My kids love legos. I love legos for the way they make my kids think and engineer things. What’s the best way to buy them? brand new they are obscenely expensive. ebay doesn’t seem much better. any tips?
craigslist
Comes with all the pitfalls of craigslist of course, but you can buy just about anything there.
Garage sales would be another option.
eBay. Look for "lego lot"s.
examples (both will expire before anyone here can bid, but try that search)
Since the OP is looking for advice, let’s move this to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Value Village or some other thrift store would be yet another option.
Kits or raw Legos? I do a lot of thrift stores, and have never seen Legos there. You can find some a bit cheaper than in the Lego store, but not much cheaper.
Lego kits are one thing I’d buy if I won the lottery, but they are darn expensive for the build time.
Lego bricks. Lego sets. Not Legos.
So the Chinese are not making knockoff copies of them like everything else?
Fuck that.
There are clones, both in China and in the West. Mega-Blok is a Canadian company, Best-Lock is a UK company and Chinese companies are listed in the linked Wikipedia article. But Lego Group is a really big company (one of the largest toy companies in the world) and they have many lawyers.
There are plenty of knockoffs, but their quality is nearly universally shit. Apart from everything already mentioned, it helps to wait til the end of the holidays. Once sets are out of season, large chains like walmart dump sets at ridiculously low prices.
I concur. Fuck that. Corporate rules for how to rightfully refer to a product can kiss my ass. Of course, corporate rules also state that they should be called “LEGO bricks” (note the capitalization) and that’s not happening either.
Triple that. Lego wants me to call them LEGO bricks to help avoid trademark dilution or something, but that’s not at all my concern. I’ll call them Legos because that’s the sensible term for them.
Also I want to figure out a cheaper way to get Legomajiggers too.
Not so. There’s at least two good quality Lego-compatible lines. The aforementioned Mega-Bloks, and Kre-O.
Mega-Bloks and Kre-O also have slightly different selections of special blocks to Lego and each other, so a mix of all three is a good way to get a nice variety of blocks. The Kreons would mix fairly well aesthetically with the Lego minifigs, too, though the Mega-Bloks figures wouldn’t.
OTOH, I don’t know that either of those lines is actually particularly cheaper than Lego (Kre-O is the only one I’ve priced, lately). Mega-Bloks used to be, but they’re not so much the generic version as a direct competitor, now, and Kre-O have always been meant to be a top line - it’s from Hasbro, after all.
Lost cause… 
Hang on, I’m gonna Google a photoshopped picture that’ll refute your point.
You can buy buckets of 600-650 standard blocks in assorted shapes for about $30 or less on sale. Walmart just had them on sale for $15 but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were sold out. The Lego Store online has $30 for them but is sold out as well. Still, once you get past the holidays, they should be pretty easy to find and would be your best bet for getting a bunch of new Legos as inexpensively as possible.
From my experience with Mega-Bloks…they’re crap. Seriously, there is no replacing legos. I wanted the castles and dragons lego set as a kid (not THAT long ago) and my parents got me the Mega-bloks castle set instead, presumably due to price. I had to hide my disappointment as the bricks either stuck together for all time or fell apart constantly due to having no tension. And the colors were ugly to boot!
The advice in the thread thus far to wait for after Christmas generic sets to go on sale is probably your best bet. Besides, the fancy sets now come with so many specialty parts it’s hard to reuse the bits in other ways - except Lego Creator sets! Those are pretty great.
In the olden days before they made a unique Lego piece for every conceivable purpose though, the Mega-Blok knights and orc-thingies had way cooler weapons than the stock Lego sword or axe. The blocks themselves were a shadow of real Legos but the figures and accessories were pretty cool.
Edit: I wasn’t clear in my older post: $30 is the MSRP for a bucket o’ 600-650 assorted stock style/color blocks. $15 was a sale price but even $30 ain’t so bad if you just need to beef up the collection.
Mega Bloks are a great option. I’ve bought some for my kids and they are very compatible with lego. They also have very interesting kits - like Dragon Universe which combines spaceships and dragons (no boy will refuse that).
The best way to buy lego is to go a a lego storeand head straight for the lego “Wall of Bricks”.
Ahh - Wall of Bricks - where were you when I was a kid? You stand there are fill a bin with exactly the pieces you and your kid want from a pretty good range of options (view yourself by following the link). Where I live it is $8 / $16 depending on size for the bins, which both hold a good amount of lego - better value than the kits for sure. My kids have fun both picking out their own bricks and then incoporating them into their building projects.