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Comment by aliswe | Hacker News Reader

A kinda interesting way to make money is to go to flea markets and buy Lego bricks at a discount, then sell them at the likes of this site. Normally I see bricks go for about 60USD per kilo I think if not more, but in flea markets you can make some good deals.

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This reminds me:

A few years ago, Jacques Mattheij accidentally won a lot more bulk lego auctions than he meant to. His story of sorting through them with a homemade hopper/camera/ML/computer vision showed up on HN.

It's still a good read today. It begins at:

https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/

Buying bricks at flea markets has gotten a lot harder in recent years. Occasionally you run across someone selling random bags of minifigs in packs of 5 for $10, or the occasional damaged box at 25% to 50% off retail, but in my experience, the prices at flea markets have gone up dramatically and finding 'deals' has gotten veyr hard.

i saw the city monorail being sold for 50 EUR a few weeks ago (in a garage sale). Went back 5 minutes later and it was gone

Poor one! One of my colleagues would have a heart attack if he spotted that. Super hard to find.

I hope this market inefficiency doesn't get ironed out. Yard sales and flea markets are where I got all the lego I had when I was a kid. My parents couldn't afford to buy that much lego new, nor at the prices charged online.

60USD/kilo is vastly overpriced, you should pay no more than 8 in bulk. Sorted and cleaned it's a different matter.

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