Are Legos today poorer quality plastic?

[newnana]

DD LOVES the Lego Friends collection. I love the Lego Friends collection. I love that DD has some sort of interest in building and playing and designing and being creative with these.

She has a few sets and has combined them and is making spectacular things. Hooray!

But I was playing with her today and noticed a significant number of pieces, 10 maybe, that are cracked. Cracks down the whole length of the piece. I do not remember out of the thousands of Legos my brothers and I had growing up ever having a piece crack.

We only have a few sets, that's awfully poor quality control. DD is extremely careful with her things, it's not that she's rough with them, she's never even dropped them onto the carpet!

I looked at the Lego website and see a replacement option, but it looks like I have to figure out what sets all of these pieces are from. UGH! I guess I will do it, but are you guys having this problem with Lego Friends? What about other types of Legos?

TIA!

[SnuggleBuggles]

We have gazillions of Legos, old and new. Quality appears to be equal on all. The Lego Friends don't get much play but seem fine.

[ett]

We don't have any Lego Friends but have lots of other sets. I've only had 1 piece break and everything else has held up fine.

[katydid1971]

There are some posts about the MIC Legos being poorer quality on the Lego Blogs.
Lego still has fantastic CS. I would look up which bricks broke (their numbers are listed in the back of the instruction book) and call their CS number (also in the instruction book). They will mail you replacement pieces and try and sign you up for their free Lego Magazine ;) You might have to wait on hold for a few minutes but you will get someone in the US and everyone I have talked with has been super helpful.

[roseyloxs]

We have a bunch of Lego Duplos, not Lego friends and we haven't had any cracks at all. Owned most of them for almost 3 years now and my DS is not gentle at all with them.

[hellokitty]

Wow, we've never had a LEGO brand lego crack before. I'd take it back or call lego and tell them. I am sure they will send you replacements. For what they charge, I would expect them to be sturdy. I can definitely tell that megablocks are more cheaply made and more flimsy than LEGO, but the LEGO my kids have and the LEGO that my parents still have from their house from 30+ yrs ago when my siblings and I were young are all pretty high quality.

[newnana]

Thanks so much everyone. I'll call lego CS today. Since I've seen so few broken legos in the past I was really getting ticked as we were playing and I kept coming across more and more that were split. Sweet DD said, "it's okay mom, they still work!" Good kid. Off to rectify!

Oh, and thanks for the tip on the back of the instruction book. I was dreading trying to go through the book to match up which broken pieces came from which sets.

Thanks!!

[vonfirmath]

I've got Lego Friends sets and haven't had any crack.