CONFIRMED
This is the plain-language edition of what a Bricks & Minifigs counter charges for the LEGO® it buys from you. Same facts, same grade, none of the set numbers, nothing collapsed into boxes. Every claim below is stated again on the cited edition, with its full sourcing and the searchable table attached.
When you carry your LEGO® to a Bricks & Minifigs counter to sell it, you see one number: the offer. You have no easy way to check it. This is the check. For hundreds of the most-traded sets, this site set two public numbers side by side: what the set really sells for on the open market, and what BAM stores charge for the same set on their own websites. The space between them is the markup. The typical set runs about 23 percent over the market. The widest gaps pass 100 percent. And on four of every five well-documented sets, the store’s price is the higher one.
Follow a single dollar of real LEGO value across the counter, both ways. Sold to the store, that dollar of value brings the seller an estimated 25 to 43 cents. Bought back from the store, the same value carries a shelf price of about $1.23. One box, one worth, two prices. The person who sold it low is the same public that buys it high, at the same register, trusting the same brand. A used Treehouse set that sells on the open market for about $15 is listed by BAM stores near $40: a markup of 164 percent, the widest in the record. These are not rare grails locked in a case. They are the ordinary sets a walk-in seller is most likely to carry in.
Buying low is the business, and BAM says so in its own paperwork. The earnings section of its franchise disclosure reports what its stores keep out of every sales dollar after paying for the goods they sold. For the typical franchise store, that figure is about 62 percent. Read it from the seller’s side of the counter: the store paid about 38 cents for the goods behind each dollar on the shelf. And 38 cents is a blend, because it includes brand-new sets bought wholesale, which cost the store far more per shelf dollar than a counter buy does. For the used side to lift the whole store to a 62 percent margin, the counter has to pay below that blend. That is why the seller’s cash is estimated at 20 to 35 cents on the shelf-price dollar: not this site’s guess against BAM, but the range that fits the margins BAM itself discloses. The company’s own manual teaches the discipline by name, with chapters on cost of goods sold and gross margin.
One category stands apart. On used sets, Star Wars carries a bigger markup than everything else on the shelf, about 25 percent against roughly 16 percent for the rest. That matters here for a reason. In late 2023, a man named Bryan Mansell consigned what BAM’s own court filing calls “a large collection of retired Star Wars Lego sets and minifigures” to the Salem store, on paper that said the sets stayed his until they sold. After BAM seized that store, the former franchisees say, the collection was swept up and sold with it. BAM’s own franchise filing shows a single operator, Brandon Best, holding both that store, now Keizer, and the Eugene resale store, at the same phone number. Star Wars is exactly the category that collection was made of, and it is the category these stores price at a premium. No one claims a set on the shelf today is one of his; where his sets went is still an open question, and it is unresolved in court.
The Eugene store’s online catalog stamps every listing with the day it was created, so you can sort its current prices by the age of the tag. Stock listed back in 2021 sits about 13 percent over the market. Stock listed in 2025 sits at 25 percent. Listings created in 2026 run 32 percent over, and nine of every ten are priced above the market. One stretch is sharper than the rest. BAM dates its seizure of the Keizer store, the store that held the Mansell collection, to November 14, 2024, and the same operator holds Eugene. For two years before that date, Star Wars ran under a tenth of Eugene’s newly created listings. In the eleven weeks after it, the share tripled to 21 percent, then held near a quarter through 2025. On one heavy day that December, a Homing Spider Droid the store had listed used at $15 since 2021 got a second used listing, priced at $90. The catalog does not say which boxes these were, and more than one thing could leave this shape; what the record shows is the timing, in the store’s own dates.
Keep the honest line the record keeps. The markup is a hard fact: both of its sides are public, BAM’s own posted price and the open market’s own record of what sold, and the arithmetic between them is not in dispute. What the counter actually pays a seller is not public, so every seller-cash figure here is an estimate, drawn from BAM’s own disclosed margins and labeled as an estimate throughout. To be fair to the company: a markup is not a wrong. A real store pays rent and staff, tests and cleans used sets, eats the stock that never sells, and hands a seller cash on the spot, and none of that shows in an online sold-price average. Nothing here is a finding that any price, or any store, broke any law, and every company named is presumed to have acted lawfully. The point is narrower, and it is plain: the numbers that measure the gap are public, and the person selling is the only one at the counter who has never been shown them.
One dollar of real LEGO value crosses the same counter twice: bought from you for an estimated quarter, and sold to the next customer for about $1.23. Both of you are the store’s own public. Only one side of that counter has seen the numbers.
Where this comes from. Open-market values are the six-month average sold prices from BrickLink’s public price guide. BAM shelf prices are the median asking prices for the same sets across Bricks & Minifigs stores’ own public online storefronts, together with the Eugene store’s own public catalog and the creation dates it stamps on every listing. The gross-margin figures are BAM’s own, from the earnings section of its current franchise disclosure, carrying BAM’s own caveat that they are franchisee-reported and not independently audited. The consignment and the store takeover come from the parties’ own court filings. Every figure, with its set numbers, its tables, and the full searchable lookup, is on the cited edition of this page.
The BAM Map is independent reporting on matters of public concern. Nothing here is a finding of any person’s guilt; the criminal charges referenced are unadjudicated and every defendant is presumed innocent. Sources are linked so readers can check the record. · Home · Map · The law · Bodycam