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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.
ReplyDeleteDepending on the country and carrier, you can't even send documents; see Finland and their national mail carrier Posti, for an example.
DeleteThis 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.
DeleteEnding this exemption has been widely supported by Democrats, and Biden also pushed for it. It’s insane but hypothetically a Democrat president sadly won’t change it.
DeleteCool, got any sources to back your statement up? A quick Google search shows that what they want is SOOooo much more complex and restricted than what this administration is pulling out their a**.
DeleteGreat! Another neutral space will turn into something preachy and cringey.
DeleteDo you people never get tired of lecturing everybody? A bunch of adults that play with children’s toys are going to be the vanguard of a political revolution 🙄
I guess tariffs in themselves aren't a major issue, but the implementation could have been more predictable and slowly rolled out, instead of having been rushed out to general confusion. Regardless, it didn't take long for the comment section to deteroriate into general pie-throwing.
DeleteMy comment seems to be a hit with anonymous randos upset by the idea of Lego fansites having at least some things they won't stand for. Which doesn't exactly disprove my point. Personally as somebody who has been burned by people I met in "apolitical" online Lego spaces turning out to have harmful real-world politics, I feel like knowing that the sites I use have certain baseline principles that they're willing to commit to makes me feel a heck of a lot more welcome than having them hide their true colors, leaving uncertainty about what exactly they're like when they log off.
DeleteYou must be fun at parties 😂
DeleteI'm kinda wondering how the anons think we should talk about Lego suspending PaB shipping to North America because of Trump's tariffs, without talking about Trump's tariffs?
Deletepolitics is what other people do to you when you don't talk about politics
DeleteAndrew, I fully support this kind of engagement with the political realities of our hobby. I bet you ARE fun at parties, I always enjoy talking with an articulate person who cares about their country, community, world.
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...
ReplyDeleteYou do know that "customs costs" are tariffs right? These have always existed for other countries.
DeleteCustoms costs /can be/ tariffs, but they can also be due to several other things.
DeleteFirst, a duty and a tariff aren't technically the same thing, though they can look and behave nearly identically, so I'm not sure that makes a meaningful difference. But the theory behind them is different: duties are charged to the /consumer/, and are based on the value of the goods being brought into the country. The purpose of a duty is to discourage consumers from buying from abroad and to recoup lost revenue (i.e., the taxes you would've paid if you'd bought it in your own country).
Tariffs are charged to the /importer/ (i.e., the seller or manufacturer). They /usually/ pass them on to the consumer, so it doesn't make a huge difference. But they don't have to — US retailers the past 6 months have on average been eating around 2/3 of the tariffs, and only passing 1/3 on to consumers. The purpose of a tariff is to encourage domestic manufacturing/sourcing.
So as a consumer, you're going to pay a duty, because a duty is a tax on your consumption. You might not pay a tariff, or at least not all of it, because a tariff is a tax on someone else's production.
On top of that, customs costs can (and often do) come from things that are neither tariffs nor duties. There can be other sorts of taxes. Customs fees can include handling fees, which are about the work Customs has to do, not about the goods or their value. There can be reciprocal costs that the shipper or recipient has to pay as part of international postal agreements. Not really applicable for the sorts of small packages we're talking about here, but customs fees can also include warehousing and transportation and other fees incurred from just dealing with the stuff as stuff.
And saying "customs costs have always existed for other countries", in addition to rolling together at least 4-5 different things, only 1 of which is tariffs, is sorta ignoring the scale of things. Prior to 8 months ago, the average aggregate tariff rate for goods coming into the US had been below 3% for 30 years, usually around 1.5%-2%. In 2024, it was 2.5%. As of April 2025, IOW *before* these not-actually-reciprocal "reciprocal" tariffs came into effect, we were sitting at 14.5%. That's the first time it's been double digits since *1946*, and the highest it's been since *1938*. Doing a 6-fold increase in the span of a couple months with no warning is crazypants. Even if the new rates were sensible policy, implementing them so fast, with unclear rates and no warning, isn't. And now they're going up even more.
And the new policy, announced just a few weeks ago, also switches to calculating tariffs based on the day it hits Customs in the US, which isn't even necessarily the day that the package gets to the US. For decades, and up until this month, the standard has been that tariffs are charged based on the policies the day the package is shipped from its origin, so neither the sender nor the recipient is responsible for delays by the shipping. You could've mailed something to the US on August 1, but if it got delayed somewhere along the way and doesn't actually get to US Customs until August 30, you or the recipient is going to have to pay the higher tariffs, or the fallback US$80/$160/$200 fee, depending on what the shipping company (USPS/FedEx/DHL/UPS/etc.) decides, which you have no way of knowing.
I 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.
sure, where "fixed" is "trump gets a tax on americans without calling it a tax"
DeleteAgree 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.
Sounds like a trip to Denmark would solve the issue
DeleteSo Trump was right and really is the 51st state.
ReplyDeleteWe sure picked the wrong friend.
DeleteI find it interesting that during the postal strike in Canada I think the US customers were still able to receive Standard items from Denmark. Now the US has new rules for tariffs on packages worth less than $800, Denmark cannot ship to Canada...I find this quite odd ...
DeleteThat's great news to hear!! Go 'Merica!!
ReplyDeleteAustralia Post has also suspended shipments to the U.S.
ReplyDeleteJapan Post too—less impactful to the Lego hobby than some other countries, but some of my friends who are anime/video game fans are pretty peeved that this could impact merch for those hobbies (including some things like Nendoroid figures that they'd already preordered).
DeleteWhen European retailers stopped supplying Lego to Russia, it was normal, everyone was having fun. But when the situation affected them, they started screaming.
ReplyDeleteapples to oranges comparison. Invading another country for a landgrab is not the same as mess of legislation imposed by the US.
DeleteI'm just so sad to be Canadian some times. The USA does something stupid once again and Canada has to suffer just because we're neighbors, it's like France doing something stupid and Spain having to suffer because of it. Not Cool!
ReplyDeleteThere are currently just 4705 parts available on Pick a Brick in Sweden so doesn't seem this issue is isolated to North America. :(
ReplyDeleteNever mind, didn't realise that each part now counts as just 1, no matter how many colours it comes in!
DeleteAre you sure this is about the US tariffs? And not only a long-planned halt of the "standard" bricks? Here in Europe, "standard" bricks were halted about nine months ago and never came back. Many of them became the "bestseller" status at this point, but not all of them. About 10% of all parts were simply removed and most of them were not out-of-production ones. We could still see the "standard" parts in Brickhunter browser plugin until some days ago, but were not able to order them.
ReplyDeleteNo packages (as in, not just from LEGO) are coming from Europe right now due to the mess caused by the tariffs. So yes, it's about the tariffs.
Delete