Ugly Stik Carbon

“Yes, absolutely The thing is that we don't consider inflation when we look at stuff, we see something priced 50$ in 1980, and we look at stuff that would be priced 50$ today, but in truth? 50$ worth of 1980 money, is actually worth about 200$ today Once you get into that mindset you will see things improved and for the better, we overall have much more advanced materials today that allow for much higher sensitivy and performance overall, as well as much more durable stuff on the higher end of things, we have much more advanced machining for stuff like gears, advanced carbon composites on rods and many others, all while a lot of the cost on stuff has simply gone down as it gets easier to produce and a lot of new features simply were not invented yet, like DC reels Speeed actually has a great video comparing a bunch of assorted items from the 1970s vs stuff you get today and yeah, you get pretty much the same results as I mentioned What you need to consider as well is a lot of brands (like Abu Garcia) have been reducing costs on their reels to keep up with inflation, which means the quality has significantly gone down to not allow for the price to be corrected for inflation. But their higher end reels are still produced to the same standards or higher as they did years ago, you just have to pay the premium for that, the difference is a budget section of things just didn't really I've caught fish with handlines and with 400$ combos, everyone knows you can catch fish on anything, but I'd take a nice modern carbon rod and a curado over a bamboo or glass fiber pole + a vintage spinning reel any day of the week”