Capitalism at it's best. It's cheaper to designate catalog/storage space for widgets that they're going to sell by the ton at a high markup than it is to hold shelf space for the widgets that are used to help make it easier for people to use the widgets that they buy by the ton. A tube of micro controllers or memory chips that could sell for a dozen, a hundred, or a thousand dollars will fit into the space they used to reserve for that scalpel. This trend will do nothing but get worse over the years, though there will pop up specialty suppliers that specialize in selling all the things that no one else wants to stock, or people will find some other way of doing what they need to.