12-03-2009, 11:17 PM
the_poochies wrote: Please read my post more carefully. I'm referring to 20 year-old Lego sets, not current ones. Current Lego sets are expensive enough! I guess it ruins things for kids who can't afford collectors prices for toys.
Who's buying their kids 20-year old unopened Lego sets? And who expects to buy an unopened 1989 set for a 1989 price? Do you expect your local retailer to stock every Lego kit that was ever made?
If collectors hadn't been buying those sets twenty years ago, there wouldn't be 100 different sets at Toys R Us today. None of those sets are collector priced. Expensive, yes, but not because of collectors. Again -- that Indiana Jones set would not even be on the market were it not for collectors.
If you feel like something was ruined for you -- the sneaking suspicion that you'll one day regret letting LP get his grubbly little hands on the set -- just buy an extra one and hope that twenty years from now it'll be worth more than $300. Good luck with that. You've know what happened with Beanie Babies, right?
A better strategy would be to collect something that he loves that nobody else would think to collect. At the very worst, when he gets it in forty years, it'll be a treasure from his childhood.