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UCS falcon rumours (that turned out to be true!)
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Comments
There's so many more important things to be upset over. There's 28 sets worth $200 or more right now. The vast majority of which go to kids.
Anyways, you're right there are many other things to be upset about. The point of my last comment was about availability speculation more than the kids, which was off topic. :)
And, this was after I had emailed and was told October 8th...
Putting stickers on this set is like painting the Mona Lisa and then drawing a Hitler mustache on it with a sharpee.
I can see how even including the OPTION of stickers might be perceived as an insult or a quality defect to someone who thinks their tastes are the only ones that should be catered to. But LEGO is easily doing the rest of the world a favor by keeping self-righteous snobs like that disappointed.
I'm in full agreement with montsblitz on this one. An unprecedented, unrivaled, prestigious, ULTIMATE Collector's edition, pride and joy flagship of everything LEGO has to offer..... and then.... stickers!? It's just a strange (and yes, for some, a slap in the face) choice. At least tell me you would prefer printed pieces, even if you disagree with the other points, yes?
Edit: I don't see where calling this preference self-righteous comes in.... it's something that LEGO has done many times before, why not hold them to it on the nicest of sets?
Hello LEGO® Star Wars™ Fan,
The good news is we are making more as quickly as possible and expect to have very limited quantities available for the remainder of 2017. We have extended the VIP-only access period, which means the new inventory will remain exclusive to VIPs at least through November.
To make your wait a little easier, you can now sign up to receive back-in-stock notifications. Simply confirm your interest below and we’ll email you when a new batch of the Millennium Falcon (75192) is available on shop.LEGO.com
If you'd rather make your purchase at your favorite LEGO Brand Retail store, please call or visit your local store starting Friday 9/29 and ask a Brick Specialist to add you to the wait list.
Now I just need to finish washing/sorting/packing the rest of tower bridge before I can open this piece of junk!
History:
Order placed 14 September, 30 mins after going live: Not in Warehouse
15 Sept: Backordered
21 Sept: in Warehouse
25 Sept: Shipped
27 Sept: VIP points credited
28 Sept: Feeling very happy
Not once did I call customer service, but I sure thought about it many times a day.
Now will patiently wait for the special VIP card.
I hope all the rest of you still waiting will be rewarded soon!!!
I definitely have some pet peeves with certain types of stickers… for instance, I already established that I hate STAMPs, which are fortunately now fleetingly rare. Stickers that go on parts like a 1x1 or 2x2 round brick are also frustrating since they often don't like to stay put after you've applied them. And the tail stickers of #70816 were a bit of a pain to apply since they were cut to the shape of the pattern rather than the shape of the piece — I understand this was probably a gift to Neo Classic Space builders so they could use the stickers on any part of their choosing, but for the sake of assembling the set it meant there were no guidelines to help line the stickers up at the same height and the same angle on all four pieces. But a set like #70615 or #10257 with thirty or so precision-cut stickers to line up? That right there is my jam.
Side note related to stickers, I would really love if LEGO would create more hologram stickers like this Exploriens sticker! Those were the coolest! Not every day you see a little 3D minifigure inside the surface of a piece!
Dfchang813, I over-exaggerated by quoting your figure of $25 and weakened my argument as a result. I also apologise for calling it arbitrary, I was unaware you were referring to a cost being quoted by a third party service.
I should have restricted my argument to stickers versus printing, which I still believe is not an either/or choice. I think the profit margin on this set for a wide range of reasons isn't quite what it appears to be if you simply use the price to parts ratio. It's huge, transportation costs from a quantity you can fit in a truck are probably much higher. The number that can be produced in the factory in each production run purely from a warehouse space has to also be a factor.
Any increase in cost (however minimal) could have affected the sales of the set, and even if you allow for under-supplying to create demand. The massive popularity of the set (on the available evidence) seemed to surprise Lego.
Prior to release, I honestly think they were nervous about it, tentative even.
I don't think I would have contemplated spending this amount of money on Lego before this set was released, and if asked in a survey, would have probably stated a figure well below this rrp as my maximum ever spend.
