[Joe Moore]

Quote:

Originally Posted by protostar8

Lego products are neat, but the company has really lost touch on the pricing. With 3D printers being a thing now, you could probably print this entire kit yourself for $10 worth of filament, maybe $20. So I know their production costs would probably be <$5 given economies of scale. So they are saying that customers should pay $195 for licensing, packing, and distribution plus a little for engineering (which honestly they probably didn't have to put in too much effort on this, maybe a day's wages for a designer).

You 100% could not do this for $10 or $20 worth of materials. I agree that LEGO prices are definitely too high (hence why I don't collect them), but the development isn't cheap.

How is it that in this day and age, people still think products should only cost the exact price of the base materials? And people are always wrong about those costs anyway. The cost doesn't just factor in only paying for the license and the materials. Cost includes the people who come up with the designs, the factory workers, the packaging materials, the packaging designer, the illustrator who comes up with the instructions.

On top of all that, they factor in the time for each of those dteps. Time is money, and it's more expensive than anything else on the list.