Skip to content
AccountCart
AccountCart

Menu

Cart

Loading your cart…

Join the dark side

The plastic ice scraper has held the windscreen for fifty years, and it is still recruiting. There is no form, no fee and no ceremony. Most people join at a petrol station, in February, without noticing.

A stick figure standing on a heap of dead black ice scrapers, one broken scraper held up in one hand. An arrow points at the figure, labelled in red: Jerry. Also, you.
Jerry, and everything Jerry has bought.

This is Jerry.

Jerry is not a person. Jerry is a way of getting through winter: one scraper a season, bought in a hurry, snapped by the first cold morning that mattered.

None of it was ever decided, and that is the pitch of this side of the war rather than an accident of it. The plastic scraper asks nothing of you, remembers nothing about you, and will be replaced by an identical one before the month is out.

Scraper per winter
1
Colours chosen
0
Decisions made
0
Month it snaps
February

Before you join, three questions.

  • 01

    Do you want to be lame?

    Membership is instant. Reach into the bin by the till, hand over three dollars, and the moulded wedge is yours — the same shape it has been since 1974, because nobody who draws one has ever had to use one at 6 a.m. Nobody will ask you about it. Nobody has ever asked anybody about it.

  • 02

    Do you want to be boring?

    Then take the one object in the car that arrives with nothing to decide. No length, no finish, no colour, no edge worth an argument. The most interesting thing that will ever happen to it is the morning it lets go.

  • 03

    Do you want to be unfun?

    Then keep February: the crack at the neck of the handle, the swearing, the drive back to the petrol station in the dark, a fresh one on the passenger seat by Tuesday. Every winter, for as long as you drive.

Three yeses and you are already a member. Joining costs nothing and takes no time at all — it is the leaving that needs a hammer.

If this is you, do not buy a Ski Scraper.

The last ice scraper you should have to buy. It does not snap at the neck, the blade comes off and goes back on, and February stops being an event. There would be nothing left to complain about in the car park.

I am Jerry.

Then nothing is required of you. Membership is automatic, it renews itself every time a handle goes, and your next scraper is already in a bin by a till somewhere, waiting for the cold.

Sign me up
There is no list. No card, no email, no meeting, nothing to sign and nothing in the post. You joined at a till in February, and the membership has been renewing itself ever since.

Break your ice scraper.

The $5 amnestyFootnote — the offer's conditions is the way out, and it is open all season: break the one you already own, on camera, and a code comes back.

  1. 01

    Break your old one

    On camera. The cracked handle, the worn edge, the one that has been under the passenger seat since 2021. It has served its time.

  2. 02

    Send us the video

    Mail it to amnesty@skiscraper.example. We are not precious about the production values, and the address you send it from is the address the code comes back to. Sending it hands us the right to use it — the third condition below says exactly what that covers.

  3. 03

    Get $5 off

    We send back a code. It works on anything in the store, once, and it does not expire while the season lasts.

Before you break anything

Break it outdoors, on the ground, with eye protection on and nobody standing near you. Polypropylene does not bend first — it lets go all at once, and the pieces travel.

The conditions are printed in full at the foot of this page: one code per person, the age you have to be, and what sending us a video gives us the right to do with it afterwards. The last of those is the one to read before you point a camera at anything.

Dispose of the remains responsibly — broken polypropylene is recyclable in most municipal streams, which is more than can be said for its design. The offer's conditions are in the fine print below; the terms of sale govern the order you spend the code on.

Get $5 off: break an ice scraper you already own, on camera, and mail the video to amnesty@skiscraper.example. We reply with a code.

  • One code per person. It is worth $5 off a single order, it cannot be spent alongside another code or exchanged for cash, and it lasts the season it was issued in.
  • A scraper bought in order to be broken does not count, and neither does one that was never yours.
  • Sending us the video gives us the right to use it. That is a permanent, worldwide, unpaid permission to copy it, cut it, subtitle it, publish it anywhere and use it for any purpose we choose — advertising, packaging and this shop included, and including as material for training machine-learning models. We can pass that permission on to the people who work with us. You go on owning the video and can do whatever you like with it yourself, but you cannot ask us to stop once you have sent it.
  • Send only a video you filmed yourself. Everybody who can be recognised in it has to have agreed to the line above before it reaches us, and if you are the one holding the camera, that includes whoever is in front of it.

Break it outdoors, on the ground, with eye protection on and nobody standing near you. Polypropylene does not bend first — it lets go all at once, and the pieces travel.