One of my favourite examples is the black vs grey pins. Here's the black one [1], and [2] is the grey one. It's one of those parts that often look like it's a rather haphazard choice which one to use. And sometimes it might be.

But the black one has friction ridges that are a tiny fraction of a millimetre. Little enough that for constructions where friction doesn't matter (you just want to connect two parts and something else will prevent rotation), they are mostly interchangeable, but the grey ones work better to connect wheels that you actually want to be able to spin, and the black one works better if you want to build a rigid structure.

You don't tend to find two parts that similar with that kind of minor difference for most non-lego plastic building blocks because most of them don't manufacture their parts precisely enough for it to work.

[1] https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=2780...

[2] https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=3673...

The black ones are also a softer material than the gray ones.

They also discard (melt & reuse) a ridiculous number of bricks. Someone did a study on the standard deviation of sold Lego bricks, and found extremely tight tolerances.

The patent expired long ago, but few companies will put that much effort into making those shapes that precisely.

A friend of mine was confused as to how they continue to sell so well without the patents and I told him to try to build with MegaBlox. The knock offs are terrible and barely hold together. I can still build with 30+ year-old Lego pieces.

That reminds me of the guy who built a machine to stress test the bricks to see how many cycles it would take to wear it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=Tnb-LUM0yd4

edit: Ah! He did it for this stack exchange question - https://bricks.stackexchange.com/questions/1754/how-much-usa...

In my family Lego is something passed down to the parents kids as it just doesn't die.

The ultimate recyclable toy!

In fact, when I was young, I built little ships and using an RCX even a submarine, using only plain Lego pieces and a shredded paper towel in a little "chamber" between the water and the motor to keep incoming water from damaging the motor. Funny enough, the towel was enough to sustain half an hour of water exposure.

Legos are amazing.

There's also a Planet Money episode on this http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/12/13/167055503/why-l...

Well, there's also that 32.8% LEGO Group operating margin...

Yes, they deliver value for money and profit from it! Great and more power to them! It's a show of how much greater in value their product is to their customers than the sum of its constituent parts/labor (or, put another way, its cost).

Whenever someone goes out of their way to complain about the profit someone makes (as though its dirty somehow) I always wonder... have you ever calculated your own profit margin? Having a job is rarely free and, unless you you're just living off prior earnings/trust fund/etc. this is a figure you can come up with. Most people I've known, including myself over time (I've for worked everything from minimum wage to very healthy salaries), have done pretty well in the profit margin percentage area as compared to the 32.8% markup you cite.

To be fair, you certainly didn't register a complaint per se in your comment, but something to think about before making that complaint.

Well that was weird. The grandparent asked why LEGO was so expensive. People reply with familiar Lego Group PR sound bytes that don't explain the markup. I reply with fresh economic facts that actually explain the costs and I am implicitly being cast as either a communist or as being ignorant?

Maybe don't be so judgemental for no reason?

+1 Making money isn't bad.

-1 Off-topic.

(I just explained why Lego is expensive. Nothing else.)

A thing is worth what another is willing to pay for it.

Yeah, that seems like a truism. Do you also have a point?

Seriously? Lego has been in business for almost a century. They should have recuperated their initial costs for their molds by now.

Molds have a finite cycle count before parts go out of tolerance. A typical steel mold might have a million cycles, more complex and precise ones may be much less. At the volumes Lego delivers (~19 billion elements a year), I'd expect nearly 100% turnover each year.

They're creating new pieces all the time, plus the molds have a limited lifespan in order to maintain those high tolerances.