Buying components: Mass purchase bulk boxes vs sourcing specific single pieces?

I bought one of those big assortment books of resistors years ago when I started breadboarding little op amp effects, and honestly it saved me more times than I can count. There was a night I was rebuilding a fuzz face clone at midnight and needed a couple of odd values to swap for tone, and having the whole range sitting there meant I coud just try things instead of waiting a week for shipping. For me the bulk route won imediately. The waste worry never really materialized. Resistors cost pennies, and the values you think you'll never touch do get used eventually, expecially once you start modding things and experimenting with gain stages or LED current. The only stuff I buy per-project now is the specific parts that actually matter, like a paticular transistor or a matched pair of something.

My one rule is that bulk is for passives, not everything. I'd never blind-buy capacitors in the same way, becuase the values and types get wierd fast and you end up with drawers of stuff you'll never use. But a resistor spread plus a basic ceramic and electrolytic selection is just infrastructure. So for a few small builds, I'd say get a reasonable assortment book rather than a thousand of one value, and top up individual parts as the projects demand. That's the middle ground that worked for me anyway.

I did the bulk box thing early on and honestly regretted it. Bought a couple of those 600-piece resistor assortments thinking I was setting myself up, and three years later I counted how many values I'd actually touched. Maybe twenty out of the sixty-something in the kit. The rest just sat in the drawer while the ones I burned through constantly, like 10k and 100k for op amp gain stages, ran out anyway because the kits only throw in ten or fifteen of each value. So I paid for a pile of values I'd never use and still had to reorder the workhorses. What worked better for me was building a small stock around a handful of projects. When I was doing a simple VCO on stripboard, I sat down with the build doc, listed every part, and ordered twice what the build needed from a supplier like Mouser in one cart. Shipping stings less when it's one order covering the whole project plus spares. Now I keep a running list on my phone of what I'm low on, and when I place an order for a current build I toss in extras of the common stuff. That way the drawer fills up with values I actually use instead of a random spread. The midnight 'I need it right now' panic still happens, but it's rarer than I expected, and one extra day of shipping beats a drawer full of dead weight.

This is helpful but now I'm wondering about the storage side of things. If I get a big mixed pack of little parts, how do you all keep track of what's what? Right now my bits are living in a sandwich bag and I spent twenty minutes last night squinting at those tiny colored stripes trying to figure out if I was holding the right one. Do people just write on the little compartments with a marker, or is there some trick to sorting them that doesn't turn into a whole weekend project?

One thing I'd add is to check what tolerance the kit actually contains before buying, because a lot of the cheap assortments are 5% carbon film while a surprising number of synth schematics assume 1% parts in places like filter feedback paths. I also found that having a full E12 series means you rarely need an odd value at all, since two resistors in series gets you close enough for nearly anything audio related. My drawer of unused values from the assortment eventually became useful exactly because of that trick.

Agree with the middle ground approach here. I did basically the same thing, started with an assortment and after about a year noticed I was constantly digging for the same five or six values, so I just ordered bulk bags of those specific ones. Best of both worlds really. The book covers the random stuff and the bags cover what I actually burn through. Also second the point about caps, I blind-bought a mixed pack once and half of them are still sitting there untouched.

The per-project route has a hidden cost nobody factors in til they've done it a few times. I tried buying exactly what each build needed and every single project turned into 'oh wait, I'm out of that one thing' and the whole thing stalls for a week. Now I just add a couple spares of anything cheap to every order. If I'm ordering ten resistors I'll grab twelve. Soldering heat kills the odd one anyway, better to have a backup in the drawer than a half-finished board sitting on the bench for a month.