So, I think at the announcement, another $25 or equivalent in other currency might have made all the difference to me. Would I have been alone in that?
No one knew what demand would be but it seems clear that there has been an underestimation of peoples' appetite to spend this sort of money (my own included). So perhaps you are right and what follows is moot.
Monkeyhanger, you point out that the price to parts ratio isn't that great and you are right, in those terms you can get a lot better value from your money, even at full retail prices, there is a great little thread on eurobricks about just that.
Let's assume for the moment that LEGO aren't out to rip us all off. They aren't all sniggering and rolling about in our money (which we give freely, and in large amounts for their products). They do want to design and manufacture good products that represent value for money for their customers.
Let's furthermore assume that $799.99 is a price that allows Lego to make a fair profit margin.
I did some rough maths.
It will cost between 2¢ and 10¢ to injection mould each piece, it's probably an underestimate but let's start with 3¢ per piece as there are only a couple of larger pieces here.
Maybe printing each extra piece would only cost 6¢ more (each pad printing step will cost you approx 2¢ a piece, let's average three different colour steps per piece). The set up costs should be relatively small, or close to negligible in the numbers we are talking.
Each extra printed piece in the set therefore costs you 9¢.
This probably doesn't include transportation or any of the logistics involved with moving things between various factories - even if they're on the same site, so we'll add 0.5¢ per piece for all these extra hassles (possibly a conservative estimate).
In quality control you'll possibly throw away as much as 1% of the pad printed pieces from misalignment or from simply misprinting. I'm fairly certain I've forgotten other things that will cost you money, but for the purposes of this let's round it up and say each piece now costs 10¢ to produce.
There are thirteen pieces more, so, $1.30, and, as suspected, not a lot more to spend at the manufacturing stage.
And all we are now doing is substituting printed parts for plain, so there should be no more costs incurred logistically.
If you hold with a general rule of thumb that wholesale cost is roughly half the retail, it's only another $2.60! So, you're both right! It's a massive scam, where are my printed pieces?
Even if you look at it from a pure profit point of view. $799.99 will have at the very, very minimum, a 10% profit margin, otherwise, what's the point? In fact I'd be very surprised if $200 wasn't closer to the profit on this, so $2.60 less is a drop in the ocean.
I hate to admit it, but looks like I'm wrong, adding these 13 parts shouldn't have had much of an impact on the overall rrp.
What doesn't add up in my mind though, is that stickers are undeniably cheaper, I know this from 12 years working as a toy designer. We would use stickers to add value and I've been assuming that LEGO were doing the same.
So, why include them unless they really are added value? If they could be printed, why haven't they been?
The only defense I have left is that price points are usually set in the project planning stage. "This product needs to retail for this price." So, the designers do their job, get to the refining the product stage and it looks like they're a little bit under budget, maybe as much as a dollar! Do they spend the extra $1.00 on stickers, or do they leave them out altogether? As a designer, I'd spend some of that extra money on stickers, make the product a little bit nicer for those that don't mind the odd sticker. So it wouldn't be a case of printing or stickers, it would still be stickers or nothing.
monstblitz said: It's not though is it. It's more like putting go faster stripes on a BMX. Ultimately it makes little overall difference to the product, and it's a subjective matter of opinion if it looks better or not.
People will always agree to disagree on this one, but I appreciate knowing where you come from. I did enjoy the ones on say.... similar to 9498 where you have to perfectly align the sticker around an angular piece.
When it comes to this 75192 Falcon though, a sticker on large flat pieces among the other things like battle scars just feels.... cheap.... in comparison to the grandeur of the rest of the set. Its packaging, manual, design, graphics, it's all so beautiful and the stickers leave me feeling underwhelmed. I probably won't apply them, rather I may sell them for a hefty price on BL. Either way, I'm sure we will all LOVE the set. Do you have one yet?
If TLG don't make a 40% margin on a set that is supplied directly by them at a similar price:piece ratio to commonly available retail sets, on a mass of commonly available pieces then i'd be amazed. If supermarkets, Smyths, TRU, Amazon et al can afford to put the common sets on regular 20-30% discount, and they themselves look to sell at a reasonable profit even during a 30% off sale, then id assume a £100 RRP/1100 piece set has come from TLG at a cost of no more than £40, and that TLG at least doubled their money - so we're talking £0.02/piece cost.
