I used to find Maplin great for components, and cheaper than Tandy. Nowadays, Maplin is more like the old Tandy 
I started using them when there used to be "Concorde" on the front cover of the catalogue ( ! ) - That must have been about 1978. They othen used to have stuff out of stock though, as I regularly got some components along with a voucher for the price of missing ones in the delivery.
Nowadays, still OK for the occasional component, but they have gone MUCH too expensive. I tend to use Farnell for component purchases, or eBay occasionally.
The only "problem" with Farnell is that the stock is SOOOOOO big. Just search for a 10K 1/4 watt resistor for example and you get a huge number of responses. I sort lowest price first and pick the cheapest suitable one as I don't care who manufactured it (careful to avoid US stock). As a result, it can take an hour or so just to get a fairly small number of items into the basket as there is a lot of sorting and filtering to do.
Rapid Electronics is another good one that I use.
Grant
I started using them when there used to be "Concorde" on the front cover of the catalogue ( ! ) - That must have been about 1978. They othen used to have stuff out of stock though, as I regularly got some components along with a voucher for the price of missing ones in the delivery.
Nowadays, still OK for the occasional component, but they have gone MUCH too expensive. I tend to use Farnell for component purchases, or eBay occasionally.
The only "problem" with Farnell is that the stock is SOOOOOO big. Just search for a 10K 1/4 watt resistor for example and you get a huge number of responses. I sort lowest price first and pick the cheapest suitable one as I don't care who manufactured it (careful to avoid US stock). As a result, it can take an hour or so just to get a fairly small number of items into the basket as there is a lot of sorting and filtering to do.
Rapid Electronics is another good one that I use.
Grant
