At our company, when a project finishes, in the main, they just dump everything currently in stock. The reason is that it is too expensive to do otherwise.
At one time we were designing, and building marine Radars on a mini production line, and there was resistors, capacitors, transformers, you name it, scattered all over the place. At the end of the day the cleaners would just put the whole lot in the bin.
And when that marine radar production finished all the items in stores, including the production test equipment, that was not from the test equipment department, also went in the bin.
That was on the commercial side. On the military side everything that was surplus, and there was tons of it, was junked. In one case hundreds of silicon transistors were dumped because there was a minor deficiency in the paper work. That was in the days when a transistor cost the earth. I still remember the part number: 2N930. For years all by home projects used Mil Spec 2N930s.
The company's general stores had a load of old 74, 74S, 74LS TTL chips which were going to be dumped. I bought them for nominal sum and made a list which I sent to a few brokers, who got into a bidding war: I ended up doing quite well out of that operation.
The message is that there are many reasons why items are cheap, not just errors in the price.
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