To start this topic by going off-topic, I was wondering earlier today if it was possible to re-create an old set from new bricks. Specifically, after looking through some of my old catalogues from the 90's, I was reminder of the 8880 Supercar from the Technic theme.

When it came out, I thought it was a massively awesome car and desperately wanted it. Of course, I couldn't get it as the price tag was quite high and my family kept wasting money on stupid things like food and paying bills. There are a number of these available from Bricklink as used, second-hand units. I figured that if I wanted one of these, I could buy one off Bricklink - but that would be the easy way out.

Since our motto around here is "do it the hard way", I thought about buying the parts new and building it from instructions. This would be particularly hard since many of the parts are no longer in production. But the beauty of these older sets is that many of the parts are just basic bricks - they are still available new.

So, to bring this topic back on-topic, I was looking at Pick-A-Brick from Shop@Home and noticed that the range of available bricks has jumped from 1,000 to 1,494. That's almost 50% more variety! There is also a note at the top of the page stating that their pricing structure has changed. It seems that the prices went up a fair bit recently due to the increased costs (plus the added cost of picking out all the bricks for individual orders).

Due to the sudden, unannounced increase, the sales of Pick-A-Brick sets must have gone down and the number of complaints must have gone up as (for an unspecified amount of time) they have dropped the prices again. Not all the way down, but it is pretty clear that this is temporary and that the prices will be going back up again soon.

So if you were planning on buying stuff from Pick-A-Brick, now would seem to be a good time to do it!