This is what I got when I ordered 1,000 pcs of capacitors, in 7 separate bags of odds and ends. FYI, the stock is over 1 million pcs available and still is. Why did they dump all the odds and ends to one customer? Do you think my luck was bad? Any similar experiences?
Just one month ago I got 100 transistors in 8 separate bags
I thought, they were running low on this part so I didn't give it too much thought.
Trying to understand. Did you order bags of odds and ends to get 1000 capacitors?
Yeah, it happens with their Cut Tape (CT) & Digi-Reel® part numbers. Their Tape & Reel (TR) option would come in one bag/box but you'd need to order 2,000 minimum.
I've never purchased that many parts from Digikey so I can't talk from experience. If I were to make a large order I would simply call and ask them what I need to do to get the parts on one continuous tape. I would be curious what their definition of Cut tape and digireel etc is.
I am curious how they work if they fragment an order into so many parts.
I guess they have multiple reels for the same part in current use.
When a reel is nearly exhausted, I could imagine that they put remainder of the reel in a sealed, marked bag and load a new real. When a customer order comes in where they can use one or more of these accumulated bags, that customer gets all the odds and ends. The first bag at least does look like it has a new label on top of an existing one.
Digi-Key is very good. Very!!! Good. Seriously, their employees take snowmobiles to work during snowstorms, which can be pretty intense up in Thief River Falls (yeah, I'm a fellow Minnesotan 
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Been ordering from them either for personal use or for companies I've worked for and over a 30 year timespan and hundreds of orders I remember exactly three mistakes!
They sell components like this as Cut Tape (for smaller volumes) or Tape and Reel (larger volumes) and as dlloyd says, they have different part numbers, so you have to be careful. If I were ordering 1000 capacitors, I'd probably go for Tape & Reel as it would likely come as one long tape.
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Yup, that's what happened. You ordered 1276-2909-1-ND which specifies Cut-Tape (small pre-cut quantities in bags). You probably wanted 1276-2909-6-ND which would have been a reel of 1,000
BTW, a similar thing happens with crimp terminals: if you're not careful you'll end up ordering 5,000 in strips designed for automatic crimping tools instead of bulk packaging which is easier to deal with using manual tools. Ask me how I know 
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That is my 20 years experience, also.
Yea but they do that for fun
And I agree, Digikey has always shipped me exactly what I ordered and for my location they are faster than Mouser.
Another interesting thing, for me at least. When choosing a part where I have no experience, I look at their stock and try to choose something in the top three.
Reasoning: it must be a popular part and not likely a left field choice. This doesn't happen often but I thought I would mention it.
I assume the parts were all correct and identical?
I've also never ordered 1000 of anything but my orders have always been "correct". The companies I've worked for do sometimes order 1000 and I don't remember any complaints but I don't work in purchasing or QA.
Lately I've been ordering from Mouser because they don't have a minimum order (and I believe Digikey still does). Yesterday, I ordered 5 Schottky diodes from Mouser at about $1 each. I only needed one, but I almost never order one of anything (in case I fry it, or for troubleshooting in case I think I might have fried it, or maybe I'll need one in the future). And unfortunately, I couldn't think of anything else to order to "justify" the shipping. The shipping was $8.... More than the parts ...That's the downside of ordering extras... I already have everything I need except one part!
I've also ordered from Jameco for many years and they've been reliable. They are basically a hobbyist supplier and they don't have the "infinite selection" of Digikey or Mouser.
I've ordered a couple of times from SparkFun and Adafriut and they've also been reliable.
I NEVER buy from unknown 3rd-party Amazon suppliers, or eBay, or AliExpress, etc. I see a lot of issues here on the forum with "cheap parts" (or cheap board assemblies). Usually the items may be OK but there are no specs, datasheet, or schematic, or manufacturer's part number so nobody knows how to hook it up or use it.
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They usually have multiple bins for the same part number. Full reels in one bin. Partial reels in another bin. Each reel having the remaining count. If the order asks for more than any part reel they have , the cut a full reel and put the remainder in the part reel bin. They keep anything that doesn't fit in a third bin.
When they have new employees, anything can happen, but they always correct the errors.
Thanks everyone! Been teaching all morning. It turns out that if you don't give a specific note for cut tapes, you MAY get multiple bags of identical parts making the total you order. But, for someone ordering 100 parts, sending 8 bags of parts seems intentional. Then a week later an order of 1000 parts in 7 bags? The repeated behavior, that's what made me angry. They could have spread out the odds and ends among all customers but someone decides that it's in their right to dump odds and ends at one particular customer, twice in a row!
I buy rails of parts sometimes for things like 100nF caps or 10K resistors. This capacitor is rather expensive so I didn't have a justification for a full rail.
General comments, I have not got wrong parts or orders from either digikey or mouser. They have professional teams to handle parts. I suspect it was individual's agendas to do such thing to one person, twice in a row. So to answer my own question: digikey is not bad and I didn't have good luck lately. 
Sometimes I must use them so I have made purchases from these 3rd parties and will do so in the near future as well. What I do is to stick to what works. Start with a small order. Make sure what I receive is good enough quality and stick with that footprint.
The green boxes are boost converters, two common types you could find on ebay and sparkfun.
The red is RTC, same pins for two types of breakout boards, with enough space to accommodate both.
The blue boxes are parallel character LCD interface, I2C LCD backpack interface, and MCP23008, depending on which ones I can source.
Even larger vendors constantly run out of certain parts. The following is a recent board with 3 footprints for LDO 3.3V regulators:
1 and 2 are the same regulator in different footprints. 3 is a different regulator.
It's just really hard to source parts these days.
I really don't have a dog in this fight but that is... extremely unlikely. Digikey processes thousands of orders each day. ISTR that their shipping volume is the only reason FedEx did not exit the area. The odds of (a) the same person processing all of your orders (b) that person remembering your name and (c) having some kind of animus against you and deliberately sending you the order in a form is vanishingly small.
It's far more likely that you used the wrong part number when ordering. As I showed previously, the same manufacturer's part often has multiple Digi-Key part numbers depending on how they are packaged for order pulling.
There are 3 part numbers for this component:
- -1 is cut tape, which until now has been what I've always ordered and only recently have got these odds and ends. I've ordered from digikey for a decade and half I think.
- -2 is tape and reel, which is what I automatically get if I order in multiple of what's on one full reel, never failed to get the reels.
- -6 is digireel which I've never ordered. I think they put your order on a reel with leading and trailing empty tape for pnp machine
I have no way to control part number -1 or -2. So the only way to avoid this is to leave a note saying I want continuous tape. There you have it. I didn't order the wrong part number. I just was unlucky, to have encountered two individual workers both of whom want to stuff me with odds and ends. Here is what I get after adding 1,000 parts, either cut tape or digi-reel:
100% correct and it cost more that way because of the labor involved, but parts ordered for a one-time build will use that method, rather than tossing a bunch of parts.
I'm not getting any younger so I might be in the market for a small pnp machine this year and I could potentially scoop up those parts that will otherwise be wasted by a factory for some casual manual build. I have a small SMD box with compartments:
I find it difficult to believe that this is the result of malice but agree that it looks odd. Maybe ask Digikey for an explanation. Anyway, to the worker doing the order fulfilment, you'd probably just be an anonymous account number.
If an individual worker converted a single order into multiple fragments it would surely leave an audit trail in the system.
Looking at the picture of the transistor bags, the labels have different places and dates of manufacture which indicates some sort of consolidation of stock. This would be a more likely explanation.
There may have been times when alll they had on hand were odds and ends, and they may have bought stock from others going out of business.
But they had over 1 million pcs on hand...