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The Wal-Marts in my area are cleaning out their stockroom. They must have some big stockrooms to lose boxes because a lot of older sets showed up on the floor yesterday and today. Yesterday I found 9 Turtles Shredder Dragon Bike 79101 and 4 Turtle Lair Attack 79103 both on clearance for $19, and $34. When I'm there I usually chat it up with the employees and that day found myself talking to the manager of the Toy Dept. He ended up lowering the prices to $12 and $25 for the Turtles sets as well as the price of 60036 Arctic Base Camp to $40. I also came away with 2 76021 Milano Spaceships for $35, and a 70133 Spinlyn's Cavern for $11. Today different store, but same scenario. They had a 75020 Jabba's Sail Barge on the clearance shelf with no tag other than the reg price of $119.99. Scanned it, came up $49. On further inspection after collecting myself, the seals were broke on one side and taped back up. I checked out the contents and found that bag 1 was missing along with Jabba. Rats. I figured if I could get it down a little bit more I would take it, so I asked the lady working clearance what she could do. She ended up finding out there were six more in the back. I said I'll take one, no, make that two, wait, how about three. So ended up walking away with three complete Jabba's for $49 apiece and they even ended up knocking down the incomplete one to $25. Sometimes I really love Wal-Mart.

Still waiting for 3 more to arrive. 16 down in the USA for FBA. The rest are whats sitting in my storage right now at the photo below. The sealed cases contains 2 each.

Logistics issues in the warehouse:

A local mom and pop toy/game shop just relocated and I thought I'd share a couple of pics. It's too bad their retail lego section is meh. They did have an in box 10129 Snowspeeder for $900 in their used/resale section. <greg: not sure why that last one won't embed...grr>

Between this and the EU sold out fiasco , I have learned that many folks don't have a clear investment strategy .

I had to make this Bless our wallets!

So are you suggesting that Minigures Monsters and the new Xwing might be bundle material? Both available in September!

My point was : when someone invest in a "sold out" set they should keep in mind that it is not officially retired and the possibility of a restock or lack of will always exist ( SSD anyone ?). the fact that lego is making more shouldn't be a case for someone to regret such a big investment that they just made unless there is a massive and sustainable restock . PS had the same statement and we are yet to see any evidence of a big release. Patience my friends .

9493 for $160... And to think this was readily available for 49$ less than a year ago..

Oh wow, that's the Sarlaac Pit right?

Who can blame them. They are selling like hot cakes to resellers.

If you want to see a true cluster "F" watch the making of Episode 1 documentary. I watched it last night from the Amazon digital collection. They had a really good kid competing with Jake Lloyd and their decision to hire Lloyd was a huge mistake. Lucas is complimenting the actors and says "We have learned about Jake" not in a positive way. Look at the way Jake's 5 agents all pose around him and talk down to him, it's pathetic. Then he shows spielberg the battle droid and says "this is the next stormtrooper." Everything about those battle droids sucked, when they die on the battlefield nobody cares. When I was growing up, we all thought "Clone wars" was going to be a fight between awesome Jedis and a bunch of bounty hunters that looked like Boba Fett or cloned jedis, something interesting. Watching sterile white clones of jango fett fight boring robots was the worst possible interpretation of the clone wars I could imagine. Also in the doc, Lucas states that the whole movie hinges on Jar Jar. "If we can make Jar Jar work, we have a great film." This was a wealthy, middle aged man who hadn't done anything creative in decades with nobody to disagree with him or edit his terrible drafts. And I'm not saying middle aged men can't be creative - look at John Lassiter. Thank goodness he sold it to Disney. What they come out with this December can not possibly be worse than what Lucas would have done.

Those Man-eating Plants are the perfect company for Poison Ivy, as her henchmen OR as her victims/prisoners

Progress

I finally took the dive and bought an imperial shuttle 10212. I can't wait for it to arrive

Hold your horses guys. So Shop has this on the DS page. "We are currently making more, so please check back soon for availability".

Start off by assuming they are telling the truth and be sympathetic...it really is a bummer to get dinged up boxes - especially if they are gifts...or more likely he is another resller! Something along the lines of "Sorry, I totally understand, it is very disappointing to get damaged boxes. These items were carefully packaged, unfortunately the USPS doesn't necessarily share our love of LEGO!" I would also ask for them to send pictures to you. A trick I like to do is to put it back on them...ask what they would like for you to do to rectify the situation (after he sends pictures of course). If they give unreasonable demnads (like full refund but they keep the items) then just have them send them back and you will lose on the shipping. Often they ask for less than you were willing to concede. The sign of a good seller on ebay isn't how they handle the routine transactions...but how they react when something goes wrong. And it at some point to even the most conscienious seller. The fact that they already left positive feedback is telling also. Some buyers will use negative feedback to extort refunds from sellers, but that clearly isn't the case here.

Oh, uhhh, I didn't see the Ferris Wheel in store, so it must be retiring soon. Is that better?

It's only worth 2/100ths of a cent???

You guys are all making the assumption "the glitch" is easy to fix. We have surmised that the retail system is separate from the online system because when someone is banned from S@H they can still use their VIP points in store. As computer systems evolve, it gets more difficult (and expensive) to integrate them... so companies don't. It's highly unlikely their production scheduling, inventory management, S@H and retail systems have much in common aside from some crude interface to pass information between them. If it is indeed just "a glitch" which was caused by human error pushing data through, or some automated process that has had a hiccup, it could take days to resolve. Quick fixing can potentially cause more problems and any good company will know it. Just because LEGO's S@H website consistently craps the bed doesn't mean they can't make _some_ good decisions. If it's inventory redistribution, it's possible that the problems from earlier this year in California with dock workers hasn't completely resolved itself... or that they have more than one inventory system and they don't speak well. We just don't know but you all are free to drive yourself crazy speculating.

