You can understand why when I was at the last gun show, I jumped on a bag of 100 .30-30's for $12.00. The seller offered to let me just pick out the head stamps I wanted, for 12¢ a piece. I just took the bag. Oh, and he had polished the brass, and 6 of the W-W sticks turned out to be primed. I'll make .357 Herretts out of the R-P brass to go with the first ones I formed. I annealed the R-P brass on Monday.
What I regret is when my Dad was the volunteer range custodian at his local range and picked up everything that was brass. Sure we saved some, but for awhile brass brought $2.50/lb. One truck load I hauled for him had 1,450 lbs. of cartridge brass. It take about 2,100 .223 to fill a 5 gallon plastic bucket. I do not know how many .22 lr but he had a few buckets of those too!
He was an old man, with time on his hands and dementia in his future. He'd pick up the 9m/m brass the Sheriff's Deputies were shooting, dig the empty boxes out of the burn barrels and re-box it for me. I just needed a couple of empty 5 gallon buckets for saw dust the other day and dug two out of the shed. There in his shaky script with a Magic Marker were two, one marked .30-06, and one marked .270. There used to be that much discarded brass back then. By the time Obama was elected, Dad was really slowing down and then there was no brass to pickup anymore other than the .22 lr and the steel case crap.