I use to work at the store mentioned years ago. And I dealt with some unbelievable stuff when it came to scheels rods and their "warranty". Scheels stands behind ALL of their warranty's when it comes to Scheels rods, but it's the guys who bring several rods back in a year or the guy who brings the rod in with half the cork handle missing, caked in mud, and says "yeah, set the hook into a fish and it snapped right below the first eye of the rod!"
Or my best experience, a guy brings in 2 telescopic handle Scheels outfitter 8'6" rods. Both of these rods are sheared off right above the first eye. He said "yeah, broke one on Saturday out cranking, and then snapped this one on sunday out cranking, not sure what the hell the deal is." No you idiot, you backed your boat in the garage when you got home Sunday night, with your rods in rod holder straight up, and broke them on the garage door. He was still sent out the door with 2 new rods. But he did get a little heckling. The warranty is for Manufacture defects, not being a "dumb-ass".
It's this type of abuse that caused all the warranty's to change with the Fenwicks. Before you could take a Fenwick rod in and they would swap it out no questions asked. Then Scheels would send the rods into Fenwick and get credit on them towards their next order. Well after so much of this abuse Fenwick said we're no longer going to reimburse you for it because only a very small portion of these broken rods are actually from a MANUFACTURE DEFECT, so the customer is going to have to send them in! So that's why you can no longer swap out fenwicks at Scheels and Wade can get by with it because he'll only have a hand full vs. hundreds from Scheels.