Lego Store!
The valley fair mall (Santa Clara, CA) now has a Lego Store.
Beyond having all of the random sets and other Lego paraphernalia, they have an entire wall covered in little bins. Each bin contains one type of brick in a single color. Not just your normal bricks, but specialty bricks like hinges, various wheels, doors, windows, flat pieces, bricks with the technic holes, and the like.
You grab either a small or a large plastic cup and proceed to stuff as many pieces of whatever variety you want into the cup. As long as the cap fits on top snugly, you can purchase a small cup of parts for $7 and a large cup for $13.
They also have little plastic bags that are totally full of gears, axels and joints, or the other kind of girders with holes for $12 or $9, depending on the bag.
Excellent. As a young Lego builder, I often remember being irritated that I was missing that one last gear or axel or holed piece, whatever, to complete my current masterpiece. A store like that would have likely consumed most of my allowance.
You can see a picture of the bins on this site (found via Google). 3rd picture down on the left. Cute kids, btw. Another accurate write up here. I like the “bins of doom” description.