>The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take shovels, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good shovel cost fifty dollars. But an affordable shovel, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of shovels Vimes always bought, and wore until the blade was so dull that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good shovels lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a shovel that'd still be keeping his sidewalk dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap shovels would have spent a hundred dollars on shovels in the same time and would still have snow in his driveway. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Shovels" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

You take a piece of aluminum flat bar stock, maybe about 1/8" thick and you put a nice bevel maybe 30 degrees on it with a dremel, a sander, or even use a rasp/file.

So its you kinda make a chisel edge blade that youre gonna bolt to the front of your snowshovel. It will take all the beating and is replace-able, regrind-able.

Its not that everyone's buying them, its that everyone who needs one is. They don't have ten thousand snow shovels at every location so its not hard to run out