Has LEGO become more expensive?

Was this written by the Lego marketing department?

TLDR: Yes, it’s more expensive.

The second dark age is upon us.

I think this would benefit from a graph or three.

Yes and I can't be convinced otherwise.

While factoring in inflation, lego's prices have decreased over time, at least as far as price per piece

The problem with Sets having more pieces is that they cost more without increasing the play value. (It does increase the display value, though)

Chinese knockoffs are cheaper, making Lego feel more expensive.
People's memories of costs in their childhood are incorrect (Lego was always expensive, but people forget that part).
Sets are bigger and therefore have a bigger price tag.
People always complain about everything.

Just some of the reasons I think people complain about price. This analysis shows ppp has actually been getter cheaper in real terms, because it does not account for inflation.

Please consider that in recent years, to keep a high Numbers of pieces Lego started to insert tons of small pieces in useless construction details. Moreover 10 c ppp was not the avverate but the maximum for me. Now 10c ppp is the average. Last 30 years saw almost no inflation and heavy production delocalization in China and Poland to keep costs low. Finally during last 30 years technology improvements contributed to reduct costs as well. If the prices were low, Lego would have not made such profits in last twenty years…
As soon as inflation exploded to 10%, Lego increased prices by average 20%…

I honestly think that a lot of sets do a poor job conveying value for price. Perhaps the addition of more pieces has led to kits becoming overly bloated?

Like the Darth Vader vs Obi Wan set that just came out. If they just made a smaller battlefield and focused on the two characters, people may have been more satisfied.

Minfigures are also getting more and more detailing, with bigger and bigger molded accessories. Could that also be a factor?

Yes! I’m a recovered LEGOholic lol and It’s been at least a year since I bought my last LEGO set. I couldn’t be happier. My Nephews seem to have ‘grown’ out of it too luckily, so I don’t even have to buy them sets for Birthdays, Christmas etc. Completely LEGO free! I do still check out new sets online but I won’t be buying them anymore. I just can’t in good conscience contribute to this greedy company that exploits its customers like they do.

Yes, but I'm also not sure *price* is the strictest measure of what's going wrong.

Looking back at the past decade, I think Lego's strongest appeal is that it had a good price spread and the quality across the line reflected that even where the price wasn't for everyone. The standard Lego line of any given theme and year tended to have a $10, $20, $30, $50, and $100 set, and the quality was relatively decent across the whole thing. Higher-end buyers could afford the whole thing, but lower-income buyers could hover in the $10-$20 range and still get something decent for their value. Case in point: the Lego Movie line had some very good $10 sets where you'd still get Emmett and a decent build. The only sets that were seriously out of range for casual buyers were things like Benny's Spaceship or the Sea Cow for the really pricey buyers.

I'd have to take a careful scan of current lines, but I feel like the $10-$20 products are fading out, and everything is turning into either too expensive for the bricks you get, or else the higher-end $200+ items are starting to dominate. Items that remain in the $10-20 range tend to look a lot blockier and cheaper. Could be my imagination, but City vehicles today tend to look a lot cheaper and less imaginative than similar vehicles from 10 years ago.

The exception might be the Microfighters and Superhero Mechs, but the Microfighters, at least, seem to be dropping way off. But really, both of those were a great entry point on the cheap. Same with the Battle Packs. Where's the low-cost entry points today?

@Somnium said:
"Yes and I can't be convinced otherwise."

Just the kind of thoughtful, reasonable prose you’d expect to find in a content section.

Instead of PPP how about an analysis based on the weight of the actual materials contained in a set. Again this can be skewed by specialized bricks and printed bricks (as well as light/motorized). I've never understood the fixation on PPP

@freelancerirish said:
"TLDR: Yes, it’s more expensive. "

NTLADAR (not-too-long-and-did-actually-read): even without taken inflation in account, LEGO's ppp has remained remarkably stable for decennia. This means that for example a 1000 piece LEGO set would have taken a much bigger chunk out of my parent's budget than it takes out of mine 30 years later.

Now, 1000 pieces would have given you a lot more 'stuff' in the '80s or '90s. Sets are nowadays much more detailed, with use of many small pieces. So that at least partially explains how it is possible to keep a steady ppp at around $10c pp. As an adult, I like current sets a lot more because of that level of displayability and I'm strangely enough not /that/ nostalgic for the sets of my youth (I stress 'strangely', since I'm normally a sucker for nostalgia). But do children have the same appreciation for details, accuracy, etc.?

Bad analysis using poor data. PPC is a way of valuing, but not how I value.

Fine assessment for a comment but not for an article. Editors should have reviewed and set back for changes?

@thefirst said:
"Yes! I’m a recovered LEGOholic lol and It’s been at least a year since I bought my last LEGO set. I couldn’t be happier. My Nephews seem to have ‘grown’ out of it too luckily, so I don’t even have to buy them sets for Birthdays, Christmas etc. Completely LEGO free! I do still check out new sets online but I won’t be buying them anymore. I just can’t in good conscience contribute to this greedy company that exploits its customers like they do."

If you hate LEGO so much, why are you here?

PPP really should've never been the norm to determine value. It should be by weight of the content--plain and simple. Figs, specialized animals, and stickers vs. prints might make some variables but the idea is the same. The value between a Friends set and City is night and day when you weigh sets from each in the same price range, for example.

Then there is the quality control issues that have crept up in the past few years...

I'd take one of those old 1000 brick buckets over a DOTS pack of 1000 1x1 tiles.

PPP is not a good measure.

Is Lego getting more expensive?

Duh, we just had a 5 to 25 percent price across half the product range. Not to mention that a lot of new sets nowadays release over $200.

I was hoping for some statistical analysis but instead this is just Anecdote: The Article. You can't make a quantitative point by cherry-picking data. You can write an opinion piece or think piece and that's cool (I like those just fine), but if you're going to position an article as trying to get to the bottom of a data-dependent question (especially a hot topic like this one), you kind of have to do some actual data analysis.

All well and good to reach that conclusion but Lego is essentially a childrens toy and children can't afford it. Thats an issue.

PPP is not a good metric. So many parts are 1x1 sized nowadays.

Yes, it's expensive. Yes, it was always expensive. But that doesn't mean we should put up with multiple price increases like that. "Good value" is subjective. And personally I feel that there just aren't enough 'entry point' sets of 5-20 euro anymore. Everything's very skewed to 50+ sets.
The polybags aren't widely available.

Lego loves it when people treat it like a premium product. But at the same time the company doesn't quite reach 'only the best is good enough' with the chronic mismatch in part printing quality (especially on dark surfaces) and stuff like sticker background mismatches, brick quality (especially dark red... still!), brick durability, value for money, and much more. Not to mention that sets seem to be priced for discounts. Worldwide, even on places where there ARE no discounts.

I get it. We're fans. But please stay critical.

Ppp is almost completely irrelevant because newer sets include tons of studs, technic pins, and various 1x1 pieces for greebling etc. For example, a space police ship when I was a kid might have been made of 150- 200 pieces. A similar size new Star Wars ship now would probably be 350-400 pieces, including a great deal of tiny parts not used on the older sets. That makes the price per piece argument seem silly to me. Is Lego getting more expensive? Umm they literally just raised the prices on tons of existing sets.....

@TomKazutara said:
""... likewise our hobbies become harder to fund ..."

This right here is the reason why Lego is boosting the prices, because 18+ !
Apparently Lego is a Hobby and not a Toy anymore, you know for kids (with short pocket money) .

Lego can be a Hobby yes,
but if you see Lego as an expensive hobby, like RC-Cars, Modeltrains, or Model-Kits,
than you are part of the problem."

I think this is an incredibly succinct way of looking at it. Yes, Lego is at least starting to slide away from kids and more towards high-end collectors. This isn't explicitly bad, but it may hurt the company's long-term viability. It's important to build long-term viability with the young customer base, rather than focusing on older hobbyists who will eventually die off.

This price per piece is a nonsense. Wouldn't be wiser a price per weight?

I feel that the quantity of desirable products has increased in recent years as well, making decisions about purchases even more troubling. Opportunity cost has increased just as much as cost in general.

I agree it's not really quantified, my problem with Lego is the equation between pre agreed prices which either limit the designer (can't build bigger because this is a £70 set) or the need to add fillers (some nice builds but do people want anymore speeder bikes/12 part furniture builds).

Build something & decide on an appropriate price taking into consideration weight, price of parts etc...also including exclusive minifigs in expensive sets continues. I measure purchases on how nice the build is and playability/display but others will have their own criteria. I'm much more measured in buys and tbh prefer moc now anyway

@thefirst said:
"Yes! I’m a recovered LEGOholic lol and It’s been at least a year since I bought my last LEGO set. I couldn’t be happier. My Nephews seem to have ‘grown’ out of it too luckily, so I don’t even have to buy them sets for Birthdays, Christmas etc. Completely LEGO free! I do still check out new sets online but I won’t be buying them anymore. I just can’t in good conscience contribute to this greedy company that exploits its customers like they do."

