Ordering parts onesie twosie (was: One of Bay Area's last Fry's Electronics stores closes)

At 14:15 31-12-19, you wrote: One of the things I miss most is no longer having any local electronic suppliers. Larger cities have more, but all of the places piled high with old electronics in Seattle in 1980's were no longer there when last visited Seattle around 2007 or so. Vancouver has one electronics store which, given Vancouver traffic, was at least a 1 hour drive each way. Seems that no-one is interesting in restoring old systems or building them anymore. The old surplus electronic stores in Canada seemed to fade away in 1970's, but Western Surplus in Edmonton was an excellent place to find military surplus electronics in 1960's. Hate online ordering as don't get a chance to actually look at what one is getting and there's a minimum of a few days to a week delay before one gets the item. Living in middle of BC means a week is closer to how long it takes. As far as China goes, have waited months for electronics to come from China. Really cheap, but even cheaper if one pulls things like 16x32 multicolor LED displays out of sale kids toys; a girls "programmable display purse" cost less on sale at ToysRus than buying a multicolor LED matrix new duties) and after disassembly, one got a very well manufactured multicolor LED matrix as well as very a very shoddy, likely ARM CPU based, board which connected to the LED matrix. Find that online ordering results in my having an excess of microprocessor development systems which I still haven't used, of which the most use in future will be Propeller proto boards as that's my favorite CPU after PDP-11. Learned early that don't have a few glasses of wine before starting to order electronics online ($1500 AdaFruit order was result). Now I just try to stock up on things that are likely to be in short supply and that I don't want to run out of. Current system of immediately getting a part when one needs it very fragile and depends on a complex transportation system which can easily fall apart in a SHTF situation. Also, donate old electronics to people who will resuse them (such as out local Makerspace which may represent a future form of distributed manufacturing). Not having local stocks of electronic parts available for purchase very annoying and only solution I've found for now is to look at what parts I'm likely to need and order 50 of them or whatever number I get a decent price break. Electrolytic capacitors have a finite lifetime and would prefer to buy them new but will just have to hope they age more slowly when not in use.