"...After conducting traffic stops on both vehicles, deputies searched the trucks and found approximately $1 million worth of Lego products stolen from two freight trailers. ..."

#lego #heist

@EllenInEdmonton @falxcerebri @ai6yr I seriously can't understand it. They make these kits that are $100+ each (I guess getting up to 200 these days?) and they only make one single thing.

I hate to drop the "when I was young" line, but seriously, when I was a kid the expensive set was a big bucket full of standard Lego bricks and you made whatever the heck you wanted to. And it didn't cost anywhere near to that much. (I have no idea what it cost, but I do know my parents wouldn't even have thought about $100+)

I mean, a frigging bucket. How is anyone ok with getting a small box with quite a lot of them consisting of pieces you can't really do much else with?

I feel like somewhere along the way people forgot what was even the point of Legos. I don't even get the point of a kit

@nazokiyoubinbou @EllenInEdmonton @falxcerebri @ai6yr I don't like it either, they've essentially made LEGO single use.

Did get one of two of the smaller kits to do with my daughter a while back but only because she already had plenty of generic bricks from the past 40 years already.

But also wonder if there's a bit of nostalgia going on here or maybe we're a few years apart. Mid '80s they were already selling space, castle, robin hood etc. themed kits with instructions (often multiple variations and easy to repurpose though). I had (and still do) the castle with the portcullis. But once built they'd get chucked in a big box with random other pieces and recombined over and over again. It's been a slow transition to the expensive monstrosities they do now but the seeds were there.

What really accelerated it was LEGO Friends - small kits but more inflexible parts. Then the licensing of the various IPs. Which partly explains the demand since people are buying a deathstar or whatever as much as they are LEGO in those cases. Like getting an adult colouring book instead of a sketchpad and pencils.

Edited to add: also, I think the demand for the sets is partly driven by the lack of equivalents of those '80s transitional sets, maybe the 3 in 1s are the closest. So you really do either have just some bricks or an intricate single use set and nothing much in-between.