Whatever makes you happy, but...
https://bricknerd.com/home/greed-or-inflation-an-economic-analysis-of-lego-price-increases-7-26-22

I don’t even understand how people are still buying Lego at such a high rate. My last 3 sets purchased have been Winnie the Pooh (had a 30% discount), the limited edition TRU Star Wars set (because limited edition) and Old Fishing Store (At regular price because it was the rare good set worth the price, this has tripled in secondary market value since affirming how it was a good set). Those Star Wars UCS sets and D2C have gotten so ridiculously priced in recent years it’s laughable. And don’t get me started on the Lego remakes of the video game systems - Atari!?

I’m waiting for the next Old Fishing Store. Hopefully they don’t mess up the upcoming A frame cabin. Though I’m not holding my breathe.

@TheMikeStrikesBack said:
" @thefirst said:
"Yes! I’m a recovered LEGOholic lol and It’s been at least a year since I bought my last LEGO set. I couldn’t be happier. My Nephews seem to have ‘grown’ out of it too luckily, so I don’t even have to buy them sets for Birthdays, Christmas etc. Completely LEGO free! I do still check out new sets online but I won’t be buying them anymore. I just can’t in good conscience contribute to this greedy company that exploits its customers like they do."

If you hate LEGO so much, why are you here?

"

Lol

Where exactly did he write that?

The only time I have the slightest interest in the price per piece is when I'm buying pieces.
If I'm buying a set, it's value to me is based on how well designed it is, how much enjoyment I will get building it, and how good it will look when it's completed.
To me, valuing a set based on the price per piece is like valuing a book based on the price of the paper and ink.

I have to do the unthinkable and compare Lego to Mega Construx here. Mega has increased in quality and value while maintaining value pricing while Lego has gone in the opposite direction. Why is the bargain brand featuring exclusive prints but Lego can't do the same for sets that cost more than a new video game console? It's embarrassing.

Price-per-part is a reasonable metric, or so I think. What is always known is the RRP/MSRP and the part count. Weight isn’t something that I’m sure gets measured properly, and consistently, or even officially. What happens when a new set is released with a new part not already weighed, or a mold is changed, and a part’s weight changes enough to skew that metric? Neither metric factors in complexity in molding the part which I’m convinced influences price. If your concern is how much the set costs with respect to the part count or the weight, why exactly are you buying the set? People can buy whatever they want for whatever reason, but if your principal concern is the “deal” you’re getting, then just focus on those sets that afford you such and stay away from those that don’t. Based on that, seems like there’s something for everybody and in some instances, prices have gone down, not up. But yes, some, not most.
Funny thing is, my 2022 wishlist (so far) has these stats:
Total Items: 52; Total Price: $3,040.44; Total Price/Part: $0.10; Total VIP Points: 19,194 ($145)

That ranges from $0.03 per part for 41946 to $0.71 per part for 71033.
I’ve noticed particularly the price on the Creator Expert modular buildings has slowly crept up over time. And the 4+ sets really skew the price per part argument some people use (me included). They feel so expensive given what you get. Sure, there’s likely a reasonable explanation for that but I’m not shopping based on reasonable explanations. I don’t focus on the part per price but more so how much the entire set costs and what it is, but that’s me. Others are likely to disagree with me and that’s just fine, I can’t tell you how you feel or what you feel and nor would I ever attempt to. I’m just sharing my thoughts on this.

People gonna people.

Perhaps one should ask how a Lego set (which is really just plastic) compares to more sophisticated devices. For example, the big Millennium Falcon costs as much as a smartphone... I think this could also be an angle to measure how expensive Lego sets have become compared to other regular products.

I get why the cost/value of LEGO undergoes so much scrutiny. I am a little confused about some of the claims that LEGO has dipped drastically in quality in the past several years. There have been some issues (e.g. certain colors produced in certain years were more brittle, there have been some inconsistencies in opacity at times), but the overall quality of your average brick seems pretty consistent to me based on my personal experience.

@Mirakle said:
"Perhaps one should ask how a Lego set (which is really just plastic) compares to more sophisticated devices. For example, the big Millennium Falcon costs as much as a smartphone... I think this could also be an angle to measure how expensive Lego sets have become compared to other regular products."

To say it's "just plastic" seems like an oversimplification that does not take into consideration what is done with that plastic and what that involves. It's not like you're paying for a pile of ABS granules.

@TheMikeStrikesBack said:
" @thefirst said:
"Yes! I’m a recovered LEGOholic lol and It’s been at least a year since I bought my last LEGO set. I couldn’t be happier. My Nephews seem to have ‘grown’ out of it too luckily, so I don’t even have to buy them sets for Birthdays, Christmas etc. Completely LEGO free! I do still check out new sets online but I won’t be buying them anymore. I just can’t in good conscience contribute to this greedy company that exploits its customers like they do."

If you hate LEGO so much, why are you here?

"

I don’t hate LEGO. I like LEGO. But I’m not very fond of TLG.

Was the price of oil factored in?
Oil's been about $70/barrel from the end of 2014 til roughly the end of 2021.
Some years from like 2016 to 2019 was under $70- with a couple months at around $40/barrel and $20/barrel.
From '79 to '82 over $100/barrel.
From '06 to most '14 averaging over $100/barrel.
Now we're back to averaging $100/barrel again (Feb. '22 to July '22).

Aren't most plastic made from oil?

"quality products will always command a premium price"

Quality? Have you not noticed the color matching issues of Lego sets in the last few years?
Also, 120 € / $150 for 42144?

Now, I’m someone who long before this article has generally used that formula for my purchasing decisions- roughly .10 per piece. And frankly I like the more adult oriented, detail driven display pieces over play pieces. That being said, because of the display aspect you have to somewhat modify that ppp- a 2x4 brick is not the same as a 1x1 stud. And that really shows in the display pieces- a whoooooole bunch of muuuuuch smaller pieces as opposed to a decent amount of regular sized pieces shows. Again, I still love playing with Lego (haven’t been happy with some of their values lately, but that’s a different discussion), but to say that the prices haven’t gone up is… well, misleading at best

@utlf said:
"Lego prices have gone up, quality has steadily declined since ~2015
Let's see an article about how trash the part quality has become; I doubt it'd be released here though LMAO"

@gatorbug6 said:
"Then there is the quality control issues that have crept up in the past few years..."

This constantly gets brought up, but I really don't think Lego's quality is getting worse overall.

Lego's quality control has stayed consistent over the years, but the production has increased by >17000% since 1999. A few hundred million pieces per year around that time, these years they're producing 70 billion parts per year.

A quality assurance of 99.99% would yield a few tens of thousands of "defect" pieces in '99. Be it stickers cut wrong, colours, finishes and what not.
At 70 billion pieces, that amount rises to 7 million faulty pieces. Same quality assurance number.

The quality itself has most likely not gone down, but the amount of "faulty" pieces has gone up, simply due to an enormous increase of production over the past two decades.

I would have been excited if my wish list had only increased by $200, lol. :o)

@yui
Except when people mention quality dropping, they often also mean things like milky (and that's being generous) tranparent pieces, abysmal color matching etc. So it's not a quality control problem, it's LEGO being cheap.

Food for thought (totally subjective but coming from a 10-years AFOL must at least touch said subjects a bit)
A) LEGO sets nowadays don't spread equally on an price axis (from affordable, e.g. 5-10€, to less affordable e.g. 200€ and so on). City sets will always be the golden extension where you can always find something worthy/good looking at decent prices (farm tractor is a nice example). Oh, and Friends too but who buys friends other than to gift them to a girl in their family? :P
B) Shelf life has dramatically decreased "forcing" our collector/OCD inner selves to grab them fast. One can always wait for a significant bargain (more than the classic 20% that is) or look for older sets at flea markets (if any).
C) There used to be more pocket money/army builder sets. Now there aren't (m)any and are focused at SW.
D) PPP is a ridiculous way of evaluating set price, given how small parts are getting issued nowadays and how much more elaborate (but visually stunning) sets have become and given everybody and their mothers crave for good looking minifigures (on the latter, chinese knockoffs are getting closer and closer quality-wise each year). One can use the weight/volume factor for a better pricing reasoning. Once again I steer off licenced sets (with the exception of Harry Potter where one can find some decent pricing however the extra licensing costs. SW sets are usually off limits in Europe - in the US I have seen huge bargains at SW sets so things are definitely different there. I for once, won't buy a set only because it is cheap. It must appeal to me somehow (visually or by judging the use of its parts in my style of building MOCs)
E) TLG no longer favours themes in their sets (i.e. 2015 Pirate line) where one could find cheap, not so cheap and expensive sets and buy accordingly, without the feeling of missing out. Instead they focus on standalone Ideas sets which however beautiful, they normally frequent the over 100€ pricelines... When I was a child (before the dark ages) and couldnt afford any set costing more than 20-30€, I usually bought the cheapest set in a line and call it a day. Ofc back then MOCing wasn't something that I frequently did (at least with nowadays standards)

@thefirst said:
" @TheMikeStrikesBack said:
" @thefirst said:
"Yes! I’m a recovered LEGOholic lol and It’s been at least a year since I bought my last LEGO set. I couldn’t be happier. My Nephews seem to have ‘grown’ out of it too luckily, so I don’t even have to buy them sets for Birthdays, Christmas etc. Completely LEGO free! I do still check out new sets online but I won’t be buying them anymore. I just can’t in good conscience contribute to this greedy company that exploits its customers like they do."

