OTOH, some items were surprisingly cheap. A couple years after college, I had a small business running out of a spare bedroom making temperature monitors and there was a shielded audio cable with connector that I used for the sensor. Radio Shack's price was about $1.50 each but all the "real" parts houses were at least 5x that.
As an engineer my boss will approve $80 for a single resister after overnight shipping if that is what I need. The factory is buying the resisters a reel at a time (or similar large quantities)
I used to get assortments from Radio Shack with dozens of mundane resistors for a few dollars. That was also expensive per-part, but the convenience of have-it-now, cash-and-carry has a price.
Today, I can order a kit with 1,000 1/8W resistors, of 50 different values, for $7.99 from Amazon. I can build any specific resistor value I want with that kit. It will show up tomorrow, but if I'd looked earlier in the day then I'd have found that I could have it yet today for an extra $3.
Or: I can get an assembled book of 2900 1/8W through-hole resistors from AliExpress. 145 values, in pockets with plainly-readable labels, one value per pocket, all wrapped up in durable-enough 6-ring binder. That's $25 and ships free; I'd expect it to arrive in a week or two.
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So what I've done for noodling around at home is buy inexpensive assortments. In this way, I've already got resistors in stock at home. And capacitors, diodes, transistors, and even jellybean ICs -- along with a better selection of small metric stainless hardware than Ace Hardware offers. I don't miss Radio Shack for these parts, and I'm done paying 53 cents for each M3 x 10mm screw at the hardware store.
It did not cost very much to procure this stuff (and I bought it slowly over time, as-needed, which spread out the expense and avoided effort to forecast need), and it doesn't take up much room to keep it around.
It's pretty good to be able to build a thing on a whim.
Absolutely, in their heyday.
By the end, I met an employee who very derisively told me I didn't need to connect all three terminals on a transistor for it to work. According to him, the collector was often skipped in circuits.
So, by that single indicator, they were already the Walking Dead. But I could ignore him and still buy what I needed, then.