eBricks was established in the year 2000 to serve the needs of LEGO enthusiasts around the globe. Today, eBricks supplies individuals, businesses, and schools with sets, minifigures, instructions, and everything else LEGO branded. eBricks is a family owned unofficial LEGO® distributor. We professionally supply millions of LEGO® parts, sets, instructions, minifigures and anything else LEGO® related to kids, kids at heart, corporations, resellers, collectors and schools. We take pride in taking stance with the original slogan at The LEGO Group, “Only the best is good enough”. There's no project too small or too large for eBricks. Whether you need fast and responsive sourcing support to complete convention event displays or require large volume supply to realize the production of custom sets, we are there for you! If you are looking for old sets or individual elements our BrickLink storefront, eBricksOnline, is an excellent place to begin your search. eBricks will buy your LEGO® collection.
Physical store retailers may or may not have the best prices, and some of them (Toy’s R Us) are know to charge prices above the MSRP. But sometimes it might be. it all depends, Do you have to have it now? Is it on sale? Is there a limed edition promotion? If so, go ahead buy that LEGO set. While were at this point, we should talk about value. Most, AFOL’s measure the relative value of a LEGO set by it’s piece count. that is the number of elements in the set. clearly posted on the front of the package. a good rule of thumb is the set should cost about .10 cents per piece. Liscenced Themes like Star Wars and Toy Story will command a premium price presumably to help pay the licencing fees. So you can expect to pay more for those sets. But even that does not cover the whole story. LEGO which sells the sets does not value them based on pieces, but rather by the amount of plastic used. which is most easily determined by weight. AFOL’s on the other hand are more interested in pieces, because well larger pieces(SPUDS) are not as useful, and so a focus on piece count serves them well, but for your little youngster, this is not the best measure.
With that out of the way, let’s move on. website, or Amazon you just have to wait for them to be shipped and arrive, As an added bonus, most online only retailers such as Amazon, do not charge sales tax unless they have a physical presance in your state, and usually have free shipping. Many of the rarer and uncommon sets are offered only through the Lego SHOP, so if your looking for the exclusives check them first, and be wary of Ebay. It’s a great store to buy bulk used Lego, but most of the sets sold online through Ebay are current sets being sold at sometimes crazy markups. That is not a rip on Ebay itself, but rather some of it’s individual sellers, so be careful. So far, we have talked about standard online and brick and mortar stores there is however 1 more: Bricklink is an online website that hosts many stores form the LEGO community each of them run by their individual store owners. BrickLink is shinning if you are looking for specific LEGO elements, or out of production sets or Mini Figs.
There are no fees to sign up with Bricklink, only when you buy, and those fees are determined by the store you buy form. Many of ULUG members maintain an online pressence here, and you can help suport us, and fill your lego needs by purchasing from one of their stores:Parents often have a love/hate relationship with LEGOs. They love the toy for its open-ended play value and ability to exercise their fine motor skills. That said, as LEGO grows in popularity and kids continue to collect more bricks, problems build up right alongside them. Oftentimes, you’ll hear parents complain that their kids refuse to take apart any of their elaborate sets—so their home becomes a dust-collecting LEGO museum. Other children build sets but then take them apart to build their own creations. This may be seen as ideal but the dismantled sets usually end up in just one large bin. Eventually, children can’t see what kind of bricks that they have. Creative play is stunted and soon the kids are asking you to buy a new set.
It’s difficult to end this cycle but I’ve consulted with experts and parents of LEGO-obsessed children to find the best ways to tackle this problem of LEGO sprawl. We straighten out their drawers, their desks, their bookshelves, and now we even buy rugs for their school lockers. Even though we buy toys for educational purposes, we usually require them to do all the clean up. Almost always, they should be able to, but LEGOs are different. There are few toys that kids can own that could easily number in the thousands. LEGO told Quartz there are about 70 LEGO bricks for every one of the world’s 6 billion inhabitants. And children around the world spend 5 billion hours a year playing with LEGO bricks. If the collection becomes this large, throwing them all into a big bin makes about as much sense as using large garbage bags to store your clothing for everyday wear. In short, kids need to be taught how to organize their pieces in a way suits their building styles and their families’ needs too.
The LEGO Group designers store their bricks in toolchest-like drawers organized by color, each housing one type of brick. I’ve found that highly creative children will find sorting to be especially painful because they can look at a single brick as having so much potential. Categorizing them is like prematurely deciding that brick’s future and kids hate that. I told Megan Rothrock, former designer at the LEGO Group and author of the LEGO Adventure Book 1 and Book 2 about this problem and she shared this piece of advice: She usually asks the children about the size of their collection, and kids then describe the size of the large bins that contain their mixed pieces. She then asks them if they know what they could build out of it. “They all say no,” Rothrock said. Next, she asks them to picture what it could be like to pull out certain colors and the kids change their tune about the possibilities. “They say, ‘oh yeah, because I got these blue slopes, and these red ones’.”
Rothrock says that once the kids start thinking about color, they’ll take off. Cleaning and sorting need not be awful if you have a few good tools. Kids have a habit of spreading out their pieces all over so they can see them—but sometimes, they don’t clean it up and parents wind up stepping on them. Thus, products like Toydozer, which helps kids scoop up their pieces more easily, and Lay N Go (shown above), are great. Last year, the Johnson family in Port Jefferson, New York, decided that they couldn’t store away their bricks even though their then 12-year-old daughter was playing with them less and less. However, after visiting Nathan Sawaya’s The Art of the Brick exhibit at Discovery Times Square in New York City, they decided to make a sculpture very similar to a sculpture they saw there. The Johnsons felt that making a large sculpture with random bricks like Nathan Sawaya’s peace sign was one way to store LEGOs. This led them to create more sculptures like the Starbucks goddess which is now hanging in their local Starbucks.
As my family began sorting bricks just before the start of Christmas, we have learned a few things that affirm my belief that toys can be used to teach kids almost everything. Sorting our bricks has allowed us to see that we’ve accumulated over 20,000 bricks. (Disclosure: The LEGO Group has submitted products to me in the past but those bricks make just a tiny percentage of our supply. Most have been purchased by friends and family like every other LEGO-obsessed kid.) Knowing this number has been helpful because now they can find out how much their used LEGO bricks are worth on the market; eBay listings show that 1,000 used bricks can fetch up to $50. But it really isn’t about the money. What bothered me the most about the LEGO sprawl was this: They were not taking good care of what they loved the most. Even though I love their toys too, I decided that building sessions would temporarily be suspended until we got our bricks in order. If they quit sorting and I finish sorting their sprawl all by myself, I will choose which bricks will stay and which will go.
Now, they know their bricks can possibly fund summer camp tuition—something we couldn’t afford last year. Still, how can you expect two boys, ages 7 and 11, to sort 20,000 bricks? The truth is that I simply couldn’t “expect” anything. Sorting is a tough process that involves procrastination, decisions, do-over of decisions, muscle pain, and multiple trips to places like Home Depot and Michael’s. Parents would be best served if they understood how their child used LEGOs in order to teach how to best care for them. It’s no different or no less important than they way we teach them to put their homework carefully in their binder so that it doesn’t crinkle or fall out. As they learn how to do this, they’ll also learn their own working styles. My youngest can work fast if the task is clearly defined; my eldest son works fast when he’s under pressure. Good toy maintenance will enhance other job-related social emotional skills. Once, my husband and I literally fought about how to best sort the LEGOs.