#kwikemart

Norm Alguy.

Hi Apu, do you sell nut juice?

Kwik-E-Mart closed!

I bought the LEGO Kwik E Mart recently. I shouldn't have, but I was at the LEGO store and it was marked down considerably so I did. Oftentimes, they'll take off 10% for a damaged box. 10% off of "very expensive" still ends up being expensive and so that alone isn't enough motivation for me to buy something I would not otherwise purchase.

In this case, it was like 25% off. It wasn't on the shelf. I just happened to mention that I like the buildings and have the theater and the Simpsons' home as an example. The guy said, you like the Simpsons (?) well ... He went off to check the price and I told myself if it isn't $150 or less I'm not buying it. It was $150, so there you have it.

When you build LEGOS sorting the pieces is a big part of the process. There are a number of bags for this set, numbered 1 - 8, but that can include three # 3 bags, for instance, so there are more than just eight separate bags.

As you progress through the build, you open all the bags of a given number and work through that section.

Sorting the pieces is a big part of that and there is something elegant and orderly about having all the pieces laid out on a table. However, I have abandoned that practice for the most part.

I feel like there's an element of enjoyment of digging through the pile to find that piece. There may be only one and it may be upside down in the pile, so you have to be patient in your search.

I have never had a set where a piece was missing. LEGO includes extra pieces but they are low value items. You never see extras of valuable bricks and I have never had a missing piece. If you think a piece may be missing, you just have to convince yourself that it doesn't happen and keep looking.

For the Kwik E Mart, I had the Box in my basement and would bring up the one or more same numbered bags before going back down and fetching the next set. There was only one # 5 and this time I really needed to do a sanity check because, not only was a piece missing but there were several of the same kind and they were big enough to be obvious.

So, to check, I forced myself to sort:

(I thought I took a photo but I may have deleted it already so imagine a bunch of sorted pieces.)

I was going to use the photo as evidence that they needed to send me the missing pieces. Before taking that drastic step, though, I went back downstairs to check the box and, voila, there were more #5 bags. 😒

With that mystery solved, I went on building. I have never had a piece missing.

What about that thing I wrote where there are no extra high value pieces? The set includes a police car and when that build was done, I had two 3 x 1 x 3 black pieces. That doesn't happen so I went back through the instructions to see what I had misses. Sure enough, I had overlooked the placement of these two. Since the car still works without them and I'd have to take it partially apart to put them in place, I was like "screw it" (I mean "bonus") and added them to my supplies.

I'm convinced that the LEGO designers do use more pieces than necessary at times and this was one of those times.