I have been good at putting a new blog post up weekly until last week. I have a good excuse though... I happened to be away and I had the chance to tie in LEGO® while I was away. In case you all weren't aware, the Mall of America is located in Minneapolis, Minnesota (okay, it's actually Bloomington, but close enough). It's very large and has a ton of stores inside along with an amusement park. You can go to the link above to see more about the mall, but back to the important stuff... the mall contains a LEGO® Brand store.
Fitting with the largest mall in the US, the LEGO® store comes across as large too. Here is the front.
First off, it has its own building area with couches and tables. The tables have built in base plates to make stacking bricks easier. The store also has a number of very large brick built models on top to add to the expanse of the store. I'm not sure if they are permanently there or if they swap out models... I didn't think to ask.
Here are some closer shots of the models.
The inside of the store didn't have much different from other stores other than it seemed a little more spread out. They had the standard building areas for kids (or adults) and all of the sets seemed to be in stock. One thing that I noticed in this store and maybe it is in all stores, but I wasn't paying attention, was that the really big expensive sets were not stocked on the shelves. They just had a single version of each one. A customer in line ahead of me purchased the Star Wars Sandcrawler (#75059) and the worker told him that they only keep an empty box of the set out so kids don't wreck them. The worker mentioned that some people buy these as collectors items versus buying the set to build it. I was glad to see that they took note of that and were trying their best to help their fans out. Another note on stock levels in the store, they had the Volkswagen Beetle (#10252) and the Disney Castle (#71040) available (at the time of this post #71040 was sold out online). You'll also notice that they have the standard display case windows around the store. The windows in the picture show some of the sets available to include the modular building #10251 - Brick Bank and #10248 Ferrari F40.
In terms of the store, the workers were pretty involved with customers. Many were walking around with constructed sets or parts of sets and they all seemed to be answering questions. One was explaining to a family with kids how to best stack pieces in a pick-a-brick cup to get the most pieces in there. She said that they "didn't want to pay for air." The customer service interactions were definitely at a higher level than the Tysons Corner Center store I went to this past summer. They also had some of the larger sets on display outside of the windowed display areas to include the Technic Bucket Wheel Excavator (#42055) which was built and by the registers. Also, one of the windows had some creations built by "our model builders." I'm not sure who they are, but here is a picture of what they built.
As for buying anything, while the store was fully stocked with all of the current sets I didn't get any new sets. For one, it's tough to buy something when you know you can get it cheaper elsewhere like at Amazon or Walmart. I did see one set of parents checking the price of a set at an online location and deciding not to buy due to a cheaper price elsewhere. The other reason, the sales tax at the store was higher than what I pay locally in FL. Ordering online from Shop @ Home makes the most sense if I'm going to pay full price for a set directly from Shop @ Home. I did get a container of bricks from the Pick-a-Brick wall. The contents of the wall were the same from over the summer when I went to the Tysons Corner Center store, but I still got some pieces. I realize that it makes it look bigger, but why the need for the giant wall with the fake bricks in the top drawers?
Hopefully I'll make it to more of the branded stores to see which are better or worse. If you have one nearby that I should checkout some day, please let me know.
Happy building!