08 February 2024

Temporary changes to LEGO® Pick a Brick in 2024

Posted by Admin

Many of you have been asking here on the site and across our social channels about the delays in adding new elements to the LEGO®  Pick a Brick (PaB) online service. We have an update from LEGO, and it is not good news in the short term.


In early January 2024 we received a list of new elements that were to be added later that month to PaB, but this didn't happen. Furthermore, readers say some 5000 existing elements have now been removed from the PaB "Standard" assortment. These elements will return, and the new parts will be added - but the estimated date for this is now March. 

The reason for these further delays is that improvements are being made to the loose element warehouse in Billund, which will impact PaB - both the Standard and the Replacement Part services. 

The Bestseller assortment remains unaffected. The Bestseller assortment consists of popular elements that are stored in warehouses in Poland and the US, rather than the warehouse in Billund where a wider array of elements are hand-picked for each order. LEGO Pick a Brick stated in January that they intend to increase the Bestseller assortment in the US, which is some good news - assuming that still goes head without delay.

Changes to Pick a Brick Standard assortment

  • The delivery period for any new orders made with PaB Standard has been changed to 45 days. This will likely remain in place until the beginning of March.
  • The number of elements available in the PaB Standard assortment has also been reduced during this time. Unconfirmed reports from our readers suggest some 5000 elements have been removed.
  • New elements in sets from September, October and November 2023 will not be added to PaB Standard "until mid-March". However if these new elements fall under the Bestseller assortment, they will be added. We don't know which ones these will be. 

Changes to the Replacement Part service

There will also be a delay to the Replacement Part service, which is used when items in your set are missing or damaged.

  • From 26 February to 10 March 2024, replacement parts can still be requested but they will not be shipped until after this period.

Again, this is to reduce demand while the warehouse is being improved. 

Opinion

It is unfortunate that this means no new elements will have been added to the Standard selection between November 2023 and March 2024.

It's wonderful that the Billund warehouse is being improved. We haven't been told what the improvements are. It was not originally designed to be some sort of selection box buffet for people to choose a huge array of cool elements from, but that's what the PaB Standard selection pretty much is now! We hope and presume it is being upgraded to meet this new demand, no doubt greatly fuelled by you New Elementary readers!

It is even more wonderful that LEGO Pick a Brick are sharing information in advance about elements being added and removed - this is a highly valuable service that we don't wish to lose. However, it feels like they've been a little too optimistic about their workload. As a result, the January update that never happened has been a source of frustration for many of our readers. Many have been checking daily in expectation, and another had been planning a couple of huge orders for months now – they even had one order ready in their basket, meaning the removed parts all disappeared. Weeks to months of frustration.

The compounding reasons for the delays are understandable, but ultimately the customer experience has been damaged, including ongoing trust in future lists and estimated dates provided by LEGO Pick a Brick.  

We hope that the estimated dates prove to be correct this time, and that these are just teething problems. With the commendable improvements being made, we're looking forward to an awesome service soon! 

We will of course keep you updated, and if you'd like to support our work, please remember to follow any of our affiliate links to LEGO.com before shopping, including on Pick a Brick (we may earn a fee). 

READ MORE: What are the new LEGO® parts in February 2024 sets?

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31 comments:

  1. Thanks for the update! Regardless of the (disappointing) news, at least this timeline seems realistic enough for them to iron out all the issues they've been having, presumably with capacity. It will be worth it if, after March, they can reduce the PaB Standard shipping timelines and reduce the number of errors when pulling orders.

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  2. Thank you for keeping us informed.

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  3. glad we have some more information at least, even if not good news it is somewhat encouraging. fingers crossed it all goes smoothly and we can get back to ordering new parts soon!

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  4. I'm even more pissed at Lego for keeping it hard to get already overexpensive parts, while at the same time making their best to block other brands, including perfectly legit ones, from arriving from China.
    It's like they want to make Lego a luxury product, which sucks for MOCers.

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    1. It is a luxury product… you might want to invest some time and money and try to find a new hobby, because Lego is only going to get more expensive.

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    2. New Lego has been consistently high priced ever since its inception, basically. It's nothing new, really.

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    3. If you think Lego is pricey, try legit modeling, like scale railroads, (such as G or HO), or spaceship models. They get really expensive really fast, and if you drop them, you can't always fix them! So LEGO will always be cheap in comparison.... until we start hitting $1000+ sets!

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  5. Does this confirm that the parts that were supposed to be removed in the November purge are now removed? I still see parts on the site just OOS that were on that parts removal list. Does that mean they are being extended but getting restocked later?

    I love that they are going to improve the service. This is great news and hopefully this also means even greater availability once improvements are made.

