Lego Christmas Production Shortage 168
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.
oh boy (Score:2)
Re:oh boy (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why are you arguing with me?
Re: (Score:2)
Unstructuring? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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 ??
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Anything important out of production? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just my opinion. I grew up building stuff with legos, and didn't need anything but regular bricks to do so with.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Anything important out of production? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Anything important out of production? (Score:4, Funny)
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:2)
Uh... I hate to burst your bubble, but... The internet is a series of tubes.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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, Funny)
Really?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Th
Re: (Score:2)
For a second there I thought you were saying there was an Hell-themed set.
Now that would've been awesome.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
William
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
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
While true it's all about toy competition... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:While true it's all about toy competition... (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I read your post and thought, that's an awesome idea! So I wrote one. In 5 minutes. Here it is: http://ldd.lego.com/download/ [lego.com]
Oh yeah, and I bought the lego.com domain name to make it look "official". Really, I wrote it. Just for you! :)
Re: (Score:2)
i figured someone might have done it and it makes sense for them.. just never thought of it before till i saw parents post..
going to have some fun with this
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
My friends and I built entire crazy-ass cities and had buckets full of lego pieces. We could just sit there for hours and hours and create the most totally awesome little cities and
Re: (Score:2)
Themes only recently started to depart from the overall Lego philosophy. For awhile, yes, they released a bunch of silly one-off pieces (The hideous one-piece molded Sebulba comes to mind), but they've actively cut back on that. Sometimes a tub of bricks just doesn't cut it. Sure, if all you want to do is toss together a blocky house, it's no problem. But really good (small scale) sculptures require the more interesting and esoteric pieces. Yes, you could make a pair of wings out of square plates, but it's
Re: (Score:2)
Wow, I dropped a brick when I read that. (Score:2)
Lego needs to cut their losses (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is about like being disappointed that no one now makes your favorite sliderule with the fancy new base 2 logarithms built-in. Why would anyone settle for a model of an RC car with a working gearbox? [lego.com]
And this is just the tip of the iceberg! Have you seen what you can do with latest Mindstorms? The technology behind Lego is as far beyond the original Technic as Legos are beyond lincoln l
Capsella Instead (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Production cuts (Score:3, Interesting)
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)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Next thing you know, demands up, shortages everywhere, more news stories, etc, etc. It's the Cabbage Patch ploy.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, this is technically correct... but it is technically correct for almost any kind of service. With a few exceptions which require extremely expensive specialized equipment(medical services comes to mind), the difference between you & the person you're paying for a service
Re: (Score:2)
Get a clue. Generally, when you setup a production line, you want to run the most pieces possible off of it. Costs will amortize per piece, regardless of how much more the material costs are for the increased production. We already know material and energy costs per piece allow profitability, since they allowed profits for the 1st piec
Nothing new (Score:2, Interesting)
Note I said "multimedia device", not "game console". You know which two I'm referring to.
Re: (Score:1)
Tell that to the laid off employees (Score:2, Troll)
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...
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Private corporations can still sell stock directly to investors. A private company is simply one that does not offer its stock to the general public via one of the big stock exchanges.
Re: (Score:2)
A little sadness (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
How much you wanna bet... (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Its hard work getting up every morning to go to the office to lay workers off.
Re: (Score:1)
Supply and Demand (Score:2, Interesting)
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)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I've always wondered how the assemblage of the kits was done --- very, very good QA if it's done wholly by hand.
It really seems to me that it begs to have a fully automated system of one really long line and a series of dispensing robots putting one brick at a time into the box --- while it might be hard to amortize, you could jump start it by setting it up for just the smallest sets, doing a timetable of shifts of stocking different parts and running boxes through multiple times to fill the larger sets
Re: (Score:2)
What you saw seems to be typical of assembly line operations. I have seen a few such packaging operations, and in every case, 5 minutes observation would reveal a few procedural problems and dozens of places where a small investment would improve working conditions AND boost productivity.
Many problems were indirectly created by a sort of workplace caste system. Things that would obviously improve productivity were avoided if they might accidentally improve conditions for the "lower caste".
I even saw one
Re: (Score:2)
So if they use RIAA values (Score:2)
Or perhaps the 137 million already reflects Riaa math and they would have actually lost 33 million.
Bricklink to the rescue! (Score:1)
To hell with the hyperadvertised, branded megafad-of-the-moment shite that the LEGO salesdroids are pushing. The way I'm going about it, there isn't any shortage to worry about...
I've been getting my 5 y.o. son interested by doing LEGO kitbash construction projects with him. All sorts of crazy imaginative stuff...kinda like M.C. Escher meets Jane's Fighting Ships (-grin-). When we fall seriously short of some of the more esoteric/uncommon pieces, I go online to check out Bricklink http://www.bricklink.c [bricklink.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, back in the long ago, I used to build airplanes out of LEGO with tiny little passengers. I would crash the plane, and see what happened to the passengers.
It's a shame they couldn't build a better... (Score:1)
Demand for legos? (Score:1)
Are people still buying massive amounts of legos?
Either way, I think this lego shortage is going to get massively overshadowed by the PS3 shortage that is bound to happen.
Too Complicated (Score:1)
It took all the fun out of it, it's like they were mocking my own imagination & force feeding me theirs.
I always knew thoose special pieces were bad news, thoose pieces require molds that are just too complicated.
I think Lego needs to get back to producing the toys that sparked imagination, not advertised someone elses.
Re: (Score:2)
For probably that reason alone, I just stopped even caring about Lego. I remember how all the crazy awesome castles and etc. I wanted were being replaced by retarded molded-piece sets that eliminated the possibility of creative usage of the pieces.
Re: (Score:2)
Freeze your own! (Score:2)
No nano? (Score:2, Funny)
One thing is for sure... (Score:2)
Artificial supply shortage (Score:2)
Sackings (Score:2)
Ya gotta spend money to make money. (Score:2)
Lego == Commodore ??? (Score:2)
Every time the same marketing trick... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Stupid Management (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"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]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
ok, It's fucking Lego, not Legos.
I do realise that the LEGO company objects to the bricks being called Legos but I seriously doubt they will like 'fucking Lego' much better.
Re: (Score:2)
I presume they'd appreciate LEGO being used in this way either then [kicks-ass.org]. (Kinda NSFW)
Dug
Re: (Score:2)
There are. They're never as good, though. I remember we had some Megabloks bricks once. The plastic's not quite the same and the moulding isn't as consistent - either they stick together too hard and can't be got apart, or they don't stick at all. They're decent enough as a cheap way to bulk out your collection of 2x4 Plain Rectangular Bricks, but can't be relied upon in the same way.