Where have all the caps gone?!

The past few weeks I've been doing a stock take at work. One of the things I need to replenish is low value caps between 1pF and 10pF.

You know the kind - Orange ceramic beads stood proud on 2 wires, usually 2.54mm or 5.08mm apart:

You know they could be mistake for an NTC. The reason I want these types is that they are good for bread boarding and prototyping - something that gets done a lot in a teaching lab.

So what's so hard about that?

Well recently I've been trying to find such caps of these values are I've constantly come up with results from the big suppliers (Farnell, RS, Rapid) of either out of stock, no longer manufactured, long lead time, coming in from elsewhere with a £15 delivery charge, or the wrong voltage (which also means they are 10x the price of the little orange ones).

So what's happening?! Are they being phased out? If so how are we supposed to supply lessons without either breaking the bank ordering high voltage values, or ordering without incurring stupid delivery charges?

What I want to know is:

• why are they now so hard to get hold of now?
• Are they being made redundant cos of lack of sales over SMD values?
• What's going to happen in teaching when they are finally phased out? you can't breadboard a 0603 cap easily!