Welcome to the forum Tom. I think you will find the Arduino experience even better then your first impression. It opens a world of cool projects. There are so many neat application chips available these days and the Arduino makes a perfect platform to experiment with them. I don't think the electronic hobby has ever had a better outlook then it does today.
I do suggest you check out a few on-line sellers rather then only depending on local and not so local stores. Here are just a few:
http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/
And of course E-bay tends to have over 1,000 listings these days using "Arduino" as a key word search. I have found many great bulk quantity deals from Asia on commodity electronics parts (leds, resistors, caps, switches, connectors, etc) from Asia and have yet to be disappointed in quality.
Good luck and have fun
Lefty