Archiving the History of the LEGO Retail Experience
I stopped by the LEGO Store in Rockefeller Center today. The only notable item were the now “old” green baseplates still available, at a “sale” price of about $5. These are mostly sold out everywhere else, and the new baseplates are a brighter shade of green, and now fetch $7.99 each, I believe.
It seems that Target had mis-priced one of the new LEGO Justice League sets — 76028: Darkseid Invasion — as $59.99, instead of MSRP of $69.99. I found one today, and got to see the rest of the Justice League sets, plus Minecraft, in the store.
As for post-holiday sale markdowns, they had a very slight discount on some sets. I never understand a sale strategy like this – these sets will be bumped around the sale aisle for weeks, just getting more and more damaged.
There have been varying reports on LEGO clearance items at Target stores, some people seem to be scoring loads of incredible deals, while others are finding very little. I stopped by my local Target today – a few days after clearance items would be marked, and didn’t find much to be excited about. One thing to note is that my store didn’t seem to have the 50% discount that many other stores did.
With LEGO gaining in popularity even further, post-holidays sales have been light this year. There were reports of 50% off LEGO sales at Barnes & Noble, so after 2 days, I decided to stop by my local store. Nothing was marked on sale, but I had an employee scan a bunch of sets, and one of them — the Mountain Hut — came up at 50% off. I grabbed it.
I stopped by a different LEGO Store this weekend, amidst the height of holiday shopping. As expected, the store was packed with merchandise, though the manager kept fielding questions from customers about specific items that were out of stock: the ice theme, regular baseplates, etc. As I walked up to the store, employees were carting in a bunch of new merchandise…
I stopped by another Target on Saturday and was surprised to see a handful of the exclusive minifigure cubes in stock:
I stopped by the LEGO Store today, and was surprised to see they still had a few Thanksgiving Turkey’s in stock, and had them marketed down to $5. One of the Minecraft sets was marked down as well, and the only other thing I noticed was some 2015 City sets hitting the shelves.
A surprising little release came this week, an exclusive cube of 4 minifigs only available at Target. I stopped by my local store, and an employee told me they sold out quickly a day or two ago. Loads of signage for them. Luckily, I ordered some of these online which should arrive soon. Here is what the store looked like:
LEGO opened a new store in New York City recently, and I finally got a chance to stop by. The store is situated directly across from the Flatiron Building in a space that I think had never previously been used for retail. This area has really gotten trendy lately, so it was not a total surprise to hear that LEGO grabbed this location.
The store is nice – a big rectangle – unlike their Rockefeller Center store which is broken up based on the existing floorplan. The Flatiron store does have some weird lounge room in the back that has couches and bookshelves, and wood floors. Very strange.
They were sold out of the Turkey set and Snowman set, which seem to both be hot commodities. The custom LEGO displays above the shelves told the history of this particular building. I liked the columns that had a LEGO brick theme, and the lightning.
It is incredible how much LEGO is displayed at my local Toys R Us. You walk in to the store – it is the first thing you see; there is an enormous double-wide LEGO section, and even the Star Wars action figure aisle (a full aisle, both sides) is now 25% LEGO. I was surprised to see that they had the Ghostbusters set here, and that they had the Bricktober mini-modular sets for sale. They also had a big box of Rocket Raccoon polybags, which seem to just be hitting the market, and are hard to find.
