MistyMarie,
I've never ordered from Hancock's of Paducah myself, but I can think of a couple of ways that a fabric can appear to be "in stock" on a website, but actually out of stock.
First... most websites are not synchronized, in real time, with what's actually in inventory. It's typical for the website inventory to be updated once a day (probably at night). If a webstore also has walk-in customers, or takes orders by phone, then as soon as they make a walk-in or phone sale, then they're going to have less inventory than what their website thinks they do.
Also... we all know that sadly, you can have a brand new, full bolt of fabric, and when you start to unroll it, there's a repeating flaw that goes through several yards, and guess what that does to your inventory amount? Since you're not going to sell those flawed yards, you actually have fewer yards available than what you thought. So you have to adjust the quantity on hand to reflect what is actually salable (sellable?) but that's not going to happen instantaneously.
My guess is that for whatever reason, Hancocks of Paducah came up short on the fabric, went to reorder it, and then found out much later that the fabric wasn't available. Most likely the manufacturer decided not to reprint it. And the manufacturers don't communicate well with their customers and/or distributors, in that if they run out of a fabric, they don't bother to take the time to tell their customer or distributor that the fabric isn't going to be coming after all, they just don't ship it. And so the quilt shop doesn't have a clue that this fabric they've been patiently waiting for is unavailable, until the order becomes overdue and they wind up nagging their supplier about it. We spend several hours a week doing this nagging process, so that we can let our customers know ASAP if a fabric turns out to be unavailable. Any of us wearing this "nagging" hat get the job title Procurement Expedition SpecialisT. PEST, for short.
Hope these insights are of some help. I'm sure that Hancocks didn't intend for it to turn out the way it did.
Oh - and by the way - a quilt shop doesn't know that a fabric has gone out of print until they try to order more... and can't get it! The best a shop can do is make a guess, as to whether a fabric is from a collection that's old enough that it's unlikely there's more available. It's still a guess, though, as sometimes a fabric will be already all sold out by the time the manufacturer receives it from the overseas mill.