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Lego Christmas Production Shortage

Posted by kdawson on Tue Oct 31, 2006 06:39 PM
from the mental-blocks dept.
Toys
shadowspar writes, "Recent restructuring and production cuts have left Lego unable to fill orders for the upcoming holiday season. Affected products include Duplo bricks, Lego City sets, and (horror of horrors!) Star Wars and Lego Technik sets." According to the article Lego stands to lose $127 million in holiday sales.
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  • Queue the legos/lego/lego(tm) bricks holy wars.

    • Re:oh boy (Score:5, Funny)

      by flyingsquid (813711) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @06:49PM (#16666507)
      This is just terrible. You simply can't imagine the disappointment this will cause me- uh, I mean, will cause little Junior this Christmas. He really wants a Lego Millenium Falcon. It's just so cute when he says "ma-ma" but he just can't quite get "-llenium Falcon" part of the ship's name out. Of course, he'd just eat the mini-figures, so the set will have to stay in my room.
      • Same thing with my little nephew. He keeps saying "Da-da" but can't get out "gobah" I just don't have the heart to tell him there is no such set.
    • It's sad to see a beloved company from my childhood not doing so well these days. I wish for lower prices and less movie tie-ins.
      • Um, perhaps the shortages are a sign that demand for Lego is on the up? I read the headline as good-but-could-be-better news.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Pharmboy (216950)
          Cue up the conspiracies that this is just "a way for Lego to artificially drive up the price". There is always at least one paranoid on /. who will say it.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Moofie (22272)
        For whatever it's worth, the Star Wars kits were superb LEGO sets, not just hacky movie tie in schlock. Can't speak for their other lines, but I was consistently impressed with the Star Wars line. Nice new pieces, and not too much big molded crap.
  • Wouldn't that be unstructuring? Isn't restructuring supposed to help you make sales instead of loose them ??!
    • Organizations can't be torn apart and restructured with the same ease that Legos can.
    • sn't restructuring supposed to help you make sales instead of loose them ??!
      Uh, no.
      Restructuring is supposed to make you look good for the next quarterly meeting. It has nothing whatsoever to do with sales or the future of the company.

      Normally by the time the shit hits the fan, you're supposed to be busily safely restructuring *another* company.

      Didn't you take business at school ??
    • The optimist looks at the glass and decides it is half full.
      The pessimist knows it is half empty instead.
      The business consultant takes the glass and hits it against the table, thus breaking it in two, with the remark:
      You've got twice the amount of glass than what you really need.

  • I'm sorry for not being an enthusiast for the 'theme' junk that in my opinion detracts from the lego concept entirely, but I didn't see 'plain lego bricks' on the list. The other stuff is just a marketing department running out of control. As long as big tubs of regular lego bricks will be available, this will just make it easier to not be annoyed by the other crap.

    Just my opinion. I grew up building stuff with legos, and didn't need anything but regular bricks to do so with.
    • As long as big tubs of regular lego bricks will be available, this will just make it easier to not be annoyed by the other crap.
      Yep. A big box of 2x4s, some of the other generic sizes, and kids will be fine. But you have to think about the fathers, too!

      • Re:Anything important out of production? (Score:5, Funny)

        by mincognito (839071) on Tuesday October 31 2006, @07:04PM (#16666709)
        Yep. A big box of 2x4s, some of the other generic sizes, and kids will be fine. But you have to think about the fathers, too!
        Don't you mean think of the grandfathers. Be honest. Your ID number must make you at least sixty.
        • Be honest. Your ID number must make you at least sixty.
          Well, in my defense, after having just learned about this new-fangled Internet thing, and having declared the WWW dead ("Nobody will ever use this! It's sucky slow! Who wants to see pictures of a volcano on Hawaii?"), I found Slashdot much inferior to Usenet, and did not bother with getting registered for quite a while when it was introduced. I probably would have gotten one of the double digit ones, otherwise...

          But seriously now. I bought the id of some old geezer on Ebay. Went for quite a bit, but well worth it. I don't think any of the first 1000 is still alive. Most of them died of Malaria when digging the trenches for the first Internet pipes. That Gore guy really made them sweat....

          • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

            by oGMo (379)
            I don't think any of the first 1000 is still alive.

            Really?

            • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

              by Anonymous Coward
              Nah, see, this was before they put in the tubes. A brief history of internets follows.

              In the very first generation of the Internet, you had to print out your internets and deliver them by hand to their destination. All were in agreement: this was stupid.

