How Santa and Amazon Are Similar

This week, Santa will deliver the most packages. Though not close to Santa’s totals, Amazon also stops at a whopping number of houses.

Santa and Amazon

Santa’s Deliveries

Santa might be visiting 376,200,000 children in 125,400,000 homes. Yes, the number of children aged 0-14 years in the world is in the vicinity of 2.2 billion. But, depending on their religion and who has been good, Santa’s visits shrink to 19% of the total or just 376,200,000 children. Next, if we assume 3 children per household, we could be talking about approximately 125 million stops.

Then, with all of his visits covering slightly more than 510 million kilometers, Santa’s sleigh has to travel at 4,570 kilometers a second–13,000 times the speed of sound. Moving quickly, Santa’s sleigh meets such huge air resistance that, at the worst, he could burst into flame. At best, he is creating countless sonic booms.

At each stop, Santa parks his sleigh and looks for the right gifts. Then he climbs off the sleigh, down the chimney and grabs his snacks (but not in Germany where the children leave a note). After filling the stockings, he comes up again, and rushes to his next stop. At approximately 4 million homes an hour, he has to visit 1.12 homes every millisecond from 5 p.m. to midnight. Assuming the sleigh moves from east to west (and including time zones in our calculations), Santa completes his deliveries in 31 hours.

Amazon’s Deliveries

Making 170 to 190 stops, a typical Amazon driver in the Boston area, delivers 250 to 300 packages during one day. They start the day with the “load out.” Translated, that just means transferring packages from the delivery station into a van. Then, once the totes and oversized packages are loaded, they follow the suggested (mandated?) route. If the driver is in a custom electric delivery van, then a tablet screen near the driver has routing and package information. In addition, the driver takes a picture of every delivered package.

Close to 5 billion a year, the numbers are huge:

Updating the above statistics, CapitalOne Shopping reports that the total for 2023 was close to 5.9 billion. At 16.16 million a day, the delivery rate is 673,500 packages an hour.

Our Bottom Line: Transportation Infrastructure

All deliveries, whether from Amazon, UPS, FedEx, or the US Postal Service, depend on the U.S. transportation infrastructure. At first composed of rough roads and waterways when Ben Franklin ran the USPS, it gradually acquired canals and then railroads. Now, whether it’s a sleigh or a drone, air transit provides the last links.

My sources and more: In the past, our Santa stats have depended on different sources like a More or Less podcast that I still recommend. This year, though, we are using a recent ClickSend. blog post (that I have not confirmed for accuracy) and a Washington Post column from 2019. As for Amazon, there was a slew of possibilities that included this “day in the life of…” From there, looking for something less rosy, I found this Business Insider description of the pressure. Meanwhile CapitalOne had the Amazon numbers update.

Also, please note that several of today’s sentences were in last year’s Santa post.