I recently got an Expride and was unwrapping the plastic from it last night. What does this gold sticker indicate? Is it ultimately going to fall off and I just take it off now so that wear and sun fade doesn't affect the look of the rod? The white writing it actually on the rod and does not come off.

Don't sweat the small stuff..

Could be a sticker that indicates the rod passed a quality control inspection.

That’s golden ticket! You won!

17 minutes ago, waymont said:

That’s golden ticket! You won!

It's not so much something silly like that. I just wanted to ask other Expride owners if their 1-piece American market Expride rods came with that on it or not. Yes I would like to know what that signifies but it is not a big deal. A Google search surprisingly was a complete blank. I normally remove all tags and stickers from items because they annoy me but the main thing is I am trying to figure out is it something of significance to where if I remove it if I want to sell it a year from now I could have made more had it still be on there or something like that. At initial glance it does not appears to just peel off easily so I just wanted more info before I proceeded one way or the other.

Not sure, but I peeled mine off and got the access sticky stuff off with warm water/soap. 

I just left the sticker on mine. Does the EVA have holes in the handle on yours? Anyways enjoy the new stick!

1 hour ago, thunderblack said:

I just left the sticker on mine. Does the EVA have holes in the handle on yours? Anyways enjoy the new stick!

It's not as bad as it looked in that photo. It looks like it may have been store or shipped with other items up against it and sort of "depressed" the foam a bit. I got it from a guy locally and it had all the tags and plastic wrapping on the rod for little more than a 100 bucks so obviously I could not pass it up and am tremendously happy with the deal!

Nice deal there! Anyone would have jumped on that. I'm sure you will like it.

Just to wrap this up I heard back from Shimano today with this response:

 

That is simply a date code for manufacturing. It tells us the month, year and factory the rod was made in. It is only for internal use should there be a QC issue with the rod.

 

That being said I think I will go ahead and take it off.

It's actually Shimano's proof of authenticity.  Taking it off or leaving it on is up to you. I strongly suspect either way it won't have any impact on the number of fish you catch!