              The second generation was brought about when Vint Cerf set up a system of dump trucks to carry large numbers of internets at once. This system had the advantage of very large capacity, for as Claude Shannon famously proved, "You can pile a metric fuc

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Fallingcow (213461)
      I liked the themed but unbranded sets, like Space, Castle, Arctic, Pirates, Undersea, etc. Hell, even the "Town" bricks were good.

      I just can't stand that they've been all but supplanted by "Star Wars" and fucking "Harry Potter" legos. If you want to play with branded shit, buy the goddamn action figures. Leave Legos alone, and give me back sets unburdened by storylines.

      I grew up with them, and now that I have the money to buy my own Legos (and believe me, I would, I love the damn things) they've switched
      • The Star Wars sets have one good feature: They helped facilitate the Star Wars storyline in Irregular Webcomic.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by plover (150551) *
        If it'll make you happy, I've heard (from an officially well-placed source) that LEGO has very much reduced the number of marketing tie-in sets. Most of them had very short shelf lives -- they sold well only at the time of the movie release, but almost nothing after. That meant retailers had to "clearance them out" to make room for the next models, which doesn't make anybody in the supply chain rich. And if big retailers can't sell something, they won't buy more of them to rot on their shelves again.

        Th

    • Oh I agree, but am I the only one around here that thinks they're horribly overpriced?
    • I agree about the branded sets, but Duplo bricks are what gets a lot of toddlers started in the lego world.

    • I'm sorry for not being an enthusiast for the 'theme' junk that in my opinion detracts from the lego concept entirely, but I didn't see 'plain lego bricks' on the list.

      If you would watch kids play with the stuff, you would not not call it 'theme' junk. It is surprising how fast the themes get disassembled and reconstructured to match the kids own fantasy. My daughter got a lot of Belville stuff, and the girly pinkish content does make her like all those kits instantaneously. So, she builds it once accordi

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Jeff DeMaagd (2015)
      Technics are on the list. I think they are great, are you telling me you didn't have fun putting together complex mechanical contraptions?
  • Capsella kits are way more cool than legos.
      • That's how I learned about running battery packs in serial vs. parallel! I don't know what voltage those motors were rated for, but they really got going when you strung the battery packs together.

  • Production cuts (Score:3, Interesting)

    by frisket (149522) <peter AT silmaril DOT ie> on Tuesday October 31 2006, @06:53PM (#16666563) Homepage
    "Production cuts"?

    Q. Why do you cut production when there are orders to fill?

    A. When someone other than a businessperson is running the company (eg beancounter, marketing droid, moneylender, etc)

    • i don't see how a marketer could be behind any plan that causes them to sell less of something. less quality? certainly! less volume? no way. unless they're going with the Cartmanland exclusivity strategy
    • So if accountants & bankers aren't buisnessmen, who is?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Clod9 (665325)
        That would be the people who create products and find buyers for them.
        Counting stuff, while an important adjunct to business, isn't the same thing. Show me any "financial product" and I can explain how the profit margin is generated through ignorance on the buyer's part.
        Truly great business has a buyer and a seller, both have near-100% information about the transaction, and both go away happy. Accountants and bankers merely aid this process, they don't create it.
  • So they are trying to steal the multimedia device and Tickle Me Elmo business strategy? This is nothing new.

    Note I said "multimedia device", not "game console". You know which two I'm referring to.
  • Massive layoffs at Lego
    http://www.journalinquirer.com/site/news.cfm?newsi d=16811796&BRD=985&PAG=461&dept_id=161556&rfi=6 [journalinquirer.com]

    They should have thought about that before swinging the axe to make the share-holders happy.
    Of course, how many execs will get canned because of this? Yeah. Zero. Bastards...
    • when the share holders are footing the bill. I believe Lego faced a loss at the beginning of the year, so they cut production. It's what you gotta do nowdays. They'd be better to focus on the "basics" rather than themed stuff, or cut the themed stuff back. I buy a lot of Lego product, but almost never the themed stuff like starwars or spongebob, mostly Bionicle a good mix of toy and technic. Note I din't see Minstorms NXT on the list of "shortages" which is the only "cool" thing they'll run out of.
  • I can't help but feel a little sad about his. Although Lego has its share of company-wrong-doing-and-greed, Lego bricks are some of the nicest toys around. I really hope Lego can put its show together again.

  • If there's less in supply than there is demand for something, the price (and value?) of that particular something generally goes up. If they have more people wanting legos than they can provide for, couldn't they just sell to the highest bidders and make up some of the loss? Legos could turn into sort of a luxury item temporarily. Not necessarily all bad for them.