If you hate LEGO so much, why are you here?

"

I don’t hate LEGO. I like LEGO. But I’m not very fond of TLG."

That’s fair. I guess you can like the product but not the company. I just find it odd when people comment that they hate TLG and have completely sworn off LEGO, yet they are still obviously following a LEGO fan site.

I think we also need to to take into account the instruction booklet - this is now a significant part of the cost of the set, and in some cases will cost more than the bricks! In the 80s and 90s most smaller sets had a single page A4 or smaller instruction sheet, folded up to fit in the box. Larger sets had a A4 booklet consisting of three or four A3 pages folded down the centre then stapled - this was about as big as it got.
Nowadays even the smallest boxed set seems to come with a 32 page instruction booklet - even bigger for larger sets, 100+ steps in a set are now commonplace. These instruction booklets aren't cheap - and will have their own logistical challenges when making a set in the factory.
So the set may not seem more expensive on a cost-per-piece basis - but you get a lot more 1x1 and 1x2 plates and tiles, which significantly bump up the piece count in each set for less cost.

The problem is not so much WHY they are expensive as to the fact that they ARE more expensive now. The reasoning will not stop those of us who just simply can't afford to keep doing this from buying less Lego. Personally, I cannot maintain (or even accelerate) my buying of Lego just because it's always been that way or because of inflation or because of war or because of whatever we conclude this week.

The bottom line is that price go up, income go down, Lego buying go down.

As the author I appreciate all of your feedback. Yes, I know people will not agree with me, but for those who accuse me of cherry picking sets, I encourage you to do what I did. Go to browse, and select any year from 1990 to 2022 and scroll down looking at PPP. You will find that the only sets that have more than $0.10ppp are licensed sets or those will large molded bricks.

I concur that price by gram would be more efficient, but Lego doesn't currently provide weight on their sets for us as consumers to determine exactly what that would be.

I am happy to support Lego as much now as I have ever been. They can't make a product without a return. If you find yourself unhappy with paying an average of $0.10ppp, then don't. I'm not saying you have to. I'm just proposing that they are just as good value for money as they have always been.

Thank you Huw and Brickset team for being willing to share my research.

There are so many very large Lego sets that when combined with recent price increases leads to very expensive sets.

Does that new $400 set have $400 in play value? It's an irrelevant question if you don't have $400.

So many sets are an easy pass because they are so large, bloated, and expensive.

Just experimentally, here's a list of sets from the first Hobbit movie with an illustration of the price spread. I don't think themes really do this anymore.

30212 Mirkwood Elf (Polybag): $4.99
30213 Gandalf at Dol Guldur (Polybag): $4.99
79000 Riddles for the Ring (Bilbo, Gollum): $9.99
79001 : Escape from Mirkwood Spiders (Elves, Dwarves): $29.99
79004 : Barrel Escape (Bilbo, Dwarves, Elves): $39.99
79002 : Attack of the Wargs (Thorin, Dwarves, Orcs): $49.99
79003 : An Unexpected Gathering (Bilbo, Gandalf, Dwarves): $69.99
79010 : Goblin King Battle (Dwarves, Gandalf, Goblins, Bigfig): $99.99

I feel like that's a good spread of figures, with a decently cheap option (two main characters for $10) and a few desirable figures being accessible. The only thing it's missing is a $20 set.

I may be cheating a bit with the polybags because those are promo items and their availability varies, but even those I'd prefer to think of as a very baseline entry-level option. The better polybags even throw in a main character and a cromulent build.

@Jcontor said:
"I concur that price by gram would be more efficient, but Lego doesn't currently provide weight on their sets for us as consumers to determine exactly what that would be. "

I'm not utterly convinced of that. If the only value you get from a LEGO set is the amount of plastic in it, then maybe. And weight might give you a general indicator of what something might cost/is worth. But there are other factors...the printing (if any), the design, the instructions...all of that takes time and money to produce. For instance, designing a "Creator-3-in-1" set is going to take more design resources to develop than a Basic box of elements. There are a lot of variables at play. Is X+1 greater than X? Yes. I think where a lot of folks are missing the mark is by accusing The LEGO Group of greed and milking the customer. Times is tough. Costs are high.

For me, the issue isn't necessarily that the price has gone up, that happens with everything in life, my issue with the current price of LEGO is that everything else has gone up so quickly by large margins against average earnings that haven't gone up to the same degree.
What was once a luxury product that I could afford without too much worry has become a luxury item that I have to think twice about buying as other things that are more important to general life are prioritised over something that isn't a necessity and quite often, stops the Lego purchase altogether.

PPP is such an arbitrary criterium. And only special moulds are taken into account here and no other parameters like e.g. brick size. A box of 1x1 plates anyone?
Sure, the article is but an opinion but to me it seems they started writing the conclusion and filled in the rest backwards.

@shaase said:
"Instead of PPP how about an analysis based on the weight of the actual materials contained in a set. Again this can be skewed by specialized bricks and printed bricks (as well as light/motorized). I've never understood the fixation on PPP"

It was a decent marker of things even about 10 years ago, because in general you had a similar mix of bricks, plates, and specialized parts between most sets. Anymore though and the PPP is a terrible descriptor because more often than not the parts are filler. Plates, 1x1s, small pieces that inflate that ratio artificially when previously you can see sets consisting mostly of bricks costing less for the same PPP.

@ResIpsaLoquitur said:
" @TomKazutara said:
""... likewise our hobbies become harder to fund ..."

This right here is the reason why Lego is boosting the prices, because 18+ !
Apparently Lego is a Hobby and not a Toy anymore, you know for kids (with short pocket money) .

Lego can be a Hobby yes,
but if you see Lego as an expensive hobby, like RC-Cars, Modeltrains, or Model-Kits,
than you are part of the problem."

I think this is an incredibly succinct way of looking at it. Yes, Lego is at least starting to slide away from kids and more towards high-end collectors. This isn't explicitly bad, but it may hurt the company's long-term viability. It's important to build long-term viability with the young customer base, rather than focusing on older hobbyists who will eventually die off."

From what I have understood, it is LEGO as a company actually addressing the adult market almost by accident (Star Wars), that saved the company; perhaps with - in some respects - going back to the 1980s and early 1990s in set design helped their survival as well.

I honestly doubt whether LEGO today actually can survive as a company if it were to focus on kids alone - considering the way kids are now almost programmed towards computer gaming by their environment; it is often the exposure (or interest) of an adult (or the old stuff the adult had) that will trigger the interest of young kids in LEGO.

@gunther_schnitzel said:
"Was this written by the Lego marketing department?"

Was this written by the Mega Bloks marketing department?

If one collects minifigures, it has become almost impossible to afford them, either by purchasing overpriced sets or by purchasing them separately on BL (also managed by TLG). CMFs have gone from about $0.25/part to over $1.60/part since they were released. The price to obtain any minifiigure in any set has gone up significantly as well.

Yes...inflation has definitely increased with all the magical money printing governments do these days. Unfortunately for TLG, businesses haven't increased salaries to keep up with inflation. Consequently, Lego sets have become much more expensive when compared with the ability to purchase them. Lego sets definitely falls into the "discretionary spending" category, so their sales can't help but be impacted. I guess it's one way to reduce the impact of plastic on the environment.

a simple confrontation: the biggest classic castles were 6090 and 375 (because of brick built animals), with a little less than 800 pieces.
The last big Icons Castle have 4500 pcs... you would think it is 6x bigger than a classic castle, but no! They're big alike! 10305 is only fuller of plates (1/3 of a brick...). Old castles had panels and raised baseplate to be bigger, but not increase the number of pieces because sets couldn't be overpriced!

