I'd never go back to a store that tears. I bought some fabric online one time that had been torn (didn't know it till I got it).....It was crooked. I tried like the devil to get it to straighten up. It didn't -- I lost about 1/8th yard.....
My mother gave me a quilt she'd started -- a log cabin. She'd torn the strips. The strips had stripes in some of them...the fabric did NOT stay on the "grain" -- or the design wasn't on the grain. So -- had she not torn it, she could have adjusted and had her stripes show up straight on the quilt.....(is that as clear as mud????)