[sersnth]

I am pretty sure you can end up in the sort of situation where ordering 3000 costs less than ordering 2500 on Digikey, and in my experience the same goes for other major component distributors like Mouser.

It seems to me like it kind of promotes waste since one ends up ordering components that they may have no use for, but maybe it is not that big of a deal since it is common to want to have some amount of spare components when doing a production run. Personally, even if I only need a single unit of some little surface mount resistor or ceramic capacitor I usually buy 100 since the price tends to be like $0.10 each for <10 versus $0.50 for 100, and I can just add the excess to my spare parts collection.