Another confrontation: my childhood Police Station was 6386, with only 381 pcs (almost like a Speed Champion!) and the half of the new 60306, but the older one looks bigger than the new, not only a facade... Another one? The mythic 6399 "Airport Shuttle" had got only 767 pieces! Do you believe it?

increasing the pieces out of proportion with small pieces, it is easy to increase the prices following the rule 1 piece / 10 cent and get the same toy, but more expensive...

As I say in every one of these articles... Many of the (approximately) pre-2000 set retail prices listed on Brickset and other Lego fan sites are set to the "Shop at Home" catalog price. This is different than the Lego's real suggested retail price for the sets being purchased anywhere else. This is because "Shop at Home" used have entirely free shipping, and the "shop at home" price is actually the retail price + shipping. The real retail price would be the price found in any regular store. Because of this, this gives a false impression that older Lego sets cost more than they actually did. Later, Lego changed so that the listed price through their Shop at Home is the actual retail price, and then you paid shipping on top of that.

Yes it is more expensive, and I do not feel that part per piece (PPP) is accurate given that most parts in LEGO sets appear to be smaller than in years past, though it would be interesting if that could be quantified. But as sets have gotten 'more detailed', parts have respectively gotten smaller, which means the PPP is not truly accurate (not when most parts appear to be a ton of 1x1 plates, tiles and 1x1 type parts). It sure looks like sets have gotten more expensive though, especially given that most salaries have likely not been rising in relation to inflation.

I'd personally argue the problem is less PPP (which even before this article, I was aware is often *better* than it used to be) but more-so the price ranges of sets. As Brickset has talked about before, the number of products released per-year that are over $200 has significantly increased over the past decade. While it's cool to get so many high detailed and displayable sets, it also makes it much harder to maintain a collection.

That's not to say there *aren't* cheap set options available. We still have Collectable Minifigures in the under $10 range and Brickheadz at the $10 range, but I feel like people are missing the days where we had things like BIONICLE, X-Pods, and Tiny Turbos running simultaneously. Or even slightly more spread out collections like Mixels and Mighty Micros. I'd personally prefer a theme to consist of 10 $20 sets as opposed to 1 $200 one, so that collecting it can be divided out more easily.

@DutchFlyer said:
" @ResIpsaLoquitur said:
" @TomKazutara said:
""... likewise our hobbies become harder to fund ..."

This right here is the reason why Lego is boosting the prices, because 18+ !
Apparently Lego is a Hobby and not a Toy anymore, you know for kids (with short pocket money) .

Lego can be a Hobby yes,
but if you see Lego as an expensive hobby, like RC-Cars, Modeltrains, or Model-Kits,
than you are part of the problem."

I think this is an incredibly succinct way of looking at it. Yes, Lego is at least starting to slide away from kids and more towards high-end collectors. This isn't explicitly bad, but it may hurt the company's long-term viability. It's important to build long-term viability with the young customer base, rather than focusing on older hobbyists who will eventually die off."

From what I have understood, it is LEGO as a company actually addressing the adult market almost by accident (Star Wars), that saved the company; perhaps with - in some respects - going back to the 1980s and early 1990s in set design helped their survival as well.

I honestly doubt whether LEGO today actually can survive as a company if it were to focus on kids alone - considering the way kids are now almost programmed towards computer gaming by their environment; it is often the exposure (or interest) of an adult (or the old stuff the adult had) that will trigger the interest of young kids in LEGO.
"

BREAKING NEWS ALERT

Lego has ALWAYS been expensive!

Sooo... the appropriate comment is actually, "I love Lego, but.... OMG! What the f-! That can't be! That costs as much as.. holy crap! Wow!"

To which the appropriate response is: "Well, it's still cheaper than therapy, more enjoyable, and can I show you this interesting Forbes article about its collectable value?"

@thefirst said:
"Yes! I’m a recovered LEGOholic lol and It’s been at least a year since I bought my last LEGO set. I couldn’t be happier. My Nephews seem to have ‘grown’ out of it too luckily, so I don’t even have to buy them sets for Birthdays, Christmas etc. Completely LEGO free! I do still check out new sets online but I won’t be buying them anymore. I just can’t in good conscience contribute to this greedy company that exploits its customers like they do."

How exactly do they exploit their customers?

If I recall correctly I've seen some sets here on Brickset with a recorded weight. It would be cool to see that more. I don't ignore PPP as a metric, nor do I treat it as the holy metric it is to some. Take all factors and make a decision. "Volume of Stuff" as Jang says.

Thanks for the article!

I’d say jangbricks’s “price to volume of stuff ratio” is the best way nowadays. PPP used to be good but it’s so unstable now it’s barely worth it. There’s so many factors to take into account, like specialised molds, new colours, different licenses and so on.

Ironic and hypocritical that folks are chiding the author for not taking a more critical and thorough approach when the comments are filled with uncritical, blanket statements like "do you work for Lego marketing," "I believe it's more expensive and you can't convince me otherwise," and "TL;DR Yes they're more expensive."

The fact is that the author has UNDERstated how affordable Lego is in real terms, not overstated it. Adjusted for inflation, 10 cents per piece in 1994 is equal to 20 cents per piece today. And that's not because inflation has been high for the past year or so: 10 cents per piece in 1989 was 20.6 cents per piece in 2019 (before the pandemic even began, let alone the more recent high inflation).

The 2022 Galaxy Explorer (10497) costs just under 8 cents per piece. The 1979 Galaxy Explorer (497/928) cost just over 10.5 cents per piece - and in inflation-adjusted numbers, that means the 1979 Galaxy Explorer cost 21 cents per piece. That's a fact, and if you refuse to acknowledge it then you have no business criticizing the author of this article.

Prior to 1999, there was no Star Wars Lego, no Marvel or DC Lego, no Harry Potter Lego, no Super Mario, no Minecraft, no Pixar, and on and on. So licensed sets - which many folks complaining in this thread no doubt like and collect - have added a new cost for Lego, and yet even with that, the inflation-adjusted price per piece remains the same or lower than in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

I think it's also a little disingenuous to minimize the value of smaller, more detailed parts as "only for display value" when (a) everyone commenting here is an adult and adults care about display value; and (b) Lego continues to make Classic sets that replicate the "big box of bricks, wheels, windows, and basic elements" model of the old days - and those Classic sets are great values: the new 11022 Space-themed Classic set is $70 for 1700 pieces! Even if you assume the approximately 100 1x1 plates and tiles, frogs, and other tiny elements are useless, that set still comes in at less than 4.5 cents per part. In the late '70s/early '80s glory days of the 700- and 800-series universal building sets, the inflation-adjusted price per piece would've had to have been about 1.2 cents per piece to match that value today - and it was nowhere near that.

What has changed over the past 40-50 years, aside from the availability of many licensed lines and the greatly increased quality and detail of the instructions and increased detail of most models, is that wages have generally stagnated and barely kept up with inflation, and in the past year or two inflation has significantly outstripped wages. Also, housing costs have skyrocketed, even adjusted for inflation, and higher education has simultaneously become way more expensive and also more necessary for many careers.

So we're all feeling the pinch. But Lego is not at fault for that. It's always been a premium toy, and it remains so.

I'm not a Lego apologist - I've noticed for example that a lot of the simpler 4+ sets seem to have among the worst part per piece value of all Lego sets, and I don't like that, because those are the sets most likely to be sought after by parents of young children, who might not have as much disposable income as an AFOL who's in the market for a $300 UCS set. IMHO they should accept lower profit margins on those small sets targeted at young children.

Lego is not perfect, and they are a profit-seeking company. But the author of this article is absolutely correct.

I had to comment on this.
I used to work for the LEGO group between the years of 2011-2016 and the staff all year around would get over 20% all year around and sometimes over 40% off four times a year. (Don’t want to say specific amounts)
Now, I understand the company has to make money to stay open, invest in their product, expand, pay staff, bills etc but if they can still make money every single day say if ‘hypothetically’ a staff member bought something for over 20% all the time, why can’t they pass on some sort of discount to customers or reduce prices in general?
Surely, if they did this, customers would buy more products and some people wouldn’t be commented say that their too expensive which I do agree with especially with some prices they come out with particular sets nowadays.

At the end of the day, as a consumer, if we keep purchasing the sets, that’s our own choosing and yes it may certainly add to the company seeing the constant sales and increasing the prices.
Since leaving the LEGO group, I’ve only bought the Back to the Future range products but at the same time I’ll add this… If it’s your hobby and what you like to do, then be happy and do what’s best for you ??

An interesting point I will bring up given 6597 Century Skyway was mentioned. It was rereleased in 2004 as 10159, one of the most interesting sets in history. It came out the same time as the new brown and gray colors, resulting in dozens of old parts, often with old prints, appearing in these new colors in this set. All of these molds/prints would be subsequently retired. Exclusive designs would normally increase the cost of a set, yet this rerelease was 20$ CHEAPER than the original.

