Costly Star Wars Lego Error

The Local, an English language news outlet from Denmark, reported on a 2015 Lego factory error. It was mentioned only recently in company newsletter.

The incident occurred when the wrong color gray brick was packed into several different sets, including at least some in the Star Wars line. The error was discovered prior to the sets shipping to retail, so an official recall was able to be avoided. The toy giant reached out to a group of employees that were vacationing in Europe to assist with the repacking and shipping of the sets, which numbered about 129,000.

The internal investigation uncovered the source: a single employee erroneously labeled a part in the factory with the wrong color gray, resulting in a light gray brick incorrectly being selected for the sets. According to Lego, there was no disciplinary action taken against the employee. The company invested a large sum of money into improving the lighting in the factory to help prevent the error from being repeated.

Now here's the payoff for our using a Danish source: The cost to repacks the sets combined with the upgraded factory lighting cost Lego 10 million kroner. 10 MILLION KRONER! For those of you not aware of the current exchange rate, that is about $1.58 million. But we got to use kroner in our report.

It also goes to show how Lego chooses to treat its employees, at least in this instance. If I made an error at Bantha Skull that cost 10 million kroner, I'd surely have hell to pay from Chris. He'd probably seize my AT-ACT. (Chris doesn't know what 10 million kroner is, so please don't tell him.)

---

comments powered by Disqus