That's exactly my point.
$27 chips at $6 each, you can see the margin is big if the chips are costing them a few cents each maximum, but jelly-bean logic chips are only a few cents each new anyway, so there's no visible margin.
The ones bd mentioned, 74HC595, can be had even in modest quantities for around $0.20 each, so you'd have to scam a crap-ton of people to make a worthwhile profit there.
The weird drifty behaviour of that 4503 has me scratching my head and shrugging my shoulders. I know Specmaster has cleaned the board thoroughly; he had to as the old memory battery had shit all over it.
Normally when you get odd behaviour on the ohms range it's something like the movs have been tickled and they're out of spec, but he's checked that too, so iono
I think it's a case of someone goes to a crap market in Shenzhen to stock up on 595's for their aliexpress / ebay store and hits the lowest bidder. The lowest bidder is a guy with a crate of rejected parts and has relabelled them. The buyer doesn't give a fuck as they look the part, he's got 20 different store fronts, 80% of people don't complain or just chuck it away or doesn't know if it works or not either way so he's up money even if he sells 50k shite parts.
.
"Statistical capitalism" at it's best.
Actually I should write a Medium post or some old shit on statistical capitalism as I just invented that phrase
Edit: also the resellers don't know what the fuck they are selling most of the time. In with your NanoVNAs are sex toys, dog uniforms, ICs, kitchen gadgets that cut your fingers off, death lasers, all sorts.