Was this Lego cutting the costs of 6597's R&D? It seems likely, but in every other case a rerelease has never been cheaper than the original. The early 2000s Legends line of rereleases (which 10159 is sometimes counted as part of) didn't cut prices like this, and the extremely rare cases since didn't either. The reason I think is it was priced low compared to the original was to make sure it would sell and help Lego get back on their feet in that time, or that it was a simple mistake given the turbulent times and change in management they forgot to check the original price and just chose a price to sell it at.

@Jcontor:

“Whether or not a LEGO set or theme is licensed affects the average ppp.”

I have to call you out on this point. Two decades ago, at a time when both SW and Bionicle had each introduced over 100 new molds, I got sick of hearing how “SW sets blah blah licensing tax blah.” I pulled up LEGO.com and compared the prices on SW vs whatever the town theme was called at the time, excluding obvious outliers like sets with electronics. SW cost $0.09/pc, while unlicensed town cost $0.11/pc.

Use of lots of specialized parts may have cost a shift in that regard, but that’s use of specialized parts, same as an unlicensed safari set with a dozen animal molds. There are a few instances where sets (both licensed and unlicensed) have had price hikes on the fly, where the intent seems to have been to temper runaway demand (CMF and battle packs are both examples of this).

One point that you missed in your conclusion that was a key factor in a previous article of this type (maybe five years ago?) is that the range of sets offered each year has about quintupled since the 90’s, so even if you stick to a max price range, you may still feel like you’re spending more if your annual wishlist has similarly grown longer.

This analysis does not account for the increased number of small pieces included within modern sets. Also the amount of 1x1 parts that cannot be stacked. Not a good value at 0.10 PPP.

Price per piece is a terribly flawed metric. This author has chosen the best examples to support their statements but they don’t provide any real data.

I just can't understand why PPP lasted so long. It doesn't make any sense (e.g. Trains).

As others have said, PPW (Price Per Weight) or dare I suggest, PPS (Price Per Stud) would be much more accurate metrics.

Yeah, LEGO is expensive and there's an overabundance of huge sets over multiple hundreds of dollars. But one argument I must pose to counter the idea of PPP being inflated by filler parts is the idea of size vs. density. Most sets use those higher part totals for meaningful detail. Modular buildings now have interior design on par with the exterior. Vehicles have more nuanced and attractive designs achieved through the geometry of smaller pieces. I think there's a general idea that value is palpable by size, but I personally would prefer something smaller and fully-finished than larger and hollow. Those smaller parts more often than not actually fulfill a purpose that makes the sets more artistically attractive and imaginative. Sure, a 1x1 doesn't seem comparable to a 2x4, but in the final product, it might be doing a lot of work.

Price per part is a good measure that I have used since 1994, but the real "value" is the more difficult to define how a product makes you feel when you think about purchasing it. I swooned over the terrible part/price value product 6286 at full retail but couldn't be swayed to buy 76942 at half price recently. Value of a thing has to be measured on the personal level, but ultimately I always start with the equation of price divided by parts.

Inflation sucks.

"Is LEGO becoming more expensive? Yes. Without adding anything new, my LEGO wish list increased $200 since August 1st, 2022.

Has the ppp we have become comfortable with changed? Not really. I stand by my $0.10 ppp standard as good value for money."

?!
If your wish list did not change but increased $200, how didn't the ppp of your wishlist change?
If your wish list had a cost of $1000 for a total of 10000 pieces, that would be $0.10 ppp. But if it now costs $1200, then it has a $0.12 ppp. I would say it's a pretty significant change.

@BrickRandom:
Nonsense. LEGO sets were always free when I was young. It was only after I got a job in high school (and had to sneak LEGO purchases into the house) that they ever started to cost money.

@gabrielerava:
Inflation has been constant, but never nonexistent, for much of the past four decades. People just haven’t noticed it in regards to LEGO sets because they’ve been able to reduce their prices at a pace that was equal and opposite to inflation for much of that time, allowing LEGO sets to stay close to $0.10/pc while many other consumer goods have shown significant price hikes. Look up consumer price index data, and you’ll see how the value of currency has steadily fallen since the birth of the minifig.

@PixelTheDragon:
The shift towards more and smaller pieces probably went hand in hand with the hiring of notable AFOLs from the online community. Go to any major AFOL convention, and you’ll see a lot of MOCs that are elaborately detailed with incredibly high part-density. There’s no reason to expect they’d switch to chunky 80’s construction just because the logo appears on their paycheck.

@ResIpsaLoquitur:
$20 sets are still fairly common, but If $10 sets are becoming less common, it’s because $10 isn’t worth as much anymore. When the minifig first appeared, that was probably four hours work for most after school jobs in the US. Now you can’t hire someone to flip burgers for less than $14/hr. As the value of the dollar shifts to the left, the affordable price range shifts to the right in response. They just haven’t really made any attempt to keep up with it for a long time, instead letting their once-luxury brand become considerably more affordable at the low end. $5 sets still exist, but now they’re polybags instead of boxes, and they’re considerably more difficult to find due to being unavailable through LEGO Brand Retail (in most cases), and being offered to a limited number of retail chains (and often not at all, depending on where you live in the world).

@shaase:
Price per piece is an objectively measurable number. So is price per weight. The recent shift has been towards “price per stuff”, where the value of “stuff” can shift based on mood, theme, and the local tidal charts.

@Elcascador:
Ooh, “decennia”! You’re going to be disregarded for certain with words like that. Welcome to the club.

@gatorbug6:
Labor costs more than a plastic. Price per piece factors that in, while price per weight ignores it. Labor prices have gone up nearly 10x since 1978, while the cost of plastic has dropped over the same time. Combining piece count and weight into a unified metric would require knowing how the two rates compare, and how much percentage of total set cost each represents. Without that data, the best we can do is try to match them against what historical data we do have, but that still creates a complex math problem to tell you if the set has good value or not.

So for the last year and a half, there have been constant complaints about quality, sold out sets limited amounts available at release and I could go on. Basically collectively we have told lego they need to get their supply problem fixed, looks like they are fixing it. "I won't be buying lego anymore" equates to better availability for those who still wish to purchase. Now Lego can slow their physical sales growth and hopefully work on better customer experience/service and in stock postition.

This is something that is done by businesses the world over all the time. Yes, it comes across as greedy, and it will not hurt their bottom line(despite how many of you think your purchasing habits changing will affect it) but if they can work on getting better at other things it should move the customer experience forward. Maybe everyone complaining about price will slowly get quieter and forums like this will also improve?

The only thing about Lego that burns me out is all the crying and whining from AFOL about prices…guess what? I can’t afford a Porsche but I don’t get on their forums and cry on every post about it. Just make a personal budget and stick to it. If you want it spend more make some sacrifices somewhere else. Maybe for example, dont buy Starbucks or eat at restaurants for a month and see how much you can add to a Lego budget. Thank you for this article and explaining the actual value of Lego.

Maybe lego is putting more money into the minifigures? But anyways I feel lego has really been less value for money in the price to volume ratio and I do wish lego could bring out themes which could have simple yet effective builds like they do a while back. I think the older sets had baseplates too, which might have made the price higher. A really huge problem I want to bring up is that lego needs to put more affordable sets in their range, there’s barely anything substantial or interesting below $10 except polybags which don’t even release here! I really miss the sets just a few years ago that were fun and boxed for 5-7 dollars :(

Yes, it has, especially relative to wages. Only recently are we starting to see rising wages in the US, while the price of Lego and the size of their sets has consistently gone up. Also, it seems like overpriced sets have become more and more common. Just look at the Justifier. It's an extreme example, sure, but sets being $10+ overpriced isn't exactly uncommon.

When wages have long-since stagnated in many developed countries and refuse to keep up with inflation, inflation really stops justifying price increases. Instead it just makes them worse.

Not to mention declining parts quality. Never saw a big ugly sprue mark on a lego piece before a few years ago, now they're ubiquitous on many parts, and they keep moving the sprues to more conspicuous regions of a part. Pigment concentration has fallen through the floor leaving some colours and some parts looking anaemic. Many small joint parts are being switched to some horrible soft plastic that has no clutch. Colour matching is getting worse by the year. I could go on. Point is, they dont get to decrease part quality *and* increase prices and act like that's reasonable.

My biggest issue is what has happened to the small sets. I remember being able to buy a variety of fun sets for $3-6 as a child in the 90's with my weekly allowance. It was how i got into a theme. Now there isn't much aside from CMF that is under $10.

I think this essay misses the point. If you are strictly looking at ppp, then by prices remaining consistent over the past few decades, Lego has actually become much cheaper. But it isn’t that simple (nor is it ok to just look at large specialized parts).

