When buying pre-owned shirts for resale, here are points of wear and staining to look for.  Careful examination and evaluation of these wear points will help increase your profits and decrease returns.

Please bear in mind that these are the most common points where wear and staining occur.  You still need to examine the entire shirt before buying it.  People give or throw away shirts for many reasons.  You'll want to hope the shirt you're examining has been given away because the previous wearer doesn't fit in it anymore.  However, stains, rips, tears, and other damage can occur anywhere on a shirt.  These are just the most common areas.

COLLAR: Examine the entire collar, starting with the collar points.  Frayed collar points are the most conspicuous area of wear, and render a shirt unusable for business purposes.  Hard wear (i.e., a too-tight collar with friction generated by neck movement) can also cause the collar to fray around the neck itself.  In addition, dry cleaning (covered below) can cause the entire collar edge to wear prematurely.  Finally, "ring around the collar" is a frequent problem caused by heavy sweating and lack of timely washing and stain removal.  It's worst on pure white shirts.  It was the cause of one of my only two returns (somehow I missed it during the inspection process.)  Ring around the collar, unlike fraying, can sometimes be fixed by any number of stain treatments.

CUFFS: Cuffs are usually the first part of a shirt to wear out.  As with collar points, frayed cuffs mean a shirt you can't wear for business, or resell.  Check all the way around each cuff, and especially on the left cuff, where a men's watch will abrade it over time.  Also, like collars, cuffs can get stained inside by poor cleaning.

UNDERARMS: Just like with ring around the collar, sweating men will eventually cause unsightly yellow stains to form under their shirts' armpits.  Extremely difficult to remove once staining sets in.

FRONTS: Some men are messier than others.  The messy ones end up leaving much of their lunches on their shirtfronts, presenting interesting problems in stain removal.

THE PROBLEMS OF DRYCLEANING AND STARCHING: Many professional men send dress shirts out for drycleaning.  Why?  They don't know how to iron properly (or can't be bothered), and, well, wives are no longer expected to stay home cooking and cleaning all day.  This presents great opportunities for shirtmakers, but makes for short-lived shirts.  Drycleaning is an incredibly harsh process involving high heat and noxious chemicals.  It can cut the life of a dress shirt in half.  In combination with starching, it's doubly worse.  Starch, when cooked into a shirt, destroys the cotton fibers.  The bottom line is that dry cleaning tags are no guarantee of a used shirt with many wearings left on it.

That's why Nordstrom - who knows quality shirts - recommends home washing and simple steam ironing.  Your shirts won't stay as crisp, but they'll last longer.  If you must have a crisp shirt, my business partner's husband (a retired Marine colonel) recommends starching lightly, every other or every third ironing.