I've been quilting since I was 17 years old - I'm 62 now. I've always had a budget. I've always had space issues (yes, I was quilting in my dorm room, in my apartments, etc). I was a single working parent for most of that time.
I've never been able to just go out and buy any thing without being aware of my budget. Not food, not clothing, and not fabric. I don't buy $500 purses, I buy $20 purses. Pretty much everything I buy is on sale, discounted, or at least a good buy. Think of it this way, if furniture (or fabric) can be sold at half price, they are still making money and you are just silly to pay full price. Never ever buy full price at Joann -- they don't expect you to, they expect you to wait until the sales, that's why it is priced the way it is.
Is real easy to sit back and be bitter over people who have more than we have or who have things we want. Real easy to sniff at something and say it's ugly. What I do as a quilter is I take those things other people have discarded and sniffed at and make something beautiful or at least warm and comfortable.
I may not have control over what is offered to me at the thrift stores, but I do have control over what I buy. I buy plenty of brand name fabrics -- yes, Moda, Benartex, Hoffman, whatever. I got a bag of gorgeous batiks and souvenirs of someone's trip to Indonesia for $7.99 for the entire bag. I got a bag of hand dyes for about the same -- ok, in that case I had to do a lot of work and effort (but low cost) because the dyes had not been fixed correctly. But otherwise, that stuff would sell at $20 per yard.
Before typing up this reply I looked at Craig's List in several random parts of the country. Every single one of them had fabric in the $1-3 or so dollar a yard range. There are discount houses and other things.