Two arrested, including 71-year-old man, for allegedly stealing almost 3,000 boxes of LEGOs

Wilshire@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 175 points –
Two arrested, including 71-year-old man, for allegedly stealing almost 3,000 boxes of LEGOs
nbcnews.com
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They do list an age range of 4 to 99 so he's well within normal limits.

And Lego fans/dads know there's a king's ransom worth of Lego in that picture.

Dude, there's no way he will even be able to eat all those 3000 sets before turning 99

The product is known as LEGO. The plural is not LEGOs.

The boxes contained multiple pieces of LEGO.

A shipment of glass does not contain glasses. It contains multiple pieces or sheets of glass.

I'm going to call it LEGOs even harder now.

I'm going to assume that you used the grammatical nightmare "I'm going to call it LEGOs..." just to annoy me.

I want you to know that you doing that has made me incredibly aroused.

Oho well in that case I hope you step on some LEGOs tonight. ;)

I want you to know that you doing that has made me incredibly aroused.

😳

Language evolves. Incorrect pronunciation, punctuation, and pluralization can become "correct" through popular usage.

Lego is a registered trademark. Legos isn't.

Thats the real reason for the language push.

What do you think would happen if you tried to sell "Legos"?

Do you think Lego would agree with you then?

You're diving into Intellectual Property law here, and there's lots of nuance beyond just registered trademarks.

You could likely be fine selling a round pastry filled with apples call "LEGOS". If there was a trademark for it at one time, and it has been abandoned, you might even be able to register the trademark yourself for your round pastries.

Or try to argue genericide, and get their trademark invalidated.

time for them to register Legos then, instead of trying to fight global linguistic trends

I seem to remember a legal decision that prevented them from doing so (a horse leaving the barn type situation), so I don't think its possible. Lego is hardcore about the "lego" trademark though:

What does "a horse leaving the barn" refer to?

I think they’re referencing the idiom “closing the barn door after the horse has bolted”, ie taking a measure after it’s too late to accomplish anything.

Exactly! Just like we eat a bowl of popcorns or a plate of rices or pastas with beefs or porks, maybe with a nice glass of wines, teas or milks. After that we can go to the beach to play in the sands or if it's winter we stay in and watch the snows.

Shrimps is perfectly acceptable and correct, so watchout, any of those examples could happen....

Language evolves

Says every American who has to have it [simplified]

Lol

Oh yeah then why do my glasses have two pieces of polycarbonate lenses

over 2,800 boxes of LEGO sets, each ranging in price from $20 to $1,000.

Not to be reductive and at the risk of pissing off Lego fans, how much could those $1000 sets cost Lego to make? We're talking about plastic bricks that must cost a fraction of a cent per brick.

Legos are very cool but they seem ridiculously overpriced to me. Especially now that they're getting fans to design things, so they can't even claim any sort of R&D going into it.

I'm not going to disagree they're overpriced, especially the bigger collector sets, but they are built to insanely perfect tolerances and that's never cheap. Use any generic blocks and it's easy to see Lego manufacturing is on another level. In addition I've built countless sets and despite thousands of tiny pieces I've only had one piece missing, once. And customer support sent out that piece immediately, no questions asked.

I believe much of the cost comes from the standards they hold themselves to.

Bootleg Lego are the saddest thing. They have cool designs but the pieces not being built with the same precision makes them a shore to build. Assembled pieces just don't hold together and it becomes an unfun disaster.

Some things just need that level of insane precision and consistency to work well and comes at a cost.

I tried to give other brands a chance, primarily because Lego doesn't dabble in war builds, but yeah I built a kit, picked it up to move it and half fell out because the bricks were not able to tightly clasp. I suppose it's less of a problem if you glue, but notably different experiences indeed.

My kid one a small set one. It was a cool Japanese anime robot but it was impossible to finish. The look of frustration and my own when I tried myself. I had to tell him to give up.

That’s starting to not be true. Several of the brands out of China have better manufacturing quality than LEGO these days.

I know we're way off original topic, but do you have personal experience with the chinese brands? Any specifically you'd recommend checking out?

In addition to this - brand value and licensing costs or however they structure their deals with other companies.

Yeah I jumped on the $500 Rivendell set and was more than happy to pay that. Before that one came out my brother and I always talked about how sad we were that we didn’t get the older LoTR sets

And the new Barad-Dur set looks amazing as well.

