Now that all the drama is over in this thread, I feel like contributing.
First, you need to understand how WM buys fabric, indeed, how it buys everything. Whereas you and I go into a store (or if we're fabric buyers we go into a distributor or manufacturer,) and that dist or manufacturer tells us what the price will be. Unless we're buying a lot, or have really good relationships with the seller, we're going to pay the price they demand. If we as buyers are dumb enough to pay high prices for lower quality goods, and btw all of us have done it a few times, you'll see lower quality goods in your LQS. There is very little variation in first line goods pricing between good stuff and bad stuff to the LQS from the dists/manfct's.
When WM buys stuff, the sellers go to them, WM tells them the price point they'll buy at, and the seller decides if they can sell at that price or how they can change their manufacturing stream to meet that price point. Many sellers will sell at a loss to WM, at first, just to get in the door. This is how you occasionally find higher quality goods at WM, but with continued price pressure on the seller, they usually find a way to manufacture them more cheaply, or have specific lines manufactured at a lower cost (and subsequent lower quality) to meet WM's pricing demands.
This is a critical difference, and is the reason there is so much quality variation in the products you see at WM.
This is also the reason why you see a lot of goods appear in WM only to disappear after a short time. The seller took one shot with them and then decided they were tired of losing money or didn't want to lower their quality to meet WM's pricing demands.
We've also seen instances where WM has sold counterfeit goods, probably unintentionally.
The problem, as a fabric seller, that I have is that the brands that do a lot of business with WM tend to cheapen all their goods over time, and this has happened with several manufacturers previously mentioned in this thread. If you go to a buyers market, you'll see very little activity around their booths, because most of the small shop owners prefer not to carry these brands.
So, if you see a genuine fabric that's the same in WM as in the LQS, it will indeed be the same fabric, although it may be an older, closeout fabric. Same thing with online stores that specialize in closeouts.
But the other side of this is you probably won't find many of the fabrics that WM buys a lot of (names deleted to protect ME) in LQS's. Most savvy LQS shop buyers tend to stay away from these and some others because they (like us) have been burned by these in the past. We see a lot of these fabrics only on paper before they're released, then when we get the final product, they're just junk and we're forced to either close them out or donate them for charity quilts. I know there are several manufacturers products I won't even consider anymore because I can't trust what I'm going to get from them.
The bottom line for the retail buyer is to examine carefully what you're getting, no matter where you buy it. And if you buy something online that is sub-par when you receive it (assuming you didn't get it at a really low closeout price), don't be afraid to send it back and state to the seller why you're sending it back. The higher end online stores are like the high-end quilt shops. They don't want to sell junk.