jdubbs

Seems pretty straightforward to me. Say what you mean, mean what you say. This "well I actually mean X, even though the words I chose said Y" argument is little more than linguistic retconning.

Folks in the UK/EU should bear in mind that US prices do not include sales tax (which is typically another 8-10% on top of the list price, depending on which state and city you live in) whereas prices in £ and € have VAT already built in... which if I'm not mistaken can be as high as 20% in some regions? So it's not really fair to do a straight dollars-to-euros-to-pounds currency conversion and expect equal results.

At the risk of being called "too loyal" to the company, I would also point out you're not exactly comparing apples to apples here. Battle Packs have evolved a fair amount over those 15 years. More parts (70-80 per set then vs. 100 per set now, give or take), better builds, more accurate/sophisticated prints, new molds, named characters, etc. Yes, they cost more, arguably more than they should (certainly more than I would like). But you're also getting more. And, LEGO's pricing strategy shifted over that period... now pretty much all sets under $100 are priced for immediate 20% discount, at least in the US. That was not always the case. When I started collecting LEGO, it was rare to see sets ever go on sale (I've been told retailers were actively prevented from doing so) but now every Walmart, Target, etc. marks sets down within a few weeks or months of release... sometimes they even launch at 20% off. Those discounts are certainly factored into the list prices, which is a big chunk of why sets cost more today than they did 10+ years ago.

If you're going to do this kind of analysis, you should use real numbers. The battle packs released in 2009 were $11.99, not $9.99. Adjusting for inflation (using the same calculator you used), that comes to $15.72... and with inflation now at 6.2% annually, the supply chain and shipping in particular eff'ed up the wazoo, and no telling when life is truly going to return to normal, I'd guess LEGO is being conservative in its long-term outlook and simply planning for the worst. We also don't know what non-inflationary changes might be motivating the price increase... things like licensing fees, which have been renegotiated at least once since 2009. I don't disagree that it's a steep price hike. I'd much rather have seen it go to $17.99, which seems more in keeping with previous battle pack price jumps. But I also suspect that, with things going the way they are, the inflation-adjusted value of the BPs will surpass even that number sooner than anyone would like.

The larger sets like UCS, MBS, etc. start out as D2C (direct to consumer) only available from LEGO Stores and LEGO's website. This window of exclusivity typically lasts 3 months, after which they are available from select retailers (typically the largest ones like Amazon, Target etc. in the US). These retailers are usually prohibited from marking down the D2C sets for the first several months (or even years) that they carry them.

It's a 33.3% price hike. ($14.99 x 1.333 = $19.99)

If only there were a way to swap heads with another minifig. Yet as we all know, LEGO parts were designed with no such interoperability in mind.

Well, the preceding discussion was about filling the AT-AT with snowtroopers... but maybe try being a little less literal in your thinking.

If nothing else, you can all rest easy knowing that apparently, no one else is satisfied either! Either it has too many figs, or too few... take your pick. Never mind the dozens of times people have reiterated how this all works, how both the AT-AT and the Gunship are entirely consistent with the sets that preceded them, how if it had included enough figs to fill every seat inside, it would easily cost $100 more... people still find reason to complain. Maybe have a little faith that things are gonna work out okay. That LEGO actually gets it, and will give you what you want, if you exercise a little patience. That, as they say in Tara, Tomorrow is another day.

Umm, not so much. Certainly there is the element of fascism in both the Empire and the Nazi regime, but that and the term "stormtroopers" is about as far as the comparison goes. Lucas has said repeatedly— and others around him when he was writing Star Wars have reiterated — that the Vietnam War was the model for Star Wars. The Rebels were the Viet Cong (underdogs, woefully outmatched and underfunded, yet somehow still triumphant), the Empire was America (all-powerful invading force bent on expanding their global reach), the Emperor was Nixon (never mind that the war began long before he took office). People don't like to acknowledge this because of the controversy of the Vietnam War, and honestly no one in the US wants to imagine themselves an evil empire, but it is what it is.

