to be from 1991, yet the x-Axis starts at 1949. Why? I'd have a better overview of the price changes if the actual data had more space.

smashmiek• 2 years ago

I can’t read your chart labels. There’s not enough contrast.

noneeeed• 2 years ago

I wonder how much the trend towards smaller pieces has affected this. There seem to be many more very small detail pieces in the kits now, which makes for lovely detailed models, but increases the part count without increasing the size noticably.

One of my frustrations with trying to get my kids into lego is the proliferation in these one and two stud pieces in relatively small kits that are otherwise perfect for kids. Those tiny pieces can be pretty hard for smaller children to put in place properly, and make the build instructions harder for them to follow on their own. They result in higher detailed models at the end of it, but both my kids found them very frustrating when they were smaller.

bluetomcat3• 2 years ago

One of my frustrations with trying to get my kids into lego is the proliferation in these one and two stud pieces in relatively small kits that are otherwise perfect for kids.

With my 5-year-old, we keep groups of sets in separate stackable plastic boxes. In one plastic box, we have only City vehicles (vans, tractors, cars, SUVs) which are mostly in an assembled state. He would play with them on the ground and would occasionally want to disassemble one. He then builds his own wacky wheeled creation, pridefully shows it to me and then asks "daddy, can you give me the instructions so we can build the original tractor again".

We also have another box with mostly gray rectangular bricks from 31120 "Medieval Castle". We would both stand on the ground for hours, doing stuff like small towers, houses, or just wacky things resembling real-world objects he has seen.

dan_hawkins• 2 years ago

Regular LEGO sets are not intended for small kids, Duplo sets are. Every LEGO set comes with suggested age range or suggested minimum age on the box.

systems• 2 years ago

this is too complex , i just wanted the price per brick over the years

like year -> price

this is too enterprisy

31carmichael• 2 years ago

I never understood Legos. For kids, they are quite expensive as a toy. For adults, why don't you build something actually useful. For example, learn to build electronics projects, or mechanically useful objects, or simple woodworking.

Lego price per part over the years

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