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The LEGO® Pick a Brick (PaB) individual element online ordering service has had a successful year in respects of new features and improvements, but a challenging time with the fulfilment of orders. Just as things seemed back on track, there's fresh woe for customers in the USA and Canada: today, thousands of Standard elements have been removed from sale, and it seems the root cause may be changes to tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.
United States
On the North American PaB stores, Standard elements are those stored in and shipped from the European warehouse, while Bestseller elements are in the USA. (For the rest of the world, there is no such distinction – everything comes from Europe.)
The Trump government have suspended something called the De Minimis exemption, where packages with a value less than US$800 can enter without paying customs, duties or taxes. Now, tariffs have to be paid prior to arrival, and it's up to the postage carriers to ensure this happens. As a result, postage carriers in Denmark and other countries are suspending all deliveries there, because of the short window given to them by the US to alter their business practices before this comes into effect on 29 August 2025.
We have not had any official statement from The LEGO Group as yet about how this affects customers, however thousands of Standard elements have been removed from the service today. At time of writing, there are less than 2,000 Standard elements still available, but we would not recommend purchasing them before they disappear, given the unpredictability of the situation.
Canada
Regrettably the same applies in Canada: thousands of elements have been removed. Obviously this is not a case of Canadian tariffs. Presumably the whole PaB stock management system is geared towards treating North America as a single entity? After all, who could have predicted they'd need to treat one country so differently, at such short notice!
Europe, Australia & New Zealand
READ MORE: Double points are back for LEGO® Insiders members until end August
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This sucks. Off to Bricklink I go I guess.
ReplyDeleteIt also affects Bricklink. European sellers won't be able ship anything to US since most of the post offices and courier companies like DHL blocked shipment to USA. Atm. you can send only documents. No products like Lego etc.
ReplyDeleteThis is immensely frustrating news, but it was also inevitable that this reckless, isolationist style of governing would eventually affect the Lego hobby for people living here in the U.S.. I hope news like this leads fansites that generally avoid discussion of politics to take a stand—like it or not, politics can affect every aspect of people's lives, even hobbies like this.
ReplyDeleteFantastic idea, I’m sure injecting political sermonizing will totally make the hobby more enjoyable for everybody!
DeleteI mean when politics is strongly effecting a decent chunk of the hobby it's not us injecting politics into the hobby, it's politicians.
DeleteJust as I was about to make an order of both BestSellers and Standard elements to Canada! Hopefully this gets resolved quickly for Canadians that are being affected because of the decision of the government to our south.
ReplyDeleteRight?! Me as well. I have a giant list of standard parts and picking them out again would be a pain. I'm not going to log into PAB until it's changed back, last time that worked and hopefully it'll work again when TACO changes course
DeleteIt was great suddenly and unexpectedly having 100s of parts removed from my cart with no way to know what was and wasn't removed.
DeleteProbably just going to give up trying to order parts for a while...another hobby tanked in six months by these incompetent morons.
Do they not realize its the bread and circuses that keep us entertained while they destroy everything around us?
I see the problem, bread and circus's aren't guns and church. If your values aren't theirs, they don't care and if you have other opinions, well they have tools for that.
DeleteOh, dang. Happily, the other direction, from USA to Europe seems to work fairly smooth at least. I just recently bought some manga floppies I was missing from eBay, and I just needed to pay some tolerable shipping and customs costs...
ReplyDeleteI heard about the postal service suspension this morning and I swear my first thought was, "this is going to royally mess up PaB."
ReplyDeleteThis is incredibly annoying, but the good news is, it's too annoying to last. Not Pick-a-Brick per se, but Europe suspending all shipments to America is a measure designed to call attention to something they want fixed urgently, and it almost certainly will be fixed within a few weeks.
Agree with Orochi235. When I read DHL was cancelling shipments to US from Germany, I knew PaB days were numbered.
ReplyDeleteNext year’s MOC is already designed and had been ready to itemize then purchase the parts. PaB has always been where I shop first, then it would have been BL to get the rest. I can’t imagine being able to get 21000 pieces from 700 lots all from BL. So, until (unless?) PaB is back, I can’t plan to bring a MOC to next year’s show, and if not, then there’s no sense in attending, either.
This is going to affect the entire AFOL community and hobby.