I went into the local Radio Shack yesterday (and found, to my surprise, that it is no longer a Radio Shack,a lthough nothing much has changed) and discovered that most of the electronics bits are gone -- perhaps alundra has stumbled onto a similar situation (the local store, for example, did not have any of the normal spools of stranded wire, but had some solid ... and, of course, speaker wire).
Cheers.