Some LEGO pieces are probably more expensive than others, but what is the average price per piece of LEGO pieces, when sold as part of a kit? Is there any place containing statistics or graphs about the prices, showing the range of smaller and larger pieces?
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1BrickSet has information on how many pieces were in a set and it's RRP, which it then uses to calculate the average "price per piece" for that set in the right hand column.– Zhaph - Ben Duguid ♦Mar 1, 2012 at 7:53
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You also have to factor in the LEGO bricks like the NXT intelligent brick, which costs $150 alone.– user4028Sep 29, 2014 at 6:41
3 Answers
A brief search led me to a very thorough blog post by Ruth Suehle on GeekMom, which includes the data and a Graph:
Does It Feel Like Lego Bricks Just Keep Getting More Expensive?
In her findings, she found that average cost per piece in 2011 is about US$0.12, down from a high in the '80s of about US$0.40 - these prices were adjusted for inflation, etc.
Prices tend to be most affected by the price of oil, as that's a key component in plastic manufacture, so we might expect to see prices starting to creep up again.
Interestingly the licensed sets (Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc.) don't seem to have much of an impact on the price of the sets, it's just that they are often bigger sets, so have higher price tags - For example the Super Star Destroyer with a retail price of $399 had 3152 pieces working at $0.13/piece - although yes, an extra $0.01 multiplied over 3000 bricks does seem to add an extra $30 to the set.
There doesn't appear to be much data on weight or type of brick.
Brickset has information on individual sets, and has some interesting data in its Data Mining section. Towards the bottom of that page they list
- Best price per piece in the UK
- Worst price per piece in the UK
- Best price per piece in the US
- Worst price per piece in the US
amongst other data.
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Interesting set of links - I notice that the "worst price per piece" sets all seem to be the ones excluded from GeekMom's research - duplo and battery powered sets. Mar 1, 2012 at 10:41
The average price per brick value for all the sets ever sold is going to be unhelpful. The prices of sets are influenced by the exclusiveness of the set, product licence (I.E. Star Wars), year of production, etcetera...
I don't think a statistical representation exists for that reason.