The price isn't bad. If you went surplus, and purchased the minimum for each value from here:
There are 12 value subdivisions in each "decade", and 6 decades, plus one (the 1 meg ohm resistor), for 73 possible values. Multiply that by $.50 (the allelectronics minimum for 10 pcs), and you end up with a total of "$36.50"; half that again (to match with SparkFun's offering), and it works out to "$18.25" - so you can clearly see that SparkFun has a better price.
I don't, however, think its a good deal from the standpoint of quantity per size. 5 pcs of each size seems low; I personally wouldn't feel comfortable until I had at least 15 pcs for each size. If I was doing more than breadboard prototyping (and was instead doing a number of PCB prototypes or similar), I would consider 100 pcs per each value a minimum.
There's also a strange thing about this kit - according to what I learned in this thread:
http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1277448268
And off this site (noted in the above thread by raron):
...SparkFun is using an E12 list with 5% tolerance parts, which would leave potential gaps between values because of the tighter tolerances (you should use an E24 list for 5% tolerance parts). An E12 list should be used with 10% tolerance parts. I'm not saying such a mix won't work, you just have to keep in mind the potential gaps when you use them.
These guys actually come closer to SparkFun's price:
http://www.goldmine-elec-products.com/products.asp?dept=1125
...if you run the numbers you'll get $12.78 for 5 each of the 73 values (unfortunately, you can only order 100 at a time for each value, which would be OK for a PCB prototyping shop).
If you look around, you can probably find cheaper vendors (and if you can find 10% tolerance resistors to better fit the E listing, those will likely be cheaper).
Hope this helps!