We hear maybe a half-dozen helmeted troopers speak in the whole of the original trilogy... none of them snow troopers... hardly a representative sample when you consider there are, what, fifty thousand of them on each Death Star? As we saw in the sequel trilogy, the female stormtroopers' costumes were nearly (if not completely) indistinguishable from the male stormtroopers. So, there's nothing to say that there aren't female stormtroopers in the OT. There's also nothing to say the stormtroopers don't have brown skin, or medium nougat skin, or whatever. Until Finn took his helmet off in The Force Awakens, we didn't know definitively that Stormtroopers were even living beings, let alone human. So I'm a bit unclear what you're defining as "accuracy". I'm sure if the added (sorry, "forced") diversity of minifig heads is such a sacrifice for you, there are plenty of Angry Clone heads other EBers will happily trade you, in exchange for the heads that come with your AT-AT... And, even if there were some definitive proof that no stormtrooper in the OT was canonically ever female — cue the obscure comic book/video game reference — the heads can easily be swapped to another minifig... this is LEGO after all. Having a hard time seeing what the "principle" is here. UCS sets have, with rare exception over the last 10+ years, come with exclusive figs. It's a fact of life, one that isn't gonna change, and one that really shouldn't be surprising, unless you just emerged from a decades-long dark age, or started collecting these sets today. Even so, there's nothing that says these heads won't show up elsewhere. So... why is it okay for Stormtroopers in the Marauder to have diverse prints but not the Stormtroopers in the AT-AT? Black heads are appropriate for one, but diverse heads are welcome in another? Huh? What happened to "accuracy"? If LEGO is putting different heads in each of their sets, that just broadens the pool of unique heads we can get... which is something you already acknowledge most everyone has been asking for. Sure, if the AT-AT were the only set to include diverse heads, and every other set used Angry Clone heads, I could see an issue with that... but LEGO has been putting new/different stormtrooper heads in lots of sets over the last year or two... so, why does it matter if there are a few more added to the pot here? You don't have to collect them all... you can just pretend these heads don't exist, if they don't eventually show up elsewhere. I don't mean to be harsh, but it seems like you are talking out of both sides of your mouth here. And when you drop phrases like "forced diversity" and "diversity for diversity sake" in reference to minifig skin tones and genders — representing unseen, almost entirely unheard Star Wars characters — well, it just smacks of all the half-wits outraged when they saw a black stormtrooper in the first TFA teaser, or who couldn't accept a female protagonist in a Star Wars trilogy. Was really hoping we had moved past this.

Seriously though. What are you smoking?

I think some of you guys have become way too cynical when it comes to LEGO's motives. It's much more likely this is due to tariffs and licensing than to some kind of nefarious plot on LEGO's part to bilk UK buyers (and only UK buyers) out of £100. LEGO goes out of its way to avoid raising prices on already-shipping sets. They have done it a few times, but they're few and far between. So I would guess that the Falcon, were it released today, would likely see the same price inflation in the UK that you are seeing with the AT-AT, and LEGO has resisted raising its UK prices because that's their policy... or perhaps as a product that predates Brexit, it qualifies for lower import duties... or perhaps LEGO front-loaded a ton of stock in the UK before Brexit to avoid paying higher tariffs down the line. As for the Titanic, it could be that it qualifies for more favorable tariffs and import duties because it's under a certain price threshold (e.g., the AT-AT is over £XX so it counts as a luxury item with higher tariffs, whereas the Titanic is under £XX so it doesn't), or even because it's based on a UK brand... or maybe the import rules are changing in two weeks and the Titanic just squeaked in before them.... or maybe it's being manufactured in a different factory in a different country, and thus is subject to different import taxes. Lots of plausible reasons why these two sets are cheaper for you, that don't presuppose LEGO being evil.

It's not as simple as exchanging dollars for euros or pounds. Different countries have their own import duties, tariffs, etc... and I would not be at all surprised if licensing fees vary from country to country as well. You even see this in different € prices across the EU nations, and those are all theoretically on a fairly level playing field. The UK opted out of the EU, so it's not at all surprising that your pricing is going to suffer when it comes to goods made by EU members, in EU factories.

That horse is long-dead.

One is minifig-scale. The other is not. Seems pretty clear to me.

I think there may be some confusion about "budget" when it comes to new molds. We've heard LEGO designers talk about how the line or the set they worked on only had budget for X number of new molds/new colored parts... but this isn't just about monetary budget... it's all the human resources required to get those molds designed, tooled, and tested, which are always going to be finite and in-demand. Even if LEGO had an infinite pile of cash to throw at creating new molds, there are still only so many 3D modelers, tooling engineers, QA testers — not to mention machines in the factory — available to produce new molds and parts based on them. "Budget" is more than just costing... it's bandwidth/capacity too. Also bear in mind that recolors of existing parts often require a new mold... so while we may perceive there to be just 5 or 6 new molds in the SW lineup in a year, there are no doubt many others that never occur to us for part recolors.

I think this goes overlooked a lot among AFOLs. My son sees no reason at all to have a second of any figure or set, even something massable like a clone or stormtrooper. I've lost track of how many times I've heard something to the effect of, "I have a stormtrooper already. You can have this one." It's baffling to me, but there you go.

