I am sure that many of us have wondered what it would take, logistics and resources-wise, for Saint Nick to deliver gifts to children all around the world in one night. Many of us have probably tried to calculate it around this time of year, perhaps at a bar or holiday party.
We may have even divided the tasks with one person taking notes on a cocktail napkin and another volunteer googling the necessary information…until we scrapped the task, ordered another round and toasted the jolly old elf.
For any of us who may have wondered the same in a clearer-headed mindset, you will find this entry interesting. The other night, en route to my niece’s and nephew’s holiday pageant at their school, I heard this introduction on NPR:
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST: It's Christmastime and kids everywhere are writing letters to Santa Claus. One particular letter got us thinking. It's from Lucy Drummond(ph), daughter of the senior national editor here at NPR News, Steve Drummond
LUCY DRUMMOND: (Reading) Dear Santa, I hope you and Mrs. Claus are well. I think you are so kind but I have one question: How do you do it? Oh, by the way, you have a good sense of sight. Love, Lucy.
SIEGEL: How, indeed. How does Santa deliver presents to hundreds of thousands of children in a single night?
Well, as a public service to children everywhere, whoever wondered about this same question, Chana Joffe-Walt of NPR's Planet Money tried to find an answer.
“Huh. This will be interesting,” I thought. The following is the summary from the NPR
website[1]:
There are 760 million Christian children in the world, according to the Pew Research Center. Suppose Santa delivers one gift to each child. What kind of delivery workforce would Santa need?
We couldn't get an interview
with Santa. But we did get Paul Tronsor from FedEx and Mike Mangeot from UPS. They helped us go through the numbers.
Here are just a few of the positions Santa would need to fill to pull off Christmas:
- 46 international distribution centers, to allow Santa to reload as he crosses the globe. That means 400,000 workers for loading presents onto Santa's sleigh.
- 60,000 workers to develop optimized flight plans and communicate with the FAA, secure flyover rights, etc.
- 7,000 people monitoring demand and tweaking his route in real time.
- 100 meteorologists to make sure Santa doesn't fly into a blizzard.
- 40,000 people to help Santa clear customs.
To give you a sense of how big that team is, that's 40 times the number of employees at FedEx:
FedEx: 300,000 employees
Santa: 12 million employees
…This is what the whole
workforce looks like:
- 40,000 Elves deal with customs issues
- 67,100 Elves to calculate the best route for the sleigh and monitor the weather
- 152,000 Elves figure out how to properly load all of the presents onto the sleigh
- 180,000 Elves fly the presents to Santa’s distribution centers
- 400,000 Elves to work in Santa’s distribution centers
- 500,000 Elves work in Human (Elf) Resources, Accounting and other administrative departments
- 3,360,000 Elves drive the gifts to Santa’s distribution centers
- 7,300,900 Elves are on General Assignment
That’s a lot. And that is simply the elfpower Santa would require. No, we probably never would have gotten that far with our cocktail napkins, the google app on our mobile phones and our collective quafside calculations.
Those numbers are astonishing,
but it was Chana Joffe-Walt’s closing comments with Mssr.s Tronsor and Mangeot that
made me, and probably many of us listening, smile[2]:
JOFFE-WALT: So, Santa Inc. is 12 million employees
TRONSOR: Santa Inc. is 12 million. It is massive. I don’t know of any company that has the number of employees that Santa does.
JOFFE-WALT: These two guys, with FedEx and UPS, can look at their own businesses and figure out a lot about Santa’s operation. But Santa does have certain trade secrets that are his alone. For Mike, with UPS, the biggest question he has about Santa’s operations is that sleigh. Not only does it have to move fast, delivering almost 9,000 presents per second, but it’s also carrying a huge amount of weight.
MANGEOT: Santa’s sled has to be absolutely ginormous. If you assume conservatively that each of those 760 million children get a present that weighs one pound, that’s 760 million pounds, which would take 295 747 aircraft to haul. Interestingly, that’s about 50 more 747’s than exists in the entire world. So that’s – these reindeer are doing something really impressive on Christmas Night.
JOFFE-WALT: In the end, Mike and Paul both say they believe that with 12 million people, about $10 billion and lots of technology, Santa’s task does seem feasible. The remaining questions they have, they just chalk up to Santa’s main competitive advantage: Magic.
[1] Glass, I. (Executive Producer). (2012, December 19). This American Life. New York, NY: National Public Radio. Retrieved from: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/12/19/167570321/without-magic-santa-would-need-12-million-employees
[2] Glass, I. (Executive Producer). (2012, December 19). This American Life. New York, NY: National Public Radio. Retrieved from: http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=167570321
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