Early in my EE career at a very small electronics manufacturer, "pulls" (cheap components that were removed from equipment) were a thing. Lots of vendors in the

Early in my EE career at a very small electronics manufacturer, "pulls" (cheap components that were removed from equipment) were a thing. Lots of vendors in the back pages of the Component Shopper (I think that was the name) rag advertised them. As I moved on to companies where supply chain quality was important, we didn't do that anymore, but I'd be surprised if that marketplace has gone away. Especially for hard to find parts. I know of companies where 6-figure orders were being held up because of the inability to find a few $5 components. It's less likely to happen for consumer products that are price-sensitive, though. There's a big difference between doing that with low-integration DIP parts vs fine-pitch SMT devices that have orders of magnitude higher transistor count.