LEGO fans seemingly frustrated by the switch to cardboard packaging for the Collectible Minifigures are reportedly ripping open 71039 Marvel Series 2 boxes in stores.
The least-desired (and presumably most-feared) outcome of moving away from flexible foil bags – which previously allowed collectors to feel out an approximate idea of their contents – has apparently already become a reality, and 71039 Marvel Series 2 hasn’t even hit its wide release date. Stores across the US and UK have put the latest series of superhero minifigures out on shelves early, and initial reports indicate things aren’t going great.
Chelsea Bowyer – a member of the Facebook group Lego Buy/Sell/Swap (U.K.) – has shared a photo of multiple opened boxes on an Asda supermarket shelf. The contents of those boxes were apparently still intact, suggesting the culprit was seeking a particular character (rather than brazenly stealing any and all minifigures), leaving behind those they weren’t interested in.
It’s a similar story in the US, where Instagram user fourstud says that one shopper had ripped into boxes of 71039 Marvel Series 2 minifigures at a Target store. “While checking out, the guy told me that in the 40 minutes it took me to get there, someone had torn open 21 of them,” fourstud wrote in a since-expired story (and has since confirmed to Brick Fanatics). “They took them off the shelves and put the remaining nine in boxes, which I purchased.”
In a Venn diagram with two circles labelled ‘regrettable’ and ‘inevitable’, this pretty much falls smack in the middle. Removing the ability to feel out specific characters in a Collectible Minifigures series was always going to frustrate some people, and there were ultimately always going to be a subset of those fans who would take things to their logical extreme.
It’s worth noting that in the two instances described here, this seems less about theft and more about an unwillingness to engage with the practice of blind purchases (or gambling, if you want to put a broader label on it). That obviously doesn’t excuse opening boxes in stores, not least for how it will actually impact other fans: as Bowyer demonstrates on Facebook, anyone finding those opened boxes is unlikely to buy them over concerns pieces might be missing.
As a result, retailers will likely either have to repackage them (as apparently happened at Target), sell them at a discount or write them off as losses – which will ultimately trickle back to the LEGO Group one way or another. How much impact that might have on the packaging of future Collectible Minifigures series remains to be seen, but these could still be isolated incidents for now. The real test will come once 71039 Marvel Series 2 debuts widely on September 1.
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