Quote from Campylobacter jejuni;1244285:
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So to summarize, their costs are -
Factories/Machines: Pending breakdowns, these have been around for years now and I'm sure are already paid off 4-5x over, so lowering the prices won't affect them at this point.
Plastic: Purposely using a higher quality than needed so they can charge more. No one needs a building block to last 300 years.
Employees: Valid.
Licensing Fees: If these were such a big impact on pricing the generic Lego sets would be way cheaper than say, a Star Wars set. But last I checked they aren't.
Profit: Valid, within a limit. If something costs .00001 cent to make you shouldn't be charging $1 for it. That's called overpricing. Ripping people off. Con Artist. Etc. And seeing as they refuse to tell anyone how much it costs to make a brick, we can't even judge this. They could be making 800% profit per brick for all we know.
Quote from Campylobacter jejuni;1244285:
Well then don't buy LEGO. They'll get the memo if the market demands it. There are certainly cheaper alternatives out there.
http://brickstories.blogspot.de/2013/06/the-unfinished-list-of-alternative.html
Finding any of the knockoff brands in the US is next to impossible, and online they are only sold in bulk, so you have to spend $300 to get 50 of the same set or get them off ebay where people charge just as much as LEGO for them(which defeats the purpose because if I'm going to pay LEGO prices for knockoffs I'd just buy LEGO instead). If buying these were an option I would do it.