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    1. Since the last "improvement of the service" meant removing a lot of parts ("best sellers" LOL) from normal PAB, just renaming both sources, and adding a lot of fees, I'm not too excited for a new improvement.

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  6. LEGO, why didn't you share this info before removing some 5000 parts yesterday? All of us who had some of those parts in our PaB basket will have to manually add them back in mid-March at best, after painstakingly going through our wanted lists and PaB basket to figure out which parts are missing.

    You really shouldn't just remove parts that go "out of stock" from the basket, you should instead leave the parts with an "out of stock" notice. That would make it so much easier to re-add them later, or order them from elsewhere.

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    1. Send this to Lego on their contact page! I often wonder why they just remove items without any notification. I've started writing a list of part numbers instead of keeping them in my cart because they disappear.

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    2. There should probably be an option to save your listed order on- or offline, regardless whether the parts would be in stock or moved to another section, I guess, so as you wouldn't be left out to unforeseen company whims.

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    3. I can only recommend to not rely on the PaB basket. I usually use a Bricklink wanted list. This can be uploaded to the Brickhunter browser plugin for Chrome or Firefox. Brickhunter can scan the prices for the parts on the list and fill the PaB basket for you. If something goes missing in the PaB basket, just empty it, and then have it filled up again from Brickhunter.
      If I order parts for different MOCs this is especially useful, as I can keep several named lists in Brickhunter (and can have backups for the lists in XML format on my computer).

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  7. "The delivery period for any new orders made with PaB Standard has been changed to 45 days. This will likely remain in place until the beginning of March."

    But the beginning of March is a lot less than 45 days away. This doesn't make logical sense.

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    1. 45 days from the time of order…not 45days until March

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    2. That's 45 business days (i.e. Monday-Friday), so 9 weeks.

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    3. Exactly, so order on Feb 28th and it takes 45 days, order on March 7th and it takes, say, two weeks! Doesn’t make sense. More likely they mean that all orders will be put on hold until the warehouse is working again, and let’s hope it’s early March

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    4. It says delivery could take "up to" 45 days, not that the order will be delivered on the 45th day and not a day sooner. They're probably still shipping orders, but at a reduced capacity, so increasing the window to approximately when things will be back in full swing is more accurate than saying that all orders are on hold until then. And if your order arrives in less time than that, hooray!

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    5. Unlikely, because then PAB orders would be getting priority over missing parts in sets: “From 26 February to 10 March 2024, replacement parts can still be requested but they will not be shipped until after this period.” All orders are on hold, that’s the only logical explanation that fits all the information.

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    6. Doesn't seem particularly unlikely for them to prioritize sending out the shipments of larger orders people paid for, rather than orders of one or two missing parts as a free accommodation. Either way, they aren't going to be lining up orders by date placed and saying "hold up these were from february 28th, they're gonna need to wait the full 45, now let's get those march 7th orders sent out" they're just going to fulfill them as they're able, but with potentially longer lead times due to the reorg.

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    7. It's a much easier procedure, though. Earlier, it's taken me about a month to receive my PAB orders in Sweden, but if I have parts missing in the orders, I'd usually receive them in a week or so...

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  8. 45 days is closer to the average amount of time my orders seem to take to arrive anyway. I've had orders take 4 months and 2 orders that took 5 1/2 months to arrive

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  9. Oddly enough some September, October and even 2024 parts have appeared on PaB the last couple of days, most "standard", even though LEGO said no new parts would be added until March unless "bestsellers"...

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    1. The 2024 part I spotted is actually from 2023, just with a new element number, sorry (#6508250).

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  10. they removed 1856 SKUs on 2023-02-13

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    1. And to be clear, all those almost 2000 parts aren't just "out of stock" like the about 5000 parts mentioned above, but completely removed - again without notice. Would be very interesting to get a list of those parts, and if this also is just temporary or permanent.

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    2. Are these parts that still are in production, used in current sets? Otherwise, it doesn't seem too strange that stock would be replaced with new, current parts.

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    3. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    4. indeed those bricks have disappeared from the list between two scans of the database. they are not marked as "out of stock" which are two different states.
      now where do I put that list ? (I am working on a site, but it's gonna take some time)

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  11. The about 5000 parts that went "out of stock" already seem to be back! Right now there are 14279 parts in stock. Also, "standard" shipping is back to 28 business days. Now we're just waiting for further September etc parts, let's hope those also arrive earlier than announced!

    (The ~5000 parts haven't been moved to "bestseller" as speculated, but remain "standard". Currently there are 3939 "bestsellers" in stock.)

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  12. The Standard Assortment elements removed from PaB have now been restored, as have the usual delivery times. This is apparently because the warehouse upgrade has been partially completed, and the rest will happen later in the year.
    We recommend holding off buying, because they will now begin adding those delayed new elements! More soon...

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