[thomastjeffery]

I bet it's more likely that a given Lego set that is missing pieces was produced, packaged, shipped, and sold, nearby other piece-missing sets.

In other words, I would not expect the distribution of Lego sets that are missing pieces to be evenly or randomly distributed.

[pcthrowaway]

Yes I was thinking the same thing. Certain factories may have worse quality control, and those sets end up in different regions from sets that come from better production facilities

[Ma8ee]

Are they really producing the same sets in different factories? It would surprise me.

[TylerE]

One thing they do on the big sets is give you extras of the small stuff. Like if you need 10 of a 1x1 tile of a certain color, maybe they give you 11, or even 12.

[thomastjeffery]

The biggest limitation to that is that the selection of extra pieces is probably not as random as the set of missing pieces, especially since they focus on smaller pieces - presumably to accommodate the ones you lose after buying a full set.

[TylerE]

Probably not, but it seems I tuitive that the smaller pieces are the most likely to be lost.