How Santa Can Be Most Productive

Santa will consume close to 70 billion calories if, as expected, he nibbles on a cookie and gulps a glass of milk at each of his 396 million (or so) stops.

But there is much more.

Santa’s Delivery Schedule

Describing Santa’s Christmas Eve deliveries, we can ask who, where, and what.

Defining a child as anyone 14 or younger, they have to be Christian (and good?). Then, it gets trickier. After all some Christians don’t observe Christmas on December 25 or at all. But giving ourselves lots of statistical leeway, we can say that Santa will need to visit between 500 million and 900 million children. Then though, if we assume an average of 2.5 children in each home, the number of stops shrinks to as few as 132 million homes. (Since some say it could be as many as the 396 million homes, we used that for our cookie calculations.)

While the U.S., with its large high density Christian population will keep Santa pretty busy, Monaco is a relatively easy stop because its 5,280 kids live near each other:

Of course, Santa has to map an optimal route. If he follows NORAD’s path, having begun at the International Date Line and then traveling west, his first stops are at New Zealand and Australia:

Visiting only 100 million households, Santa would have to make close to 1,000 visits a second. And, even if he were to give each child a Rubik’s Cube, his load would weigh as much as the Titanic (50,000 tons).

Our Bottom Line: Productivity

Considering productivity, we have to look at land, labor, and capital. For Santa, the land is the globe, the labor is he and his elves, while the capital is the sled and reindeer. One routing firm suggests he can be even more efficient by reducing his fuel needs down to 2,845 pounds of carrots for the reindeer. They also suggest he might deliver the heaviest gifts first to lighten the sleigh and increase his speed.

Somewhat less amazing than Santa, UPS and other delivery companies have a gargantuan task. Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, UPS, expects to deliver 750 million to 800 million packages. In the past, for labor, they’ve had to hire 100,000 extra employees. Furthermore, their capital depends on a system called ORION to optimize their delivery routes. For a typical 120 stop route, Orion considers new pickup requests, traffic jams, road closures. But, to be most productive, they avoid lefthand turns.

My sources and more: Today’s post is an updated version of what we’ve said about Santa in the past. This year, for new facts, I used Google’s AI, the current NORAD link. and Paragon’s routing suggestions. Of course all of the Santa numbers are wild estimates but still, they convey his massive task.