SMD Capacitors in Bulk

I'm planning on adding a SATA connection to my Pogoplug Mobile, possibly promoting it from "thing in a box that I've already hacked and become bored with" to NAS box I would use daily.
(I'll be using this thread as my guide, although it's a bit sparse.)

The only thing in my way is a little SMD soldering, which is more of an attraction than anything else at this point. Unfortunately the mod requires adding some 0402 components, which is not a size I have on-hand. But take heart! It just so happens I am in the middle of assembling an order to Digi-Key. (I usually order from Mouser, but Digi-Key has a larger selection, and it just so happens this time aroudn I need some stuff Mouser doesn't carry.)

If you're never ordered from an electronic component retailer before, they normally offer large price cuts the more you buy. Often they won't even sell you less than an arbitrary minimum number. (If you look up a part on findchips, the lowest price is almost always at Verical, the "clearance aisle" of Arrow, but you have to buy several dozen to get that price.) This is the reason why we need services like Tindie and Kickstarter, as everything in the electronics industry operates this way, making it prohibitively expensive to make only a couple of anything.

I'm well aware of how this all works, but when I went to hunt down some 0402 caps and resistors this morning, I found the bulk pricing on them very odd.

Their price for a single 0402 10nF cap is 10 cents. Seems a bit excessive, but you always get gouged for small quantities, and they are X7R (low variation over temperature) and a name brand. I only need maybe 5 caps, but I've learned that the smaller a component is, the more spares you should buy. So I should probably buy around 10, then. The bulk price when buying 10 or more drops to 1 cent each. So let me get this straight, buying 10 of these caps is exactly the same price as buying just 1. How is that possible?

I looked at the next tier up; when buying 25 or more, the price drops to 7/10 of a cent each, making buying the minimum for that tier a total of 18 cents, which would be less than the price of 2 single caps. The next tier up is 100 caps for less than 5/10 of a cent each, with the minimum purchase a grand total of 47 cents.

So I could buy just the 5 caps I need for 50 cents, or I could buy 100 caps for 3 cents less.
Makes perfect sense!