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Only 1 VW Camper poly per household via S@H
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Comments
I won't take my ball and go home just bc the freebie is no longer available to me, but I may go play in another person's yard - most likely Amazons. It's in TLG's best interest to keep me in their yard. A small freebie is a small price to pay.
Overall, I have gotten 2 of each in 3 trips.
(Or am i just lucky working 5 mins from the Liverpool store hehe)
Don't put it in the cart and we're all good.
Except that 2 per household would be better, people do have multiple fans of LEGO and of course it makes a great gift.
Heck, I'd buy a few extra for $10 each if they would sell them.
I purchased 2 smaller SW sets, total of about $85, to get the VW Camper Van and SW figure.
Without those freebies, I would never have placed an order.
So they can't have it both ways. Either give me something nice to motivate me to place an order at full price, or I'm not going to buy.
BTW, how come this thread in the shopping UK section? And how on earth LFT found this??? :-)
Hogwash, if 10% of all LEGO business is S@H and LBR stores, then the retail end is a $400+ million company.
There is no excuse for a nearly half billion dollar company to be this sloppy when it comes to e-commerce. The technology has long since been figured out, you can buy this stuff off the shelf, you don't even have to program it yourself anymore.
Most customers don't complain, they just never return.
Still makes me laugh how many people are up in arms and throwing their toys out the pram in a "If I can't get multiple freebies, I will take my business elsewhere" style. We are a tiny minority, Lego are going from strength to strength, you act like it would harm them if a handful of random AFOL's buys their product from a different source. You are still buying their product, they are still making money from you, do you not get that??
It is mainly about HOW the freebie removal is handled..
TLG is basically getting a bit arrogant on what they think they can do to their customers and still get away with it. They are entering a very negative area and with little perceived benefit in customer happiness, if any is even possible regarding their moves (other than those few wishing prices would go up for everything). And if I'm so replaceable by some newbies, then go for it TLG, wish you all the best in persuading someone else to cough up $1K a month on your toys. I'm sure we grow on trees infinitely too. I hate the direction they are going with the Big Brother tactics. Really, they should invest those dollars into extra freebies and employee discounts instead of installing scam-ware to sniff out double-orderers ooohhhh those evil people who order more than once.
Can't believe she called me dummy.... But she was right.
AND the problem is, you will continue to spend a fortune on their toys, even if not direct through S@H.
So if you were aiming to get say 5, TLG instead get 4 promo's out to their target market who are likely to have a positive vibe towards the company for getting something for nothing; and you are either happy with your one, or bitter and storm off and throw all your toys (except Lego) out the pram and go somewhere else TO BUY LEGO, so they win either way!
If someone buys a £99.99 RRP set from Amazon for £69.99 then Amazon still makes a share of profit from that, but even if it's only say, £5 then the discounted price at Amazon alone means Lego is down £35 on that product from what they could've had.
So yes, they may still be making a sale but if others start switching like this then it effectively pushes Lego's average sale price down, and if they can't maintain their average sale price then depending on how quickly they can pull in new customers they will start to see a slowing of growth, or perhaps even negative growth.
Given that they're such a big player and it's tough at the top they're going to be reaching a point where finding new customers is going to get ever more difficult so it's more important than ever that they keep the customers they do have paying as much as they can if they want to maintain growth.
If they're going to start pushing people away to discounting sellers then they wont achieve that. The freebies are fundamental in helping assist them in getting people to pay RRP.
So yes it does hurt them if people start buying elsewhere. Decreased profit is a very bad thing for a company especially if it were to get to the point where Amazon and/or other retailers become a big enough portion of their profits to start arguing for better terms such as increased profit share, decreased prices and so forth.
Buying from non-brand stores if brand stores or S@H stop being competitive or stop offering incentive to buy there can very much give TLG reason to stop and reassess how it has treated it's customers.
TLG are booming, however much you think you know about business, they are handling theirs very well.
They are targeting their core demographic, and at the expense of a tiny amount of people who think they are entitled to an extra freebie.
Lets be honest there is not that many AFOL's and I would say there are a fair percentage of those that agree that sticking to their own rules on a promotion is a good thing.
This is NOT going to hurt them.
There are far too many people here who think they know better than TLG, makes me laugh so much, if you guys were in charge the company would crumble within days... Oh just give them as many freebies as they want, just set up a new reseller deal where we give them all the hot products just as they are going EOL. Let them buy as many 41999's as they like (and their Mum's!).
What we're looking at here (and other threads) is people not dealing well with change, that's almost always the case and completely understandable, we're just not very good at it and to be honest LEGO aren't helping the process with a lack of information and inconsistency.
However, when you step away and say, OK, Lego are limiting a freebie to one per household, its stated in the small print (and I think has been for a while) and they're just enforcing at S@H because its easy to do - you do wonder where is all the uproar coming from?
Sure, it could be handled better, it could be removed from the basket, they could hold up the order and email you about it. They could make the same rule apply in store (although that's harder as they don't have a household to work from without a VIP card). But really, people are going to change their buying habbits because of a limit on free poly bags?
It would be better if LEGO explained why they are making these changes, they've given some, particularly in terms of the VW poly and it wasn't believed by many and I'm fairly sure whatever LEGO said if it didn't agree with some peoples opinion they wouldn't belive it anyway.
To make sure shops stick to the same policy, then they could also make it that only VIPs get freebies. Then have the requirement that each VIP card is verified to a single address.
