Have you ever tried the plastic hotel key cards? Tbh those things are clutch for this exact deal. I was doing some trim work in an old farmhouse and the walls were so far out of whack that shims were splitting left and right on me. Grabbed a stack of old key cards out of the glove box, and ngl they slid in flat and held rock solid with no cracking. The best part is they don't swell up if the house gets damp like wood shims do.

I read a piece on a home repair blog about how steel prices went up and it trickled down to tool storage. The guy who wrote it said the same thing happened back in 2008 and then again in 2021. He said the boxes get hit harder than the tools because they use more raw metal. A lot of the big brands also run sales that are not real sales, they just mark it up first and then drop it back to where it was. Your garage sale guy was right, the sticker is just a starting point and you can almost always do better if you wait or haggle.