The fact is that sets today include many more smaller parts than they did in the past. This has resulted in part counts becoming bloated. Furthermore, Lego now produces many huge sets, with part counts getting bigger and bigger each year. So while the ppp may seem to have remained unchanged, you are getting more parts for a smaller overall set these days.

Also, if you look at Lego sets from the 80’s, the vast majority of them were small little $5 sets, today $5 will buy you a custom minifigure or a polybag with no minifigure. The smallest actual sets are usually around $15.

I personally don’t feel Lego has gotten more expensive, but I do feel like they have made the cheaper sets less desirable and less available. The emphasis today is on large expensive sets that in the past would never had been produced.

@MainBricker:
If you read the previous article (and you don’t bail after the first paragraph, claim you do this sort of thing for a living, and then claim that if they had any clue what they were talking about they would have written the exact article that you pointedly didn’t read…as one user foot-in-mouthed over), they point out that it’s only sets with a multi-year release schedule that were affected. Single-year releases can be retired before inflation makes them unprofitable, and price adjustments for their replacement sets can be calculated before the sets are announced. So, guess what percentage of multi-year releases fall into the 18+ category?

@TeriXeri:
And I bought a copy of Farnsworth House to strip it of white 1x1 tiles because it was more cost effective than buying them on Bricklink. Plus, all the extra parts were free at that point.

@Wasthereonce:
It wasn’t even 10% of the product range. There are over 500 sets released every year now, plus all the big D2C sets carry over for a few years so total production is probably around 600 sets at any given moment. And yes, sets with higher price tags exist now. In 1978, $100 was a week’s pay for many people in the developed world (US federal minimum wage was $2.65 at the time). The same job today probably pays more in one day. Sets costing $800 would have bankrupted the company in 1978 because only a handful of the very rich would have been able to afford them, and sales volume wouldn’t have covered the development cost. A $100 set can now be an impulse purchase, where four decades ago it was probably reserved for Christmas, or maybe birthdays.

@Draykov:
That was an excellent and informative article that was shot down by people who admitted they hadn’t even read it. An even better article from a decade ago can be found here:

http://www.realityprose.com/what-happened-with-lego/

It wasn’t received any better by the AFOL community.

@Mirakle:
Considering there are phones that cost 50% more than the UCS MF2, it also shows how the cost of owning a phone has skyrocketed, compared to a time when most landline handsets were sub-$20.

@Jraptor:
No, a 1x1 plate resells for about 1/5 a 2x4 brick. A 2x4 brick is 24x the size of a 1x1 plate. Clearly the demand-driven resale market values the tiny parts more than the Brickset comment section.

@Onatu:
1x1 and plates are detail pieces. Filler is 2x4 bricks. I get dark-purple 2x4 bricks on LUGBulk, and the other members of my LUG can’t believe that all I really do with them is make minifig stands and packing material.

A simple way to 'normalize/standardize' all this, is to go by theme. Say you take 'City': you take all the sets in a given year, you tally all the prices, and all the part counts; divide one by another and you have a 'normalized' price per parts for 'City' for that year (basically eliminating distortions for large/small sets as well as specialized parts). You then do the exercise for every year and see if there is a trend (would also be very interesting to see the cost progression to buy an entire theme over the years). This might be a bit more difficult for Technic and Trains as both themes include sets with lots of electrical components - but I am not even sure this would skew the results too much.

Best person to carry such an analysis would be Huw as he has full access to the database and can create easy queries to perform all this in a few minutes.

I scroll through all these comments and all I see is "Waaaaah."

TLDR version of this comment section: Waaaaah

Most likely responses to my post: Waaaaah

@DutchFlyer:
That is a falsehood that has been perpetuated by disgruntled AFOLs who refuse to admit the theme that was “destroying the company” almost single-handedly saved it. Star Wars did set things up, but didn’t do the heavy lifting. From sometime after WWII to 1998, Germany was their biggest market. In 1999, SW launched, and the US overtook them. SW was a huge success in 1999. And again in 2002. And again in 2005. During the gap years it held its own, but didn’t have a film or TV series to help drive sales. Harry Potter also helped, and didn’t have the problem of gap years (with eight films released over 11 years, there were only three gap years, with no two-year gaps). Instead, TLG quickly found that the movies skewed darker than the existing books had when they signed the contract, so set design dropped to one set for HP5, none for HP6-7, and they cherry-picked scenes from the entire film series for HP8 (including one tiny set from the final film).

In the midst of this, Bionicle launched, with full afterburners. I attended NYTF from 2002-2004, and one of those years they handed out a fact book. Star Wars was their second best seller that year. Harry Potter was fourth. Classic was third (but probably didn’t bring in as much profit). In the top spot was Bionicle. In a year when the entire company was losing money on lesser themes, Bionicle was selling well enough that they installed a new production line just to keep up with demand for Bionicle parts without having to cut production of other sets. They were still lowering money at the time, but take Bionicle out of the equation, any they could very well have ended up a subsidiary of Mattel.

Yes, my wish list became significantly expensive with the most recent increases. Some Lego sets are becoming prohibitively expensive. However for me the number one problem is finding display space.

One thing that isn’t mentioned is that a lot of the newer sets have small
1x1 decorative elements rather than older sets with “traditional” bricks. If this was taken into account I doubt the theory would work

According to the 10c per piece theory, Lion Knights Castle should have costed around $451.40. It costs $600. There is a moulded cow (and lamb) and lots of little pieces, but it is therefore very overpriced (as I've always said).

What I will emphasise is that I like Jangbricks judgement of "amount of stuff that you get". Just looking at Lion Knights Castle, and regardless of 10c per piece, I don't see $600 worth of Lego. I could get (roughly speaking) 3 modular buildings, or 6 City police stations for that amount of money.

But take Boutique Hotel for example. Great set, lots to love. However, it costs $320 originally, now it's been increased to I believe it was $350? I'll comment on the price I paid ($319.99).

BH is one of the shortest modulars to date. It really looks like a MOC where someone ran out of pieces for more floors when you place it next to just about any other modular building. The ground floor has lots of empty space and a tiny reception desk (that could have been a couple studs longer). The rooms are reasonably detailed, although there are only 3. There is only 1 unique print in the set (for the 2 hotel staff) and generally the minifigs arent special or unique compared to previous modulars.

Police Station is $20 cheaper, yet has the same amount of detail and is a much taller and more imposing building. It also gives the impression of 3 buildings, with 2 actual buildings. It introduced lots of new prints and pieces.
Town Hall was the same price and is the tallest and largest modular to date. Personally I would argue it has the same amount of detail as its modern counterparts, simply that designs for furniture for example are not as sophisticated. It has a working lift and very unique and interesting minifigs.
Assembly Square is $80 more than BH yet is an entire modular and half, fully detailed, lots of unique prints and minifigs.
Therefore, I would argue BH is terrible value and very overpriced, especially at the new price. Is it a bad set? No not necessarily, there's lots I like about it. But when you compare it to both its contemporaries abd prior modulars; looking at the display value, level of detail and uniqueness, it really falls short. Some people would rant about inflation if one compares Town Hall to BH, okay then compare Police Station and BH which are only 1 year apart. Neither has large specialised pieces or is licensed. Police Station is reasonable value, BH is a rip off (especially for $350).
It is a fact that Lego has gotten more and more expensive unnecessarily. Inflation should not allow Lego to just choose any price they want and it is therefore acceptable.

"quality products will always command a premium price"
This would be the case, if the quality wasn't dwindling. We have major color inconsistencies, milky clear pieces, etc.

Yes and to counter that I lowered the number of my purchases per year. Lego is also releasing more and more expensive exlusives than before, but they really help me to avoid them by missing important features to me. Like the new Hogwarts Express being only a display piece...

@KasonM said:
"The only thing about Lego that burns me out is all the crying and whining from AFOL about prices…guess what? I can’t afford a Porsche but I don’t get on their forums and cry on every post about it. Just make a personal budget and stick to it. If you want it spend more make some sacrifices somewhere else. Maybe for example, dont buy Starbucks or eat at restaurants for a month and see how much you can add to a Lego budget. Thank you for this article and explaining the actual value of Lego. "

The difference is that you probably could NEVER afford a Porsche so this is not really a fair analogy. A lot of the people complaining could previously afford the LEGO sets they wanted but in one fell swoop were priced at least partially out of their hobby.

@KasonM said:
"The only thing about Lego that burns me out is all the crying and whining from AFOL about prices…guess what? I can’t afford a Porsche but I don’t get on their forums and cry on every post about it. Just make a personal budget and stick to it. If you want it spend more make some sacrifices somewhere else. Maybe for example, dont buy Starbucks or eat at restaurants for a month and see how much you can add to a Lego budget. "

This analogy is as over-bent and false as a brittle brown brick.
Let's wait a moment so that the argument of 'The world is in peril and we complain about Lego' can pop up as well.

