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12 March 2025

Pick a Brick USA & Canada: Standard elements are back

Posted by Tim Johnson

The LEGO® Pick a Brick service have re-opened their "Standard" service in North America and over 12,000 elements have returned. Only "Bestseller" elements have been available since the service was closed in December 2024.

screengrab showing standard elements have returned to pick a brick usa

This is a step towards things getting back to normal with Pick a Brick, what with the ongoing warehouse issues and poor customer communication on late 2024 orders that have left many customers frustrated and angry. However, in a new development for 2025, maximum order quantities have been placed on many items – read on for details.


This article contains affiliate links to LEGO.com; we may get a small commission if you purchase.


Discord user KittyAshley has calculated that the European and North American services now both have roughly the same number of elements, give or take about 50. Of the elements added to North America today, excluding Bestseller and those out of stock, there are 12,099 Standard elements!

Here is a link that just shows only the Standard elements on Pick a Brick. (Ignore the red error message about filters.)

However, a change that has been added to Europe this year is also now present in North America...


Maximum order quantities

screengrab of lego pab showing some elements have a maximum order limit of 10 pieces

One of the best aspects to Pick a Brick is that you can order up to 999 of an element. However, a maximum order quantity (MoQ) of 100 or even just 10 are now being applied to many elements. 
  • In Europe, 7021 elements have a MoQ of 10, and a further 254 have a MoQ of 100. 
  • In North America, about 6400 elements came back with a MoQ of 10 – more than half of the elements added today! No 100-limit elements are currently being reported.
Frustratingly, to the end user, it feels quite random. If you're looking for pairs of wedge pieces for example, there are a couple of dozen examples where one side is available in bulk while the other is limited to 10! 

Why are Pick a Brick implementing maximum order quantity limits? We have heard different answers so cannot be certain, but the most logical one would be that it is to manage the available warehouse stock better.

If you think about it, being able to order 999 of any item at any given moment is quite a stock challenge for a company – even one of The LEGO Group's size – and us AFOLs sure like to buy a lot. A popular item can go out of stock literally within less than a minute, and the team don't necessarily know in advance which items will be popular with AFOLs.

Similarly, keeping track of available stock levels is likely to be a challenge too given the breadth and volume of the PaB inventory. Pick a Brick need to be confident they are offering elements that are actually available, in the thousands.

Maximum order quantities are a solution for both these issues, but we wonder if a tweak to the maths is required as having so many thousands elements only available at a mere 10 at a time seems excessive. It also feels counter-intuitive from an AFOL point of view, in terms of what distinguishes PaB from the secondhand marketplaces like BrickLink and Brick Owl.

Hopefully these are just teething issues or gradual implementation, and perhaps the algorithm will be tweaked to at the very least raise as many as possible to 100 rather than 10.


Lists of new elements in sets - note, no new parts have been added since the sets of September 2024


 

My thanks to KittyAshley for the data. 

All text and images are ©2025 New Elementary unless otherwise attributed.

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8 comments:

  1. Anonymous12 Mar 2025, 21:54:00

    I wonder when they will lift this limit. Love using PaB!!

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  2. Anonymous12 Mar 2025, 23:41:00

    I placed an order a couple weeks back and noticed the limits. I didn’t try this, but could you not just do multiple PAB orders in the same shop@home order and that’d allow you to order as much as you want (but you’d be hit with the fee if you don’t spend over the threshold). Even with that fee if you distributed the parts in your multiple orders right you could probably get around it?

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  3. Andrew Barnick13 Mar 2025, 00:25:00

    A part of me wonders if maybe the excessive limits are meant to help stem the rush of orders from people who have been waiting for the service to become available again, ensuring that they don't get overwhelmed by the pent up demand right away. If so, hopefully that would mean they dial them back over time as that initial demand ebbs and the fulfillment team gets back in the swing of things.

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  4. Anonymous13 Mar 2025, 03:20:00

    I'm at 133 days waiting for an order.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous13 Mar 2025, 07:53:00

    The 10 units limit makes no sense to me. Sure, it would theoretically allow stocks to last longer and give opportunities for more customers to purchase certain elements. But surely it will also likely clog the ordering process with more orders as some folks place more smaller orders to work around the limitations?
    10 is such a ridiculously low and arbitrary number… is this still supposed to be a bulk ordering service… or is this being changed into some different?
    I would also expect Bricklink prices to rise for the elements that are being targeted… but I suppose that could be seen as a win for TLG.

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    Replies
    1. Håkan S.13 Mar 2025, 12:56:00

      I honestly doubt the AFOL second-hand market is of noteworthy importance to TLG. Economically, it's basically irrelevant whether some parts are collectors' items, or not. BrickLink was probably bought for data mining for the design of nostalgic sets and such, not because it - in itself - made a great deal of profit.

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    2. Anonymous13 Mar 2025, 13:24:00

      There is more to this than the “regular” MOC-making secondary market. Think of everyone trying to run a business with Lego as a focus and how it can impact them. Here’s my personal case, I have a small business of selling custom sets for companies who want to have custom merchandising items. A few months ago I struck a deal with a company on a model that I designed. I quoted them a price per unit based on the feasibility of securing the bricks at the market price then. Fast forward to today, unfortunately several elements required for the model are now under the max 10 units limit. Secondary market price for these same elements has since doubled… I can no longer deliver on the agreed upon price.
      My point is that on top of annoying the heck out of people trying to enjoy their hobby, decisions like these are also impeding people trying to run a professional activity using their products… but maybe that’s just another one of their objectives?

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    3. Anonymous13 Mar 2025, 14:29:00

      Imposing limits is market manipulation 101. TLG knows EXACTLY how PaB buyers think and purchase. Their control of the secondary market (BL) was strategic for understanding the psychology of buying patterns. If an item has a limit, the average buyer isn't going to simply stop and go directly to checkout, they will continue buying. This spreads the metrics around to other units. They also see what moves and what doesn't down to the micro-fraction. This is the problem they face with the unnerving number of differing units in their catalog. They have the supply, now they're coercing the demand. This doesn't make them evil; it makes them savvy.

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