Well, it’s happened. Year after year the Christmas shopping season moves forward. It used to start at Black Friday, but now there are pre-Black Friday sales – ugh.
But all this is very helpful when you’re trying to source a lot of sets to part out. Last weekend I bought a lot of sets on specials. A few are still on the way, but most of the haul is here. This isn’t really a celebration or holiday time for us, it’s just a time with good prices to buy in lots of parts.
Most items that we’ve bought came from a major, nation-wide retailer. Some places make it hard to purchase large quantities, but other retailers will allow you to place large orders – they are happy to make their profit until supplies are gone. That’s important, because its only a very small increase in time required to part out additional copies of a set, while the return scales directly with the number of sets parted out. Briefly, two sets have twice the parts, but only a tiny increase in labor required.
They happened to have these sets on for ~20% off of the MSRP. For many sets, we won’t buy them at that discount, but it worked for these!
One challenge that we have is dealing with all the packaging material. Every set comes in a box, and we get a lot of shipping boxes too. And there are the individual bags that the parts come in. These plastic bags may not seem like much waste when you open a LEGO set at home, but when we open up 80 sets, we can fill several grocery bags with them. Living outside the city, we don’t have regular recycling service. It’s a bit of a hassle, but we hang on to them until we have a chance to make sure that they’re recycled. The same goes for the cardboard. While our taxes don’t pay for recycling pickup, we can still take these items to the county yard, so that they get recycled at least.
The rest of the orders arrived the next day. Here they are sitting on the shelf.
All these parts will be finding their way into our inventory over the next little while, in time for Christmas.