If they are going to do it, do it properly and consistently.
http://shop.lego.com/en-GB/LEGO-Mini-VW-T1-Camper-Van-40079
Or they could contact everyone with repeat orders informing them that they will not get the freebie before the order is sent, and allow them to cancel the order rather than have to later return it due to missing items.
:P
I'm not going to enter into discussion of whether or not we are entitled to more than 1 or the circumnavigation of limits, but will say that these new restrictions are clearly not working, as can be seen on the BL sales history page.
http://www.bricklink.com/catalogPG.asp?S=40079-1
Here's a brief extract
Qty Each
9 ~GBP 10.230
4 ~GBP 10.247
1 ~GBP 10.519
1 ~GBP 10.520
1 ~GBP 10.520
2 ~GBP 10.532
1 ~GBP 10.537
3 ~GBP 10.875
50 ~GBP 10.876
20 ~GBP 10.891
1 ~GBP 10.918
1 ~GBP 10.926
1 ~GBP 10.940
3 ~GBP 11.250
2 ~GBP 11.454
1 ~GBP 11.498
1 ~GBP 11.517
5 ~GBP 11.531
1 ~GBP 11.586
10 ~GBP 11.615
Oh, or are you just another one that knows so much better how this multimillion dollar company should do it's business?
But it was all just an "if" and an explanation of "why" a move by customer to non-direct sales could harm them. Where you're probably right is that that move wont happen and I tend to agree with you here as I think Lego are smart enough to nip this sort of issue in the bud. I very much suspect that given Lego's quarterly satisfaction surveys citing a sizeable number of respondents as being unhappy with a perception of declining quality and poor value for money that Lego will be loathe to clamp down too much on freebies because it'd only increase these negative perceptions and hence increase the amount of negative responses in surveys. Should this happen I have faith that Lego are smart enough to spot that and stop being so difficult with customers about said freebies.
This is also why I suspect the US is seeing a clamp down on discounts on exclusives but Europe thus far hasn't - because the US respondents to their survey have shown a better view of value for money than Europe and so they recognise they can probably get away with it there, but much less so here where there is a perception of poor value for money contrasting against the US view of good value for money.
I may be wrong, Lego may well ignore their own survey results and shoot themselves in the foot in which case they will begin to see the impact of that on their results over time, but like you I think they're probably smart enough to know better. May I suggest checking the "What do Brickesetters do for a living?" thread or whatever it's called. There are a number of people in there who have identified themselves as being from various positions, some for companies far more successful than TLG. To assume no one on Brickset knows anything about business that would be of value to TLG is silly and to attach some kind of deity status to those that do run TLG shows a certain naivety of what's involved in running a successful company. There's nothing magic about it and certainly nothing unique - Lego if it were a US firm wouldn't even make the Fortune 500 list and there are many more companies across the globe in their respective countries that are larger and more succesful than Lego.
Don't get me wrong, I love Lego and it's products or I wouldn't be here, but it's silly to try and keep up some pretense that Lego can do no wrong and that they have magically solved the whole business thing such that they could never see any negative impact on their business ever, no matter what they do. So to turn around that argument that "if Bricksetters are so smart, why isn't their business as big as TLG's?", then if TLG is so perfect, then why isn't it the biggest company in the world? Why isn't it even in the top 1000 biggest companies in the world?
It has nothing to do with the actual amount of cash made on the sale, but rather the margin. TLG has arranged profit margins for their distribution chain that they are happy with. They are now focused on keeping their direct sales profit margins at an acceptable level. If an AFOL stacks promos and discounts along with VIP points, that margin decreases. At the end of the day it's margins on paper that matter. And sometimes it's best not to make the sale direct. And when these savvy AFOLs shop elsewhere they're protecting their margins, but are still getting the sale through their distribution chain.
This has been mentioned before, that by stacking lots of offers/discounts and now free delivery makes you much less of an attractive customer to LEGO, especially if you are only flipping the LEGO to get the freebies and hence just taking future sales off LEGO at a more favourable (to you) time.
That's still never going to be worse than a profits earnt from a 3rd party sale and even then relies on someone being able to split an order into exactly £50 batches and only ever on double VIP point months. About the only exception are brand store event days (i.e. grand openings) but these are strictly controlled anyway with limited quantities and such.
We're looking at this with almost zero information about the costs but also about the why's. You would hope that (even) LEGO would have considered the impact of enforcing a 1 poly rule and taken into account some disgruntled customers that may reduce/stop future spends. Now, either they don't care or they've decided its a price they're happy to pay. I very much doubt that they haven't even considered it, even if only at a very simplistic level.
It's just a shame if this is the case they chose such a nice and popular poly to test the water with or maybe as a licensed product they genuinely are just constrained in how many of these they could produce and provide.
TLG most likely would like to see a minimum increase of 15-20% higher margins for dierct sales over a 3rd party sale. So if a 3rd party sales margin is 30%, a direct margin would need to be 45-50%.
This is also why companies such as for example Levis, who established a strong retail brand through franchises now want to bring those franchises back in house as owned retail stores because they no longer have need to be concerned about the risk given that their own retail operation has been successful.
You definitely avoid risk by letting others do it but if you do it yourself you would have no reason to need larger profit margins, if you do it successfully (as TLG have) then you will inherently gain higher profits than you could by letting someone else take the risk precisely because that 3rd party is going to want an additional cut (primarily their profit) for taking that very risk for you.
Large companies make foolish decisions all the time, even GM went bankrupt. TLG is not immune from that.