How do you store ICs used in hobby electronics?
I store everything in the Mouser/Farnell/DigiKey bags they're delivered in. They have convenient readable labels, which is nice, especially when they contain tiny SOT-23 transistors which are quite impossible to identify and basically disappear into a black hole, or into the carpet floor, if you lose sight of them.
To find them, I just slip the bags in photo albums, and I have a spreadsheet that says on page X, there is this chip. It's extremely convenient. Plastic bags stacked in a container are unusable. But photo albums are great, and cheap.


Or I just make holes in the bags and put them in a binder.

If you have DIP ICs... a sheet of black foam fits nicely inside an A4 transparent plastic sleeve that goes into a ring binder. Or in a photo album. And if they fall off the black foam, they're still at the bottom of the plastic pocket.

For passives, I store them in a box that has the same width as the plastic bags laying vertical on their side. Ordered by value, with a cardboard separator between each E24 value. So if I need 12 kOhm, I just leaf through the stack of bags like a dictionary. It's very convenient.