I really don't want to make any more comments, because I'm sure they are equally irrelevant. However, since I grew up in the town where Digi-Key is located and once dated the daughter of a bodega owner, I must proceed.

First, bodega and convenience store owners don't order smokes from Philip Morris, they get all their stuff from various distributors. The stores themselves are usually locked into one distributor for junk food/smokes and another for liquor. Depending on how low you go on the convenience store food chain, often times the "distributor" is just a guy with a truck. Thus I'm not sure a good online business could be made aggregating the various prices of cigarette distributors. A useful startup idea would be a location-based mobile app that would tell you which bodega nearest you carries the cheapest cigarettes. You could make it non-evil by selling ads for nicotine replacement therapy that you would have to click through before getting the price for a hardpack.

As far as Digi-Key goes, they aren't the biggest distributor of electronic components... maybe in the top 20, or maybe top 10. However,they probably ARE the biggest distributor that will sell small lots to hobbyists. They are also one of the major employers in a small town in a rural area that has had a flat economy for decades. The only other employer of note is the snowmobile factory. Most of the money in the area is made by landowners who are paid your tax dollars to not farm their land, or else grow sugarbeets, one of the least efficient ways of obtaining sugar. Since they would have had to pay the most, those same farmers voted against school improvement bonds every year I lived there...so I'm going to have to go with "evil" on stupid farm subsidies but now I'm really digressing...

I'm going to have to vote "not evil" for Digi-Key. They know they are competing on price and are doing what they can to avoid losing business. If sales go south, they have to lay people off. Most of the employees don't have anywhere else to go find work. From my limited personal experience, there isn't a CEO caste at Digi-Key with golden parachutes who all stay rich whether or not the company does well. If they lose business, everyone gets fucked. I'm guessing they are cockblocking Octopart out of fear. This sucks for Octopart and is inconvenient for people prototyping electronics, but is it evil?

EDIT: what's really evil is that unknown or expired link error!