The differences between LEGO and Hasbro BS are more than just target market. I didn't restate all of them because others have already done so, and this horse can only be beaten so much. But as others have said, Hasbro can issue every Clone variant in the rainbow with virtually no additional investment, because their business model is centered on recycling the same products (digital sculpts, molds, tooling, etc.) over and over with minor upgrades to paint deco, packaging, pack-ins, etc. Since they don't own their own factories or keep product in circulation for any length of time, the risk if any one action figure doesn't sell is minimized given another will take its place in the production line a month later. LEGO is in a very different boat, and steers that boat accordingly.

As I think every EB member from Australia has and will attest to, LEGO's distribution in Australia is pretty uneven. I can only speak to my experience in the US, where the PT sets are as readily available as the OT sets. Certainly, the battlepack-type army-builder sets sell through their initial shipments each year, but then reappear a month or two later in greater quantities. Happened with the Praetorian BP, Mando BP, Sith Trooper BP, and most recently the 501st uber-BP. And, just to clarify: I'm not saying Clone or PT sets don't sell, or that LEGO shouldn't make more of them. Just that, anyone using Hasbro as a template for what LEGO should do has probably not spent a lot of time collecting Hasbro's products. Because, starting out as a Hasbro collector who only later made the jump to LEGO, I can tell you that the problems we face as LEGO collectors pale in comparison to what you deal with trying to keep up with Hasbro.

Last I checked these were not Hasbro Black Series products, which is what I and others here were referring to: "Hottoys, Sideshow, and yes even Hasbro Black Series cater to a much older, more affluent audience..." Never said they were "selling badly". In fact I went out of my way to say that discounts did NOT mean they were selling poorly, just that there was enough stock in retailers' inventory to justify discounting them. Yes, this is why I said "all sets get marked down eventually". It typically happens 5-6 months after release, except for the $100+ sets which can take a year or longer.

They underproduce now because for years and years, they overproduced, which combined with their abysmal distribution meant that one region would be flooded with product while another went bone-dry, only to receive a glut of product months after it was originally released. Resellers like Target would refuse to order more, or would wait to put out new stock until the old peg-warmers cleared away... All this created a vicious cycle where the product that actually got sold fed straight into the secondary market. Now, they seem to have migrated to a new model in which they've scaled back production runs, offer a very limited number of each figure to retailers as pre-orders (which sell out instantly), and then dump whatever is left onto Amazon or Hasbro Pulse months later. I did not think it possible for them screw this up worse than it was before, but they've made collecting Black Series an absolute nightmare. I'll happily take LEGO temporarily running out of a battle back or two each or year, over the mess that Hasbro continues to make of its SW line.

You guys keep comparing apples to oranges, and trying to draw conclusions based on these faulty comparisons. Hottoys, Sideshow, and yes even Hasbro Black Series cater to a much older, more affluent audience... kids barely factor into their equation. As has been stated and restated a million times before, LEGO's target market is primarily kids (and parents of kids), with AFOLs a distant (but admittedly growing) second place. What appeals to one audience does not necessarily appeal to the other. The fact that Hasbro or Sideshow or whomever sells out of its Clone action figures does not mean that LEGO will do the same with its Clone minifigs. I see ample stock of two recent LEGO sets which collectively feature three different (all-new, unique) Clone designs at every Target, every online store, and every LEGO store I visit. In fact, both have been pretty consistently marked down 20% for the last 9 months... an indicator that retailers are trying to clear out stock of these sets. This doesn't mean they're somehow a failure (all sets get marked down eventually), but it certainly throws cold water on the "if only LEGO would release Clone sets, they would sell out just like Hasbro's Clones do" argument some of you seem to believe.

Sorry, but this is a gross oversimplification. You're overlooking the feast-or-famine distribution woes that have plagued Hasbro for decades, resulting in some waves of action figures being impossible to find, while others warm pegs in massive quantities for months on end... Contrast this with LEGO, which keeps product flowing to both their own stores and their retail partners on a near-continuous basis for at minimum 9 months, and as many as 24 months depending on the set. (Yes, I know there are outliers like the UCS Falcon launch and the Bespin Duel convention exclusive, and Australia is another matter entirely... but for mainline sets in the US at least, they're ten thousand times better than Hasbro at distribution). The fact that any given action figure isn't on Target shelves has way more to do with the fact that Hasbro can't predict demand for and regulate flow of product to retailers, than it does with the popularity of any one character/theme/era. Likewise, the fact that LEGO's products are on shelves doesn't mean they're not selling... it just means that LEGO can actually replenish stock in a timely manner.

The rebel transporter GR-75 was made in shiptember 2018. Would love to see more pics of it!