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Lego Christmas Production Shortage
shadowspar writes, "Recent restructuring and production cuts have left Lego unable to fill orders for the upcoming holiday season. Affected products include Duplo bricks, Lego City sets, and (horror of horrors!) Star Wars and Lego Technik sets." According to the article Lego stands to lose $127 million in holiday sales.
Q. Why do you cut production when there are orders to fill?
A. When someone other than a businessperson is running the company (eg beancounter, marketing droid, moneylender, etc)
I liked the themed but unbranded sets, like Space, Castle, Arctic, Pirates, Undersea, etc. Hell, even the "Town" bricks were good.
I just can't stand that they've been all but supplanted by "Star Wars" and fucking "Harry Potter" legos. If you want to play with branded shit, buy the goddamn action figures. Leave Legos alone, and give me back sets unburdened by storylines.
I grew up with them, and now that I have the money to buy my own Legos (and believe me, I would, I love the damn things) they've switched to all kinds of shit that I don't even want. WTF? Give me some good ships or castles, for God's sake!
So they are trying to steal the multimedia device and Tickle Me Elmo business strategy? This is nothing new.
Note I said "multimedia device", not "game console". You know which two I'm referring to.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
If there's less in supply than there is demand for something, the price (and value?) of that particular something generally goes up. If they have more people wanting legos than they can provide for, couldn't they just sell to the highest bidders and make up some of the loss? Legos could turn into sort of a luxury item temporarily. Not necessarily all bad for them.
Course, I'm not a business man or an expert on economics. I guess at the same time, some people might see doing something like that as greed or as a nose in the air...
I caught the Mountain Wumpus! He gave me his treasure chest ($100) to let him go free again.
Yup, it's gonna' be tough. The plant in Enfield, CT. (which I worked at for awhile) deals with packaging the Legos (created overseas) into their boxed forms to be shipped to distributors. However, the place was pretty badly run. While I was working there, there was a little bit of leeway being made in improving the efficiency of the packaging, because of hours you could be standing on a line waiting for the legos you need to package to complete your order. And it wasn't because of the laziness of the workers, the workers themselves would get angry at the fact that they weren't doing anything, eventually sending workers to other operational lines in a hope to scrap some amount of energy out of the workforce otherwise left doing nothing at their current post.
The problem was with the management of the distribution of the packages. The legos come in with all of one style of lego (say, a 2x4 red brick) in large bins. They will be poured into individual bins that go into the line and separated into those little pouches either completely or mostly by machine. There had been under way plenty of industrial engineering trying to make the factory "flow" better. As it was, the pieces would come in and be thrown into one corner of the factory. When they were needed, they would have to be found, and then brought to the line. Leftovers get put back in bins and thrown in another corner.
And there was the problem. Each line was built in the hopes to be able to package any style of box, but because no line really specialized in one style of packaging (save for one or two exceptions, like the Bionic lines specializing in the tubed packages), combined with the fact that the movement of materials to different lines seemed at best ad-hoc (mismanaged), led to a decrease in performance.
Now, the people working the lines were doing their job, and it's too bad that they were eventually laid off. Although the lines were created to allow an increase for modularity in the packaging, the system to bring the pieces to those lines are what failed. By the time the company got to trying to solve the problem, it was too late. The entire way the factory was run, going from a single, central repository of pieces to more of a separated, distributed repository layout (where the pieces are closer to the lines where they would actually be used) would just be too much, in their eyes.
I guess they decided that so long as they were going to have to rebuild the entire factory's layout, they might as well do it where the wages are lower as well.
I'm not a industrial engineer in any right, but that's just what I was able to witness. I probably wouldn't have even written this post if it wasn't for the manager of the shift who would constantly lie blatantly to the employees ("You will not be laid off"). Everyone knows that he was lying, and the good will of the workers was being broken by that mentality.
Not sure if I spouted one piece of good info in this post, but hey, what's Slashdot if not to post uninformed ramblings.
Cue up the conspiracies that this is just "a way for Lego to artificially drive up the price". There is always at least one paranoid on /. who will say it.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
The only marketing themed sets LEGO is keeping a lot of are the Star Wars sets. The rest of LEGO's focus is on producing their "normal" sets and models, with only a few other marketing tie-ins. So yes, you can still get a bucket'o'bricks.
Oh, and the new Mindstorms looks very cool. I didn't get to see anything regarding the programming environment, but it comes out of the box with some pretty sophisticated sensors as well as a Bluetooth transceiver for remote access. You can even add a compass sensor and servo motors!
Here's a link to Target's selection of LEGO sets (sorted from most coveted to least coveted, I mean by price. :-) Lots of Star Wars, but otherwise it's a lot of ordinary LEGO. And if you want a good ship, may I recommend the Star Destroyer? 3,104 pieces, weighing in at 21.5 pounds. There's a good ship!
John