Originally Posted by LadybugPam
A store not making a living will close faster than the place making a profit. I did it for four years. Made enough to pay the bills - most of the time. But it ruined my retirement savings and I had to close my shop. I tried to make the cost of fabric, classes - everything reasonable in order to get the sales. It never happened and I had to close and go back to working.
Now I look at those places whose prices are up there (and I will shop there first every time) and they have staff to pay and a nice environment with plenty of product - they are thriving.
In essence, I had it backward.
I'm sorry for your experience and I also thank you for your perspective. There's a lot more to running a business than meets the eye!
Those of you using www.quiltshops.com: it's a great tool, and it represents MANY shops, not just one. So some of the variation in price could well be due to the fact that a fabric might be on sale in a particular store at the moment, and might not be if you go back next week.
When you're looking for a particular fabric, do you all know that you can do a search at www.google.com on the manufacturer's name (and/or collection name) plus the pattern number (if you know it), and that is also a nice easy way to find what you're looking for? Google provides a "shopping results" section, with pictures and prices listed right there. You can sort those results by price, too.
While it's not absolutely necessary to have the pattern number, it's faster, and more focused, if you do! Most of the fabric manufacturers have websites where you can easily look up pattern numbers for recent collections.