Hah I’m definitely getting my brother that one for Christmas!

But don't they hold themselves to the same standards for smaller sets and use the same machines to make them?

Yeah of course, but I think a lot more design goes into something like Millennium Falcon 75192 ($850) than Millennium Falcon 75375 ($85), it's 6600 more bricks to build. The collectors builds also tend to have more specialized one off parts.

Exactly this.

Though I am not sure how much more the designing actually costs in labor, compared to how much more they charge. (Marketing and licensing are other things that would be customized for these specialty/collector sets)

They're not all that one-off if they're making thousands of them. And does that really justify an $850 price tag? We're not talking bespoke here.

Maybe I'm not the best person to ask because I don't buy the big sets, I settled for a millennium falcon 75257 ($170). The $1000 kits aren't worth it to me personally, I'd rather piece together MOC but I guess for someone that wants to flex or is a huge fan of a specific property, it's available 🤷

By one off I mean they introduce specific pieces for that set, which introduces more cost with a custom mold and run to create the brick. Parts you won't find in any other set.

It doesn't have to be justified to you, but it's clearly worth it to some people. My most expensive sets are <$300, but having built a fan design, I can tell you the official ones are so much better that there's not even a comparison. The construction is miles better and I've never had a missing brick in the dozens I've built. People are allowed to spend their money the way they want.

Sure. All kinds of expensive things that don't have to be expensive are worth it to some people. That doesn't really justify it.

I'm sure you buy/collect something people have told you is unjustifiable, or at least implied that whatever you're spending your money on isn't worth it.

But it's worth it to you, and that's what matters. Literally the exact same principle is at work here.

Estimates vary but seem to be between 5 and 10 cents per brick.

Lego definitely makes a profit, but they also haven't done the usual thing for a business to do, make the product cheaper to squeeze more out of it. In fact, one of the reasons to choose lego over another is the tight tolerances they have for their Legos, they fit better and hold better than a knockoff.

So like, yeah, business, they're trying to make money, but its not the clear-cut fake inflation thing going on, or even necessarily price gouging, as far as I could determine. Its more, this is what a quality product costs, they haven't cheaped out, but it just feels so prohibitively expensive because people aren't paid enough in general.

That’s not exactly true, the manufacturing quality of LEGO has gone down in recent years after moving much of the manufacturing to China. For example, you’ll find more parts with ejection marks in them today than you used to.

Ironically there are a few good Chinese knockoff brands with superior quality now.

I remember seeing something that said that while the price of a Lego set has gone up. The actual price per brick hasn't.

There's also licensing that needs to be considered.

You do pay more because of the LEGO brand, and they rely a lot on nostalgia & fandom to charge that much.

What's that like $100 worth of plastic? How is this news?

Each box is easily worth 1-2 hundred. On the low side. They’re legos. and some of those sets are the limited-time only sets

The falcon sets are all 500+, if I’m reading the thumbnail right (paywall, erg.)

If we assume 100 per, that’s still 300k in value. “It’s just plastic”… might be a legitimate reason to not buy the sets, but c’mon. You wouldn’t knock collecting art (“it’s just canvas and paint.”)

Are you comparing mass-produced plastic machine made pieces to art? I will absolutely agree that you can make art with them, but at the end of the day we're talking about plastic trash injected into a mold. If you want to get me to somehow defend a company that sell s plastic waste for a massive premium, it just isn't going to happen.

At the end of the day, we’re just talking about some pigments and solvents smeared across some cloth.

I agree some of it can be art, but it’s still just trash. And don’t even get me started on the lumps of mud!

Actually, if we want to get pedantic, I would suggest the kits are more in line with prints rather than original paintings, but just because you see it as trash, doesn’t mean it is.

Certainly my opinion doesn't change the value of it. you can spend all the money you want on plastic garbage. Or by Taylor Swift records. Or buy a Tesla cyber truck.

Opinions are subjective, but you are factually purchasing pennies worth of plastic for hundreds of dollars because of some kind of nostalgic brainwashing or just general silliness.

Same like a 3k LV bag is 150 bucks of leather. Or a 100 dollar bill is a few cents of paper.

Agree on the bag. Disagree on the currency. If Legos were used as currency then it would be totally logical if still completely stupid. Even then, there's human labor involved in making a quality bag, but every Lego brick is exactly the same and made by a machine out of a penny's worth of plastic.