QKO

I don't know what you're buying, but all of the new fabrics we've ordered for the next 6 months are still 44/45" wide, except of course for batiks, which have been an inch or so narrower for years.

But the prices continue to rise, a result of the shortages of cotton, the cornering of the greige goods market by the Chinese, rising shipping costs, increasing demand, increasing wages in third world countries, etc.

Our wholesale prices have gone up, on average, by 50 cents a yard in the last year, and our shipping costs, to get the fabric in here, have gone up by about 10 cents a yard on average. The price increases for the next 6 months stuff coming are going up another 50 cents or so.

Most LQS's and online shops are being forced to raise prices or go out of business. One can't continue to lose money indefinitely. We try our best to hold down prices because we're trying to compete with big chain stores and big online entities like fabric.com (a subsidiary of Amazon) that have tremendous advantages in purchasing and shipping discounts, and also the big chain stores and their online divisions. When they finish running all the independents out of business, they'll be free to raise prices as much as they want to.

So basically, it turns out that many of us are running hobby businesses out here, if we didn't have other income we couldn't sell fabric. We certainly can't make a living at it.

With the US government drastically raising taxes on small businesses next year along with all the other price increases, look for thousands of LQS's and online shops to either raise prices, a lot, or go out of business next year or the year after, as well. And look for fabrics to increase in price exponentially starting in 2012 as the tax increases hit all levels of the supply chain.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the fact is, shoppers in the USA ain't seen nothing yet...