I'm more confident in the 10240 now that I've seen the new one .

Hoping for a similar % return on Red 5 since the new x-wing looks like a Halloween time machine.

Well at one Walmart I was at today they did not lower the IR sets on clearance and I put them back on the shelf. I picked up 3 Raptor Exchanges at that store... But I really wanted to find a "deal" somewhere in the store. I thought OK let me start looking and I looked up on the shelf straight in front of me and low and behold I bought this very good condition for $39 new and seals look great. Trying to decide if I want to flip it or add it to my collection.

21110 for $45 ... First hit at this price for me since raising it from $40

"Unofficial"? Is there an "official" version of this thread? This is like the MegaBloks version.

I have been watching all the other garbage shark movies on Syfy this week helping to build my anticipation for this turd. I watched 3 headed shark attack and zombie shark so far. Both were beyond awful, but I enjoyed every second of them

Lego CS: Activates tracking on flying laser sharks.

Pretty sure PC is massively hoarded. That was the set to hoard before the PS mini restock happened.

Can you guys speak English, please? Lol

Or they just want to go back to 1-2 modulars available at once. I could imagine that Kwik E Mart bombed in Europe though. As for calling Lego, I tried that last year re: TH and the guy just said, 'it's not retired, but we don't know when we'll get more in.'. Turns out the correct answer was, 'never'. I can just imagine the conversation in this case: Me: Hi, I was wondering if PR is really sold out, or it's just a glitch? Lego CS: It's 'available now' in the US. Me: Yes, but it's 'sold out' in Europe. Lego CS: (Pause, then in an eerily calm voice) Why do you care, exactly? Me: (Hangs up, sigh of relief that I was calling from a pay phone)

Got 2... Let's see what these do.

ditto...and I won't be the next time either. I'm still not buying any of this set. Like I mentioned a few pages back, there are several other "safer" investments than this set. It will be interesting to hear how many refunds are requested from buyers who paid over $400 for this set on eBay or Amazon over the past week and a half.

Yikes. There it is. And for good measure...

Bought 6 sealed cases of simpsons series 1 on clearance from the Lego store. They were apparently hated and the manager wanted them out. For sealed cases at target/Walmart ask an associate to look in the stockroom if they show any there. Had good luck with those too when they were clearing out 12/s1 at $1.48. Even got them in original shippers.

Maybe Lego is throwing sand in our eyes. And only one or two of the sets showing "sold out" on Lego SaH Europe are actually retiring. Just like they try to keep the mystery when looking at what is depicted in the Lego catalogue and what not.

Spoiler alert!!

Yes, TLG does know how much the production of a set will cost beforehand but only for a certain amount of units produced. If they're producing less units of a set than estimated, then each unit will be more expensive to produce as the share of fixed costs (designing the set, creation of set specific moulds etc.) is higher in relation to the share of variable costs. In case they're producing more units of a set than planned, and are able to sell them, then each unit will obviously be cheaper to produce as the share of fixed costs decreases. Even when a set is still profitable to produce, there will almost always be a set that's more profitable. Then, TLG has to decide how many of these sets they want to have available at the same time.

And, specifically "Blue". I totally agree by the way, RR is a FAR superior set due to those factors, BUT will potential scarcity of RE trump that?

RR is the "go long" of the set. Everyone here is in love with RE because of its rarity, but RR has the two main characters AND the other two raptors, as well as the motorcycle that plays in cool scenes in the movie

Maybe we will start to see 'temporary retirements'? Like a set being temporarily taken out of production for a few months, while production focuses on other sets. Maybe they wanted to free up some production capacity in order to focus on the next SW line for example? All speculation of course, I'm not that clued in to how they manage their production capacity.

Fingers crossed on seeing the rest of The Fly character because that head is a superb rendition (with the LEGO touch) of the classic science-fiction thriller from 1958. ....Anyone else hearing that? I swear I can hear a faint voice somewhere screaming "Help me!".

Perhaps some folks here that think these things (sold out - retired) can't happen should search for the meaning of a 'black swan effect'. The author 'Nassim Taleb' wrote a very interesting book about this theory.. nice read for every brickinvestor.

Fixed you up... that's pretty cool.

thank you

Trek has been on the road all day today and could not participate in these most entertaining discussions. The one thing that I've gathered from this is I need to go by the Kwik e Mart and pick up some ingredients for my restaurant if I want to be able to stockpile the French croissants and better do it soon. While on the way home from the restaurant I need to stop by and pick up. Dog food at the pet shop because they may run out . Good to know. Carry-on.

You're just a straight shooter with upper-management written all over you.

6 Cantinas in PERFECT boxes at a really sketchy Walmart for $49 each. Couldn't believe how nice the boxes were. They're always destroyed at this store. And.................sadly, i went ahead and scooped up the 3 Raptor Escapes they had. I still don't believe this theme at large is bound for early extinction, but i'm also not above hedging my bets on a non-TRU store exclusive with popular exclusive characters. Cashier was asking me if i had ever seen the Lego Death Star. I told him i had one in my trunk. I think he thought i was messing with him