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Sunday, February 28, 2016

LEGO 2016 Iconic Easter w/ Chicken Suit Guy unboxed!


My local Toys R Us had a carload of these things out for sale, so I picked one up to see exactly what it was all about.  It's a box and a figure (and no stand for the figure).  It costs twice as much as the figure did (with stand) when it was out just a few years ago.

Now for a brief rant that's only tangentially related to this product.  On YouTube I'm already seeing a lot of comments about the original series 9 Chicken Suit Guy going for $20-30 USD on Bricklink, eBay, etc.  In my view it's positively outrageous that a minifigure that was produced in huge quantities (many tens, if not hundreds of thousands) and made widely available around the world for many months, just a few years ago, can experience such tremendous aftermarket price inflation.  Things that are rare, sure. Limited releases, sure. Highly desirable sets more than a decade old, makes sense.  Anything that quickly sold out without even fulfilling initial demand, absolutely. A high-volume, lower-quality (China factory), modest-demand, $3 USD commodity item like this?  Positively outrageous.  A 3-year-old CMF shouldn't cost more than $6-10 USD, tops. The over-inflation isn't the fault of The LEGO Group, either.  Secondary market sellers have been able to manipulate things too far with the help of the current hype & craze around the LEGO brand.  I look forward to a proper, massive correction in the LEGO secondary market.  It's much needed.  Thankfully, every precedent indicates that such correction is certain to occur in due time.  I'm guessing it'll take another 2-3 years, though, as we need to get through this series of LEGO cinematic movies and the bolstering effects of their high-dollar marketing campaigns.  Perhaps TLG itself will help the situation with more direct re-issues of overvalued items, like this!

3 comments:

  1. i fully agree, and like comics before them it will correct itself within a couple years.

    i also think LEGO should re issue sets and figs in some way to attempt to offset this, Comics never really recovered from the speculator era and i hope LEGO doesn't suffer the same end...

    thanks for all the content JANG, you really provide so much entertainment to me and my family!

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  2. While I agree with your thoughts, I am skeptical that anything will change. I suspect the LEGO company isn't interested in making market corrections. In fact, this latest Chicken suit release appears to take advantage of current demand (artificial or not) to make even more money. I expect they are making even more profit on this one than the original fig release...

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