Price per part ratio is not a great comparison, unless you only compare non-licensed sets that use (roughly) the same basic bricks. Nowadays you have sets that include dozens of tiny 1x1 rounded plates, flower pieces, or cheese slopes (especially the Friends theme), which bump up the piece count, but are also a lot cheaper to produce than a 1x1x2 brick. Bigger specialized pieces are automatically more expensive and bump up the price.

So, you're really comparing apples and oranges if you only look at ppp. Even the cost of plastic is just part of the equation, because you also have stuff like packaging, overhead and marketing, which take up a huge part of what it costs to produce a set. I was hoping the ppp ratio wasn't going to be all this piece was based on, but alas...

Also, the word inflation only gets a brief mention in the last paragraph, while that's pretty crucial here. $ 50 was worth way more in 1992 than today. Yes, prices have gone up significantly over the decades, but when you take inflation into account, which you really should to make a fair comparison, LEGO sets actually have decreased in price over the years, or at least compared to the 1980s and 1990s. Yes, you got a bigger set for $ 50 in 1992 than you'll get in 2022, but money in general was also a worth a lot more in 1992. On the other hand, the prices of a lot of things have plummeted since 1992, so when you compare that to LEGO (or toys in general), LEGO is actually still very expensive.

Lastly, apart from the direct-to-consumer sets, LEGO set prices are largely determined by retail. They'll demand sets at certain price points, and when those prices eventually rise, LEGO has to comply. They can't keep producing killer $ 10 sets if retail can no longer make money off those.

In the end, LEGO prices will keep increasing, at least until our economical system ultimately collapses and we start trading goods and services again.

@ToysFromTheAttic said:
"In the end, LEGO prices will keep increasing, at least until our economical system ultimately collapses and we start trading goods and services again."

It's just economics: supply and demand. Lego will increase prices until people stop buying them at the increasingly inflated prices. They've made it VERY clear that they view AFOLs as nothing more than sheep to be sheared. They will keep cutting as long as the sheep allow it. After all, they need more Ferraris for Pa and new dressage ponies for all the girls and wives (boy, that family loves dressage).

It's interesting that neither the awesome Galaxy Explorer and the awesome and expensive Castle has sold out. On the other hand, as many have pointed out, there are still long lines at Lego stores at the start of every season.

@PurpleDave
@magmafrost

No company has ever gone bankrupt because they failed to pass along costs. They go bankrupt from mismanagement, i.e., the failure to understand their customers, i.e., they don't sell enough to make a profit.

The fact that wages have been stagnant since the 2000 tech bubble certainly can, and likely will, affect Lego's ability to continue their price hikes.

The prices may not have gone up too much, but is extremely noticeable that the quality has gone down, with blurry printing, easily cracking bricks, and more.

As someone who has actually done the data analysis of parts and sets - yes LEGO is more expensive each and every year - based on weight. I have lots of data to back that up. There are several other very interesting trends about set makeup that might surprise many LEGO fans.

@vrchill said:
"As someone who has actually done the data analysis of parts and sets - yes LEGO is more expensive each and every year - based on weight. I have lots of data to back that up. There are several other very interesting trends about set makeup that might surprise many LEGO fans."

Cool! Have you posted this somewhere? Maybe Brickset would publish it!

@pazza_inter said:
"ok, but outrageous piece counting ruins everything!
e.g.: you're alone and you want to eat eggs: would you buy 100 eggs at 10c each or 2 at 30c? Which is cheaper? And after eating, what do you do with 98 eggs?"

C’mon, you must have at least one neighbor you don’t like, I’m sure those 98 eggs can get put to good use.

@StyleCounselor said:
" @ToysFromTheAttic said:
"In the end, LEGO prices will keep increasing, at least until our economical system ultimately collapses and we start trading goods and services again."

It's just economics: supply and demand. Lego will increase prices until people stop buying them at the increasingly inflated prices. They've made it VERY clear that they view AFOLs as nothing more than sheep to be sheared. They will keep cutting as long as the sheep allow it. After all, they need more Ferraris for Pa and new dressage ponies for all the girls and wives (boy, that family loves dressage).

It's interesting that neither the awesome Galaxy Explorer and the awesome and expensive Castle has sold out. On the other hand, as many have pointed out, there are still long lines at Lego stores at the start of every season.

@PurpleDave
@magmafrost

No company has ever gone bankrupt because they failed to pass along costs. They go bankrupt from mismanagement, i.e., the failure to understand their customers, i.e., they don't sell enough to make a profit.

The fact that wages have been stagnant since the 2000 tech bubble certainly can, and likely will, affect Lego's ability to continue their price hikes.

"

I always enjoy seeing your takes on the situation. It makes for a good laugh.

There are too many factors at play to give a simple answer to the question whether Lego has become more expensive (not saying it can't be done, though).
-PPP? What about small pieces?
-Total weight? What about special parts? And what about prints, that can be simple or complex (on a stormtrooper helmet for instance)?
-Price per stud? What about the varying thickness of parts?

And on top of that, you have to account for subjectivity. But in the end, Lego has never been a necessity (how DID people get by before the 20th century? :P) so no matter the economical circumstances, we should put things into perspective and file this matter under "first world problems". I will never be able to own everything that I like and that's OK.
Personally, I will keep buying Lego as long as I like it and to the extent that I am both capable and willing to afford it. No sense in complaining.

@bandit778 said:
"For me, the issue isn't necessarily that the price has gone up, that happens with everything in life, my issue with the current price of LEGO is that everything else has gone up so quickly by large margins against average earnings that haven't gone up to the same degree.
What was once a luxury product that I could afford without too much worry has become a luxury item that I have to think twice about buying as other things that are more important to general life are prioritised over something that isn't a necessity and quite often, stops the Lego purchase altogether.

"

I thoroughly agree.
I'd like to buy more Lego but I just don't have the spare money anymore.
Impulse purchases have had to stop out of pure necessity, and I have to save for any Lego I intend to purchase.

Weight may be some people's preferred measure of value but please remember that value is relative & so your pet measurement is not someone else's
There is no 'true' measure of value

Not able to track the entire discussion, but I think PLAY value has definitely gone down based on the pieces available in sets. Many tiny parts increases the price-per-piece perceived value (and level of detail, of course), but those smaller parts offer a lot less connection value, and build up model volume more slowly. Also worth mentioning is the proliferation of tiles that only offer anti-studs, and many non-standard angles and thicknesses that just, don't really feel like components within a "system".

@thefirst said:
"I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened but at some point in the last five or so years, TLG wised-up to the fact that AFOL’s, rather than children, were their main target audience. Then the prices of sets slowly started creeping up. As someone who used to buy A LOT of sets for my Nephews when they were younger, I noticed this first hand. As AFOL numbers increased, so did the price of LEGO. With AFOL numbers on the rise, you started to get the saddo’s bulk-buying reduced sets for spare parts, or to sell on eBay at inflated prices - leaving none for anyone else. Adults posting sets on deal sites and seeing them quickly sell out due to bulk buying etc. Just, a lot of selfish behaviour in the community. It eventually stopped being a fun hobby. I don’t see LEGO as a hobby for children or families anymore. I see it as a hobby for AFOL’s, who conveniently have more disposable income to throw at TLG."

If you visit Lego stores, it's still more kids and parents than Afol's. You see that the Afol will spend on the bigger sets, UCS sets, etc. With their disposable income.
YET, just look around, there's much more average priced sets parents, grandparents, etc. are buying for their kids, birthdays, xmas, etc. Those are the minifigs on up to $80 - $100 sets.
They still sell much more than Afol's are buying.

I remember a Mark Stafford interview and one of the points he makes is that he used a smaller technic axle and that RAISED the price already set before he designed.
He thought a bigger axle would bring up the price BUT it was the smaller axle that actually raised the price.
He found out it was where it was made, the particular factory.
So even weight of the item can't be a true measure.
Lego makes parts all at different factories, much like components on electronics and appliances, etc. From various places around the world, then put together in one place and this process done right can lower costs for those companies.
So Lego does the same, and you factor in new molds, new printed parts, new graphics being done, the way they marketed it, the licensing agreements that we know NOTHING about how much the deal they made with Disney, etc.
The bank loans they get, the interest rates we know nothing about, that can fluctuate.
The raw material costs. The employees and designers with different salaries (raises, benefits, etc.), the overhead on all their properties, etc.
And much more, put into an equation to get to a price is something we cannot know all the details about.
Best to collect what you REALLY like, not for aftermarket, DON'T be a compleatist and truly enjoy the hobby.
Big sets you want, truly sacrifice and save, and in few months, you can own that big UCS set.
I do this, I look for deals, save over time and have been a happier collector for it.
I even sell some sets that I loved, I just takes good pics and keep those as mementos of my collection.
Car and motorcycle collectors do this all the time.
Don't let the price increases ruin your love of the hobby. There's ways to sacrifice, trade, sell and SAVE to get the kits you REALLY want. It's much better that way.

