[cflsystems]

If you have products which are no longer available for any reason you can:
1. leave them on site but remove purchase option - so they stay as catalog only mode an you will not lose indexing or being penalized for missing pages
2. Redirect to another page which is in some way relevant to the page in question. I think redirecting to home page for hundreds of links is not a good idea. If the link shows when people search for something and then you redirect to home page it changes user experience and changes what they were looking for. Google doesn't like this.
3. If above is not possible you can do 410 redirect which tells SE page is gone not just "not found". In this case it is more likely page was deleted on purpose and not coming back. Google will delete the index for the page faster as it will not try to re-crawl again, as with 404.