Development costs can't be huge - this isn't a "from scratch" design, same framework as the last one with similar "skin" builds that have more greebling.
Fancy packaging is obviously more expensive than the standard stuff - Could the fancy instructions and box of the MF cost TLG more than £2 a unit at the volumes they're talking? Doubtful. Shipping is going to be inflated for a big 15Kg lump, but if I could post one fully insured for about £35, i'm sure TLG could do one for less than £10 and self-insure, Cost of the pieces at 2p per piece = £150. Add in the additional customer services and warehousing costs of single unit despatch rather than bulk despatch to an external retailer of maybe a generous £20 per unit, and cost to TLG is well under £200 a unit.
As far as stickers go - the clear, soft rubberised stickers as seen on the old Death Star #10188 seem far more durable than the white ones (which go brittle over time).
That said, I'll concede stickers have their place in certain sets, and can add detail to cheaper sets without increasing cost.
This set has no place in that category. It's the largest and most expensive Lego set ever designed. And it was designed primarily for AFOLs, the vast majority of whom despise stickers. So, yes, designing this set with any stickers is a bit of an insult to fans shelling out $800 + for this set. I'd rather they not drop a sticker sheet turd in the box to keep the minority - those who pretend to like stickers - happy. But I'm glad you're happy with your stickers that will degrade over time on your $800 collectible.
Lego itself is primarily sold as a building toy that can be dismantled and built into something else, and while the thought of lobbing 7500 parts from a set like this into a parts bin to build a house or something similar may be alien to a group of set collectors, the fact of the matter is that is what it's designed for and having specialised printed pieces in every set would limit the usage of those parts for the thousands of MOC builders that use set pieces like that.
However the order limit here is still at 3 even though they admit in the email availability will be limited throughout 2017... Can't wrap my head around that.
If LEGO really cares about their fans as they claim then simply set the limit at 1 to make it harder for the scalpers to build up stock and give real fans a better chance at obtaining this at RRP.
Another factor could be the visibility of the parts with stickers. Other than the big ID plate, it looks like all the stickers will be on the interior of the Falcon. Is anybody planning on displaying it with the interior visible? Why add the extra expense of printed parts that most people will never see?
Then today, when everyone here is posting how their "backordered" turned into "shipped," mine went back to "waiting for new stock" then back to "backordered" then back to "waiting for new stock" then finally back to "backordered."
I have a funny feeling there's someone in the [email protected] offices just switching my status back and forth for the heck of it.
Maybe try reading my post again, but this time paying attention to the actual words? I never said nor implied that people who like stickers the way I do are a majority. What I was saying is that people so stubbornly selfish that they'd rather pay the same amount for the same contents minus the COMPLETELY OPTIONAL sticker sheet are a demographic that LEGO is better off not catering to. That would be like a person refusing dinner at their favorite restaurant because it had optional pepper grinders on tables and they didn't like pepper. Or a person refusing a DVD of their favorite movie because it came with optional audio commentary and they don't like listening to audio commentaries. Or a person refusing a new installment in their favorite video game series because it gave them an option to play as a girl and they didn't like playing as a girl.
Also, I can't even fathom how mind-numbingly full of yourself you'd have to be to genuinely think I'm only "pretending" to like stickers. Really? Why is the thought that people might have different opinions than you so unreasonable to you? If I ever get a set where I'm concerned about the stickers degrading, I'll leave them off, because that option is just as available to me as it is to you or anyone else. But honestly, even if the stickers on a set of mine did degrade (and none of those on sets I've gotten in the past decade have done so), all I'd have to do is scrub off the adhesive marks and I'd be left with the same set I would have had if it hadn't come with stickers in the first place, or if I hadn't applied them. Problem solved. It's not that hard a concept to grasp.
And calling a sticker sheet a "turd"? Holy crap, did a sticker sheet kill your parents or something? Because you're taking its mere existence waaaaaay more personally than you have any sensible reason to.