CONFIRMEDBAM’s own buying calculator is publicly downloadable, with no login, from a Bricks & Minifigs store website on BAM’s own domain
This is the plain-language version of the cited update, written to be read out loud. BAM’s own words are quoted below, unchanged.
A young man, who is autistic, took three of his own LEGO sets into a Bricks & Minifigs store to sell them for his eighteenth birthday. His mother came with him so he would not be taken advantage of. The store offered one hundred sixteen dollars for all three. The sets were a retired Death Star, an X-Wing, and a Super Mario block. By the prices these sets sell for, they were worth close to a thousand dollars together. The store said the offer was low because the LEGO was dusty. The family left, drove to a different Bricks & Minifigs, and were offered five hundred dollars for the same three sets, on the same day.
Every Bricks & Minifigs store uses a tool to decide what to offer you. BAM’s own manual calls it the Buy Calculator. It is a spreadsheet, and a working copy of it is sitting on the open internet, on one of BAM’s own store websites, where anyone can download it. Inside that tool is a setting called “dust collector.” When it is turned on, the offer drops by twenty percent.
But “dust collector” in the tool does not mean the LEGO is dirty. It is a label for an item the store expects to sell slowly. So the customer was told the problem was dust. The tool recorded a markdown for a slow seller. The reason the family heard was the name of a discount button.
The employee also said the sets would have to be taken apart, cleaned, and put back together, and that this was another reason the offer was so low. BAM’s own manual says the opposite. For a complete used set, it says to keep it built and put it on display. It says many stores do not clean their LEGO at all, and that “most customers understand it’s a used product and will clean it themselves at home anyway.” Nothing in it asks anyone to take a finished set apart and rebuild it because of dust.
The full version of this story includes a working copy of the same math the tool uses. You can type in what any set is worth, choose the settings, and see the offer it produces. It opens on this family’s three sets.
About a week before this story, BAM swore, under penalty of perjury, that its manual is “private and proprietary,” that it is “not intended for public access,” and that it “resides in our internal Google Drive, and is not accessible to the public.” The calculator described here is the tool that manual describes. By the date in its own web address, it has been sitting on BAM’s own public website since 2024. It was public before BAM swore the manual was private, and it is public now.
This was one store. The second store offered five hundred dollars for the same LEGO and, the family says, treated them fairly. The point is not that this young man was singled out. The point is that the tool can produce a number this low for anyone who walks in.
This site is independent. It is not owned by, run by, or affiliated with BAM. It quotes BAM’s own manual, BAM’s own tool, and the public record the way it quotes all its sources.
This is a plain-language retelling. The set prices, the family’s account, the exact quotes, and the links are in the full update. Nothing here is a finding of law.
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