Electronics > Beginners
Element14 do not sell red wire in 1 metre lengths (seriously)
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plurn:
If you only want short lengths of hook up wire, why not pop into your local jaycar, altronics, radio parts, wiltronics, etc and buy from them. They typically let you cut your own lengths of wire in the shop. They are more set up for that sort of thing (selling to hobbyists) than element14. Perhaps you are in a remote area and can't do that.

I get the impression that companies like element14, digikey, mouser, etc have professionals as their target market rather than hobbyists that want a few meters of cable. Not a conspiracy just a different target market.
tooki:
Well, digi-key certainly serves professionals, too, but they were born as a company for hobbyists, as the distributors of the day didn’t accept non-commercial orders at all. (Mouser is the same, I think.)
rawrs:
There's not much I can add to this that has not already been said. The reason Jaycar can make a profit on the stuff is that they actually have a brick and mortar presence, and a big one at that. These customers are generally only looking for small lengths of wire for whatever need they have *right now*. You don't have that advantage as an online reseller, but you DO have the advantage of large, bulk orders, so it makes sense to not screw around with short lengths of wire that people will just go to Jaycar for, anyway. You want to have large stocks of reels on hand because if I am buying stuff online, I generally want a lot of it.

It's no surprise that they do this, really.
ArthurDent:
What I have done to get lots of colored hook-up wire cheap is look for used multi-conductor cable at hamfests or other places. Sellers are generally glad to get rid of it for very little. It doesn't make any difference how grubby the jacket looks because I carefully slit the length of the jacket with a utility knife set so it can't cut any of the wires inside then peel the jacket off to reveal the clean wires inside. Here's an example of a 6 foot length of what was a special cable I got dirt cheap that had 10 colored stranded tinned wires plus 6 lengths of RG-174 coax cable inside. You can generally find the wire size you're interested in after a little searching and make a low offer that will probably be accepted.

Other than that, buy a kit from eBay with a few rolls of 25 foot lengths for about $15, you'll eventually use it all. Buying one meter at a time doesn't make any sense to me at all. 
JustMeHere:
If anyone wants to see the "cost of paying someone to cut" the wire, take a look at the price breaks of 100nf MLCC (smd chip capacitors) on Digikey. 
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