The (premature) death of my Nordicas

After using them 21 times, my new Nordicas are history. 

At least my left one is. As I was riding the chairlift with my grandson, I noticed a hairline crack on the front of the shell of my left boot and it meant that it was out of order and good to be trashed. 

Having been in the boot business for a long time, starting in 1982, I knew these incident happened, often for no particular reasons. 

The problem is called “Environmental Stress Cracking” (ESC) and covers unexpected brittle failure of thermoplastic polymers. In fact, such stress cracking is defined as "an external or internal crack in a plastic caused by tensile stresses less than its short-term mechanical strength". 

Technical considerations aside, this puts me in a bad situation as I need to return the cracked shell to the retailer, that in turn will ship it to Nordica in New England and get a replacement shell back. 

This will take more than a month, and in the meantime, what am I supposed to do? A nice customer service dilemma. 

If you have suggestions, I’d love to hear them?