Brand Name vs. Generic
To a lot of people, the cost of a shirt seems like pure randomness. When you walk into your local Target or Sears, you can easily find T-shirts for under $4. But, as soon as you enter a fashionable shopping mall you find stores in there that are selling shirts for over $30 a piece. To add even more confusion to the whole thing, the painfully expensive shirts and the dirt-cheap shirts look and feel almost exactly the same.
Well, the truth is the shirts that you find at target and the shirts you find at a fashionable clothing apparel store are actually very similiar. It's sad, but the stores so many trendy people rely on for their everyday apparel are really just merchant organizations set out to deceive you, and then rip you off.
That's right, abercrombie and hot topic and all your other hip, modern stores are selling essentially the same shirts as Target or Sears. Obviously the shirts aren't excactly the same, as abercrombie tends to embed their logo on all their apparel items while Target tends to sell their shirts blank. However, the cost of printing a logo is very small, especially when you do it in large numbers.
Thus, if you every worry about wearing a "high quality shirt", rest assured that in many senses, there is no such thing. A simple, plain gildan cotton T will get you just as far as any abercrombie shirt. The price difference comes primarily from the fancy brand name (as someone wearing something from abercrombie will look more pretentious than someone wearing a generic hanes T-shirt). If you aren't so concerned with what apparel company your shirts are branded with, then save yourself some extra money by getting a cheap T-shirt instead of a expensive one from the mall. You aren't really losing out on quality, you're just not going to have a shirt with a fancy brand name.
Online is a great place to look for cheap shirts as well. Some brands that sell cheap yet high-quality shirts are Gildan, Hanes, Champion, and Jerzees. If you are looking for a more fashionable brand-name on your clothing, but want to be economical about it as well, American Apparel has pretty good prices too (as long as you look in the right places).
I list many popular custom shirt brands in my resources page. If you want further insight into picking which shirt you will be custom designing on, check out my guide on shirt picking.
I've found that ooShirts has offered me the cheapest, yet most reliable shirts at wholesale pricing. They're normally a custom T-shirt company (you can create a design and put it on your shirts), but if you need blank shirts, ooShirts provides them too at the best wholesale prices.
Now that you understand that a shirt's cost isn't dictated so much by its quality than its brand name, you can (hopefully) feel better about sporting your cheap $4 shirt from target.