I watch them cut it.. :)

I have to tell you about my Hancocks. My son found some fabric for a quilt I was going to make him. It was going to be accent fabric for the squares. I was going to buy a little extra because DS loved it. When they started to unroll it there was a flawed section (less than a quarter yard. ) She asked if I still wanted it and I said OK. I can cut around the flaws. She hadn't cut my two yards off yet. She then unrolled the rest of the bolt ( about 3/4 of a yard more than she was going to cut for me ) and gave me the extra with no charge. What a nice thing to do. I usually get a couple of inches over a yard every time I go there. I love that store.

My Joanns is really great about giving a little extra. But I make sure I get one of the cutters who has been there awhle and is a quilter too. I know most of the gals who have been there at least 5 yrs.

Karen R. I think its fabric.com.They use to advertise 37" yard. Don't know if they still do.

This is a difficult issue.

We're a small shop, and we try to be generous with the cuts, so that our customers never come up short.

But then we consistently wind up short, by about 3/4 yard per bolt. That's 5% of the merchandise, that we lose to "shrinkage".

For us, well, it's just the cost of business, and it's spent to keep our customers happy and coming back.

But for a big chain, that's publicly traded... I would imagine that the individual stores are under a lot of pressure from their accounting department, to NOT be losing 5% of their fabric to shrinkage. I would think that the shareholders would find that numberto be unacceptably high... especially if you multiply it by the number of yards they sell!

One of the ladies who works here at Favorite Fabrics, used to work at JoAnns, and she told me that from time to time each person who worked at the cutting table would be "audited" to make sure that they were not giving away any extra fabric.

Quiltmaker, that sounds like my mom, she never says anything and just goes away quietly unhappy.

Yup, fabric.com is great. Always have extra!

What boggles my mind is when I'm at Joanns, they've recently taken to squaring up the fabric 1st. So they lay out the fabric, cut off 1" (not always straight), then cut my fabric. And then I still have to take it home and straighten it with a rotary cutter, rather than a scissors. I'd really prefer they leave that 1", cut 37", knowing that I'll have to cut off 1", but I can do it myself. Rather than them "helping" me

The stores should understand that the average unhappy customer tells at least TWENTY people about their bad experience. That is a LOT of ill will!

This was my experience last time also. I stopped her and asked her to start measuring after that inch and I would trim it myself. She was really good about it, but I think that they can get in a lot of trouble from the higher ups.

I don't have these problems at Hancock's, but they also know that I will kindly ask them to recut it.