Really cheap? I have a friend who is a single mother with a 7-year-old Lego addict, who also loves all things Jurassic World. The only Lego sets available in the aisles of the big box stores around us (conveniently placed at 7-year-old height) are the egregiously over-priced officially licensed movie tie-in kits. I was shocked to see some of these relatively small kits selling for over $100, the cheap ones being in the $40s to $60s. My friend's income (with food stamps) is roughly $1,000 a month... So her son has to feel constantly deprived of the cool toys he really wants. I confess I ordered a knock-off set from AliExpress for his Christmas present last year, he got dozens of Jurassic World-ish Lego-like bricks and it cost me less than $20, shipped. I had very positive feelings about Lego as a kid. Now I see them as just like any other business, engineering desires into their target market and exploiting those desires for maximum profit.
For the purpose of a discussion about engineering, each brick _is_ really cheap. The argument is that something they manufacture and retail for a dime or less is engineered to exacting tolerances.
Think about it: You buy a Tesla Model X for Unobtainium money, and there are panel gaps. But you buy a bucket of Lego bricks for $20, and each one clicks together perfectly.
Lego may be expensive for a tiny blob of plastic, but the point I'm making is that their engineering is amazing relative to the cost of each brick.
p.s. That being said, I hear you! The sets with authorized franchise tie-ins are expensive, in large part because a sizeable part of their market are adults with disposable income. There is no other explanation for a CAD800 Millennium Falcon with 7,500 pieces.
Think about it: You buy a Tesla Model X for Unobtainium money, and there are panel gaps. But you buy a bucket of Lego bricks for $20, and each one clicks together perfectly.
Automotive body panels are large and relatively flexible, hence harder to get close tolerances on. Small injection-molded parts, however, can be made to much closer tolerances and the process has been around for over half a century.
Their sets have always been expensive, though my older (late 80s through late 90s) ones were much bigger for a comparable price (with similar or smaller part counts—they love putting hundreds of tiny little pieces for really fiddly construction in modern sets, it's awful, I assume CAD or something is to blame) but a regular old box o' bricks is pretty cheap, and if you're not trying to buy complete high-demand sets they're cheap in mixed brick lots on ebay, too.