    Course, I'm not a business man or an expert on economics. I guess at the same time, some people might see doing something like that as greed or

  • On to Mexico! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 31 2006, @07:25PM (#16666961)
    Yup, it's gonna' be tough. The plant in Enfield, CT. (which I worked at for awhile) deals with packaging the Legos (created overseas) into their boxed forms to be shipped to distributors. However, the place was pretty badly run. While I was working there, there was a little bit of leeway being made in improving the efficiency of the packaging, because of hours you could be standing on a line waiting for the legos you need to package to complete your order. And it wasn't because of the laziness of the workers, the workers themselves would get angry at the fact that they weren't doing anything, eventually sending workers to other operational lines in a hope to scrap some amount of energy out of the workforce otherwise left doing nothing at their current post.

    The problem was with the management of the distribution of the packages. The legos come in with all of one style of lego (say, a 2x4 red brick) in large bins. They will be poured into individual bins that go into the line and separated into those little pouches either completely or mostly by machine. There had been under way plenty of industrial engineering trying to make the factory "flow" better. As it was, the pieces would come in and be thrown into one corner of the factory. When they were needed, they would have to be found, and then brought to the line. Leftovers get put back in bins and thrown in another corner.

    And there was the problem. Each line was built in the hopes to be able to package any style of box, but because no line really specialized in one style of packaging (save for one or two exceptions, like the Bionic lines specializing in the tubed packages), combined with the fact that the movement of materials to different lines seemed at best ad-hoc (mismanaged), led to a decrease in performance.

    Now, the people working the lines were doing their job, and it's too bad that they were eventually laid off. Although the lines were created to allow an increase for modularity in the packaging, the system to bring the pieces to those lines are what failed. By the time the company got to trying to solve the problem, it was too late. The entire way the factory was run, going from a single, central repository of pieces to more of a separated, distributed repository layout (where the pieces are closer to the lines where they would actually be used) would just be too much, in their eyes.

    I guess they decided that so long as they were going to have to rebuild the entire factory's layout, they might as well do it where the wages are lower as well.

    I'm not a industrial engineer in any right, but that's just what I was able to witness. I probably wouldn't have even written this post if it wasn't for the manager of the shift who would constantly lie blatantly to the employees ("You will not be laid off"). Everyone knows that he was lying, and the good will of the workers was being broken by that mentality.

    Not sure if I spouted one piece of good info in this post, but hey, what's Slashdot if not to post uninformed ramblings.
  • And assume NONE of those lego sets would have sold on sale, and all of them would have sold at full price, they can probably argue that they lost a billion dollars in sales.

    Or perhaps the 137 million already reflects Riaa math and they would have actually lost 33 million.
  • This may tip the scales to make me buy some of these [lego.com].
  • The most upsetting part is that we can't get nano-legos. I have a complete design for a self-replicating Lego nano-factory. If only I had started sooner, then I would have been able to solve their production limitations forever.
  • If Lego become any more expensive than they already are due to this, they could just as well start making these bricks in solid gold. :-p
  • This is the usual tactic. Scare up publicity and increase demand using an artificial supply shortage. Supply down, demand up, outrageous prices normal, CEO gets bonus.

  • Every time the same marketing trick... (Score:4, Informative)

    by anshil (302405) on Wednesday November 01 2006, @02:59AM (#16670145) Homepage
    There is no real shortage thats a planned trick to get more money into the toy sector.

    Robert B. Cialdini writes this in his book "The Psychology of Persuasion". One Toy-Product is heavily marketed, so you eventually promise your kids who will be longing for it, they will get it as present for christmas. Then *tata* production shortage bla-bla, and you can't get it, so you have to buy another equally valued toy for your kids. But(!): Promised is still promised! In February the production shortage suddendly vanishes, and you will have to buy your kids the promised toy also. -> Result: You spent twice as much in the toy sector.
    • apparently you haven't gotten a recent catalog. The front cover is a train and the back is a chess set. while it has star wars/batman/and other sets, trains, and cityscapes are featured just as strongly. what get's the smallest amount of space though is mindstorms, and technic. oh well.
    • Jesus, they stopped making that car?! I've been wanting that since I saw it at a friend's house 10ish years ago. Nowadays I can't even find Lego at the large toystores, and the smaller ones only have some crappy themed ones. I want my Technics back :(

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by mincognito (839071)

        I guess your mother bought you Mega Blocks when you were youger, and not orignal legos.

        "The word LEGO® is a brand name and is very special to all of us in the LEGO Group Companies. We would sincerely like your help in keeping it special. Please always refer to our bricks as 'LEGO Bricks or Toys' and not 'LEGOS.' By doing so, you will be helping to protect and preserve a brand of which we are very proud and that stands for quality the world over. Thank you! Susan Williams, Consumer Services."

        From h [wikipedia.org]

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