let's say you hear that a storm is coming so you go to rite aid or cvs or somewhere to pick up some toilet paper, milk, bread, a shovel, and some salt; you spend about $20 total. the next morning you wake up and, as predicted, there's snow. you shovel your walkway and as you get ready to leave, your neighbor asks if he can borrow your shovel. you say, "no problem, have at the salt as well if you want."

you come back from work and your shovel is broken. what do you do?

what would you do as the borrower?

As the borrower you get the borrowee a new shovel. As the borrowee you just grin and bear it and make a mental note of what a shmo the guy is.

Well...me personally, I would probably just let it go, because the cost of a shovel is not worth having conflict with my neighbor. That said, it would tell me a lot about that person's character. At a minimum they need to leave a note explaining that they broke it and will replace it as soon as they get home from work or wherever.

I would go out and get a replacement shovel ASAP. The person is doing you a favor, how can someone not know that if "you break it you replace it"?

You mean...LENDER?

As the person borrowing it, I would feel bad and try to replace it. As the lender, there is not much you can do. My understanding is that this would be an exception to the usual "borrower is obligated to pay for replacement" halachah since the object was broken in the normal act of using it.

Is it possible the shovel is a piece of cr**p? If I was the borrower I would offer the lender cash since s/he might not want the exact same shovel.

Isn't "borrowee" more fun?

Actually, as the shovel is the thing being borrowed, I think it would be the "borrowee."

At least you had a shovel to begin with... remember WH on a snowy motza"sh?

If you didn't have a shovel you'd have to use your gloved or ungloved hands.

Yup. Been there, done that.

indeed...
or sharing one pair of gloves among 3 people?

the car was completely buried because the plow decided that the street should be clean on account of all the parked cars. that was whack, yo.

I promised that if I ever moved there I'd open a shovel gemach-- it may happen one of these days.

I always thought there should be a lawn mower gemach. It seems silly for everyone to own something that's used less than an hour a week.

You'll have to talk to bigtoe about that.