Ebay's Red Scare

Right now, the best “buy it now” deal I can find on ebay for a Z-Man/Evergreen Jack Hammer in the Fire Craw color is $30, with free shipping. If you want to buy four of them, one seller has them for $120 or best offer, plus $5 in shipping.

This is not the first time that lure freaks have been willing to pay substantial amounts over retail for lures that are still in production or hard-to-find. For example, when the Pro Blue colored Megabass Vision 110 first became a phenomenon over here, those $20 jerkbaits were consistently selling for over a hundred clams. Hell, it’s not even the first time a product currently sold by Z-Man has tripped this particular trigger – when the Chatterbait first produced by Rad Lures (and now by Z-Man) first came out in the mid-2000s, they too were selling for multiples of their listed price.

There’s a difference, though. Even if you could get a 110 in a color other than Pro Blue back in the day for less money, you couldn’t paint over it and produce the same semi- transparent finish. If you were unable to get an original Chatterbait back in 2006, the market had yet to be flooded with copycats. There were no substitutes.

There’s no question that the Jack Hammer is a top producer that catches a lot of fish, arguably more than any of its competitors. I know plenty of tour-level pros sponsored by other companies who continue to pay out-of-pocket for Jack Hammers of their own. Nevertheless, even if you can’t get a Fire Craw Jack Hammer at its retail price anywhere right now, plenty of other colors are available. You can get one with the same colored blade and a different colored skirt and just swap out the skirt to one in the Fire Craw pattern for less than a buck. Or take spray paint to the blade and head to make them the “right” shade.

I’ve succumbed to plenty of tackle-based market hysteria in the past, and I’ve spent a fair amount of hard-earned cash on Jack Hammers, but in this case the combination of those two things just doesn’t make sense.