Speaking as a comic book collector: the comics industry constantly markets itself at adult collectors rather that trying to maintain a steady audience of kids, who was their original staple audience for decades. Unsurprisingly, comic book audiences keep shrinking every year as collectors either quit or die off.

If Lego wants to shift away from kids, that's going to be long term to their detriment. You won't maintain an adults-with-money audience forever.

@legoDad42 said:
"(...)
Best to collect what you REALLY like, not for aftermarket, DON'T be a compleatist and truly enjoy the hobby.
Big sets you want, truly sacrifice and save, and in few months, you can own that big UCS set.
I do this, I look for deals, save over time and have been a happier collector for it.
I even sell some sets that I loved, I just takes good pics and keep those as mementos of my collection.
Car and motorcycle collectors do this all the time.
Don't let the price increases ruin your love of the hobby. There's ways to sacrifice, trade, sell and SAVE to get the kits you REALLY want. It's much better that way."

This should be a standalone article.

To me it's not purely about price but also that LEGO seems to crank out more and more huge and expensive sets. It doesn't feel like it was that many years ago that the yearly modular building was just about the only big pricey set released along with maybe a Star Wars UCS set once in a while. It felt like most people could afford to "keep up" and not feel like they're missing out on anything.

Nowadays it feels like there's a press release every other week announcing the next big expensive desirable set. Obviously most people aren't going to even want to buy every single one, but it still gives you (me at least) that feeling of the hobby getting more and more expensive because there are more and more luxury-priced sets available to choose from. Unless you got deep pockets, you have to be more selective nowadays and you do end up feeling like you're missing out because you can't afford to "keep up" like you used to be able to. If that makes sense.

@PurpleDave said:
" @MainBricker:
If you read the previous article (and you don’t bail after the first paragraph, claim you do this sort of thing for a living, and then claim that if they had any clue what they were talking about they would have written the exact article that you pointedly didn’t read…as one user foot-in-mouthed over), they point out that it’s only sets with a multi-year release schedule that were affected. Single-year releases can be retired before inflation makes them unprofitable, and price adjustments for their replacement sets can be calculated before the sets are announced. So, guess what percentage of multi-year releases fall into the 18+ category?

@TeriXeri:
And I bought a copy of Farnsworth House to strip it of white 1x1 tiles because it was more cost effective than buying them on Bricklink. Plus, all the extra parts were free at that point.

@Wasthereonce:
It wasn’t even 10% of the product range. There are over 500 sets released every year now, plus all the big D2C sets carry over for a few years so total production is probably around 600 sets at any given moment. And yes, sets with higher price tags exist now. In 1978, $100 was a week’s pay for many people in the developed world (US federal minimum wage was $2.65 at the time). The same job today probably pays more in one day. Sets costing $800 would have bankrupted the company in 1978 because only a handful of the very rich would have been able to afford them, and sales volume wouldn’t have covered the development cost. A $100 set can now be an impulse purchase, where four decades ago it was probably reserved for Christmas, or maybe birthdays.

@Draykov:
That was an excellent and informative article that was shot down by people who admitted they hadn’t even read it. An even better article from a decade ago can be found here:

http://www.realityprose.com/what-happened-with-lego/

It wasn’t received any better by the AFOL community.

@Mirakle:
Considering there are phones that cost 50% more than the UCS MF2, it also shows how the cost of owning a phone has skyrocketed, compared to a time when most landline handsets were sub-$20.

@Jraptor:
No, a 1x1 plate resells for about 1/5 a 2x4 brick. A 2x4 brick is 24x the size of a 1x1 plate. Clearly the demand-driven resale market values the tiny parts more than the Brickset comment section.

@Onatu:
1x1 and plates are detail pieces. Filler is 2x4 bricks. I get dark-purple 2x4 bricks on LUGBulk, and the other members of my LUG can’t believe that all I really do with them is make minifig stands and packing material."

Congratulations, your clap back had nothing to do with what I actually said. Reselling is not the value I was looking at, nor is it even the focus of this article- the article is looking at sales price from Lego. Where, as I said- you may be getting more ‘pieces’, but the pieces you are getting are often a lot smaller and easier for Lego to produce. Ergo- misleading at best

I can’t believe this article was published in an attempt to compare current Lego prices to those from the 90s and the word “inflation” doesn’t even appear until it’s casually tossed in in the final paragraph.

Please, try harder if you’re going to post an article like this. Not factoring in inflation when comparing prices with more than a 10 year difference is such a basic mistake.

This article is just another blatant pro-LEGO propaganda piece. You're not even trying to figure in mitigating factors like production having become massively automated, fluctuations on the oil markets, logistics and other ancillary cost having become cheaper compared to decades ago when you apply actual normalized valuation. Even if you account for LEGO paying their employees reasonably decently, their environmental efforts, social engagement and all that their products shouldn't be as costly. Ultimately the proof is out there with other toy companies selling their products at lower prices and still making decent revenue. And don't misunderstand me: I'm sure nobody objects to paying a premium for a good product, but in case of LEGO it has reached obscene levels that are in many cases hardly justifiable anymore.

I don't think it was a great idea to post this directly to Brickset, it makes it seem like this essay is a viewpoint supported and endorsed by the site.

@legoDad42 said:
"I remember a Mark Stafford interview and one of the points he makes is that he used a smaller technic axle and that RAISED the price already set before he designed.
He thought a bigger axle would bring up the price BUT it was the smaller axle that actually raised the price.
He found out it was where it was made, the particular factory.
So even weight of the item can't be a true measure.
Lego makes parts all at different factories, much like components on electronics and appliances, etc. From various places around the world, then put together in one place and this process done right can lower costs for those companies.
So Lego does the same, and you factor in new molds, new printed parts, new graphics being done, the way they marketed it, the licensing agreements that we know NOTHING about how much the deal they made with Disney, etc.
The bank loans they get, the interest rates we know nothing about, that can fluctuate.
The raw material costs. The employees and designers with different salaries (raises, benefits, etc.), the overhead on all their properties, etc.
And much more, put into an equation to get to a price is something we cannot know all the details about.
Best to collect what you REALLY like, not for aftermarket, DON'T be a compleatist and truly enjoy the hobby.
Big sets you want, truly sacrifice and save, and in few months, you can own that big UCS set.
I do this, I look for deals, save over time and have been a happier collector for it.
I even sell some sets that I loved, I just takes good pics and keep those as mementos of my collection.
Car and motorcycle collectors do this all the time.
Don't let the price increases ruin your love of the hobby. There's ways to sacrifice, trade, sell and SAVE to get the kits you REALLY want. It's much better that way."

This is the best comment in this entire comments section imo, and something we can all agree on. The price is the price, there are a ton of different factors for why it is what it is but ultimately that's not up to us. What IS up to us is what we buy and why. That's my motto.

Me personally, I used to be a completionist. At one point, I went after every single Ninjago Legacy set because I started buying the ones with the golden minifigures, then the ones I liked, then the ones I kind of liked, and soon I had a majority and figured, well might as buy the rest. The same exact thing happened with Speed Champions. It was to the point where I was searching for the retired sets. You know, the one's whose prices have increased by over 150%.

Please: do not ever do anything like that unless you have the money for it, and even then, really think about whether it's worth it regardless. It is such a bad idea when you don't. Don't get me wrong, building them was fun, but I spent far too much money on sets that I really didn't want at the end of the day, and while selling them after the fact will get some of that money back, I'll still lose quite a bit.

That said, if there's a theme or subtheme or whatever that you highly enjoy, that's obviously different. For example, I love the architecture Skyline sets and have all of them. I do not regret any of those purchases aside from one, but only because it was an ignorant overpay. I don't regret obtaining the set itself. Ultimately, the overall key here is buying sets that you actually want, not buying sets for the sole purpose of completing a collection. The same way that getting 100% in a video game is not at all worth it if you aren't actually enjoying doing it.

At the start of 2021, there were approximately 40 sets on my "Want List" here. These days, it's down to 20 max, usually under, and only a fraction are from this year. That's because I went from wanting a bunch of sets for completionist purposes or because they were kind of cool to wanting only the sets that I, well, actually really wanted. Doing this has made me feel a lot more satisfied about my purchases, as well as a lot less guilty or stressed about what I'm doing with my money. Both ha