Subject:
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Re: Lego Direct (was Re: Georgia LEGO Outlet is Cool!)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.dear-lego
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Date:
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Mon, 27 Mar 2000 03:58:47 GMT
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Richard,
I'm certainly not an economist, so my feelings are just a mildly educated
opinion, but I don't think you will ever see any major company have a
distribution channel like you want. It won't work. If it was such a good
idea, retail outlets would be long gone. Once you have retail outlets, the
reality is that there will be inefficiencies in distribution, which will
result in quantities of out of production merchandise winding up on
clearance, or being made available to overstock stores for prices below
original wholesale. These stores will then chose various means to distribute
this merchandise. Emanuel of DYA goes to a lot of effort to dig up these
items, and because he uses a web site to collect orders, is willing to limit
high demand or low stock items to one or two per customer. The GA outlet
store isn't going to put the stuff up on a web page, but they are going to
be willing to call a few people to see if they can get a sale (but they
aren't going to go to great effort to make a "fair" list, and they will only
call people they feel are highly likely to make a purchase [remember, their
spending money here]). In this instance, they felt that there was a good
enough likelihood of return for their investment to be worth calling a few
people.
What is more likely to be attainable is for there to be some way to buy the
interesting parts since that can be kept to a very low inventory (especially
if they collect orders until they have enough to be worth a manufacturing
run). Of course they can't make all parts available in all colors, but it
won't hurt them to collect information on what people are interested in
(though that costs money also). They may discover a high enough demand for
certain items to actually do custom runs. If they do this kind of
information gathering, I hope they consider the possibility of getting
pricing information since there are many parts that people would be quite
happy to pay a premium for, which just increases the probability of those
being able to be manufactured (for example, lets say they can make 10,000
1x4 bricks [of any color] and make their required profits by selling them
for 11 cents each at quantity 100. If people said they were willing to pay
25 cents each at quantity 50 for pink 1x4 bricks, and there was interest in
5,000, that might very well come close enough to their required profits to
be worth doing, but if they didn't collect the price information, they would
never make the pink bricks because the quantity wouldn't be worthwhile).
Frank
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Lego Direct (was Re: Georgia LEGO Outlet is Cool!)
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| (...) I don't think that both sides in this debate are essentially disagreeing, just stating (seemingly) incompatible ideas. That is, I agree with both sides to some extent - I would like to see a "fair" distribution of LEGO, but I don't think there (...) (25 years ago, 27-Mar-00, to lugnet.dear-lego)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Lego Direct (was Re: Georgia LEGO Outlet is Cool!)
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| (...) Then they should catch a clue -- or is Brad Justus just a troll here? Is he just a plant to stem the tide of our venom as I already half suspect? I'm sorry, but I think it is very much TLC's job to pay attention to what we fans want, and not (...) (25 years ago, 27-Mar-00, to lugnet.dear-lego) !
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