This morning, Dominica, Francesca, Madeline and I went out shopping to look for Legos. Since Emily and I had already depleted the supplies at the SuperWalmart in Herkimer we decided to head out to New Hartford instead to see what they had there.
Overall, the shopping experience was a bust. We hit Walmart, then Target, Toys R Us and other stores. Then up to North Utica to try the Super Walmart there. Nothing. Apparently the Legos of my childhood are not very popular now. What is popular is either Star Wars collector item Legos or weird themed stuff in tiny quantities that make no sense to me. The Legos that seem to really make sense, those modeling houses, businesses, normal vehicles, normal life, etc. are all but gone. Instead of being the building blocks of modeling, Legos have widely become used as a means of building knick knacks – abandoning the traditional market and attempting to just make toys for the collectibles market (which I swear is going to suddenly dry up and disappear once people realize how silly collecting cheap toys is.)
We were out shopping for easier four or five hours. With all of those people and all of that driving and being so willing to spend good money on a Lego set it is amazing how hard it is to do. Not only is this a failure of Lego to get the necessary kits out onto the market to lure in a very large segment of their market but it is also a failure of the brick and mortars whose only advantage over the online markets (a la Amazon) is to provide the ability to buy what you want, right now, at a premium price. Now, we will simply resort to shopping online and getting the product at a competitive price as no one could be bothered to sell the product in the entire Utica market.
We did some online Lego shopping and discovered that Diagon Alley is releasing on January 1st. Dominica is going to be really excited about that. It is a very large set. A bit bigger than the castle that she has now.
Madeline is depressed that we were not able to find anything for her today. So we are going to find something that she wants online and order that for her since there just isn’t anything to be had in stores.