My LEGO Statistics from 2017-2020

Continuing this month's statistics theme, I also spent some time looking at my LEGO purchases over the last few years. During each of the past few years I've purchased between one and four thousand LEGO bricks. 

Bricks purchased per year

I am a very price-driven LEGO buyer, and it is rare that I purchase a set with a price-per-brick higher than $0.09. My per-brick expense has not varied much since 2017. I included some low-piece-count Technic and Duplo sets in this dataset, so the average skewed high in most years (this is why, in general, median is a better datapoint than average). 

Average and median LEGO brick price from 2017. 

LEGO pretty regularly turns over their product offerings, which means that popular sets become scarce a year or two after their first release. I compared my initial purchase prices for my sets to the the current lowest price on Amazon (not including shipping). 

Price change for sets purchased in a given year to current lowest price on Amazon. 

This chart makes it look like LEGO would be a great investment, but note that what I'm comparing is the asking price on Amazon, not the actual sale price. There are also significant fees when selling items on Amazon or eBay. Here's another look at the price change, this time by series. 

Price change for sets purchased in a given year to current lowest price on Amazon, by series.

LEGO Star Wars, Harry Potter, Technic, and BrickHeadz increased in value most consistently. The highest price increase, 885.30%, was actually for a Harry Potter branded BrickHeadz set, Harry and Hedwig (the only Harry Potter set I purchased in 2017). 

This is a relatively small data set, but it does not appear that LEGO sets increase in value significantly in the years following their retirement. Sets from 2017 that are now retired are not consistently listed for higher prices than sets from 2019. I suspect this trend will continue until the ten or twenty year mark, at which the nostalgia factor will kick in. 

If you're curious to see the individual set details, you can see the full spreadsheet here. I am really pleased with Google's improvements to their pivot table implementation. 

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My 2020 Reading Statistics

2020 was a strange, stressful, and busy year, but our family did quite a bit of reading. The year isn't quite over, but it felt like a good time to assemble some statistics.

Words read/listened in 2020

Like many people, I worked from home much more in 2020 than in prior years. This cut my audiobook time down considerably (I listened to the a substantial portion of The Wheel of Time, approximately 2.5 million words, in 2019). 

2020 was also the first year my kids got really into chapter books. We read every evening before bed, and in 2020 we transitioned from re-reading the same children's books over and over to reading chapter books. (a transition that brought me much joy!) We worked our way through 18 books.

Words read with my kids, by genre

The total word count of Pokémon books is likely skewed high, because the word count from readlinglength.com for most of the Pokemon book series is based on page count. 

We read The Hobbit in 2019, but this year showed that books with kids (or dogs) as protagonists really appeal to my family (we tried to start The Fellowship of the Ring, but the kids weren't into it). 

Words read/listened by myself, by genre

My preference for personal reading is clearly fantasy, though my stats are skewed a little. First, I read a lot for work, which is not reported here because I often read parts of reference books (rather than reading cover-to-cover) and such books do not always have word counts available. I also opted not to include word totals for books I have not finished, which is why Non-Fiction/History is at zero (I am about 60% done reading The Defender).

Here's my full list. 

Week Three Themes

 We had some amazing submissions last week! This week's themes are Warm and Fuzzy and Where do you see yourself in five years?