How Much Would it Cost to be Santa ?

Christmas is an expensive season and no one can deny that, but how much does a person really spend during Christmas? It’s a hard question to answer, as many of us don’t know for sure how much we spend during the year. This way, calculating how much we are actually spending during Christmas is a real challenge.

A social experiment on Christmas spending revealed only 16% of consumers and shoppers could remember just how much they had spent not two minutes before. In less than five minutes, more than 90 percent of people just forgot the sum of money!

But what if there was a single Santa Claus in the whole world and has to bring presents for every single child,what would be the total cost for this process.

1. Number of children in the world.(Aged 0–17 years)

The total number of children of aged 0–17 years in the world are about 32.8%,giving us a total of 2.43 billion children.

Total number of children in the globe.

2. Production of toys.

To produce a toy for each child in the world, we must first assign a budget. One McDonald’s Happy Meal toy cost 43 cents to produce, so we can comfortably assume $10 budget per child to cover manufacturing, packaging and wrapping paper and producing a nice toy for each child.

The total cost to manufacture a single, packed and wrapped toy for each child would be $24.3 billion!

In order to ship the toys, we need to know the volume and weight. We will assume a weight of 2 kg per child and volume of 0.01 m 3. In total then, we need to ship 4.86 billion kg with a volume of 48.6 m 3.

3. Manufacturing headquarters.

Although Santa lives in the North Pole (or Finland, or Alaska depending on who you ask), setting up the required manufacturing operation in these locations isn’t sensible.

Therefore the most sensible location for a modern headquarters would be china, specifically Shenzhen. This would be our origin for all shipping calculations.

4. Shipping the toys.

As much as you might want to take to the skies on your reindeer powered by sleigh, becoming Santa Claus will unfortunately mean a more realistic approach.

This means you’ll need to ship the toys to the world’s children, and there’s only two ways of doing that -by air or by road and ocean.

By air isn’t possible, as there simply isn’t enough planes available. Modern cargo aircraft range in capacity from around 39,780 kg to 134,200 kg. If we were to take the average of 80,000 kg per plane, we would need 60,750 long haul flights, plus the same again in short haul flights. The world has approximately 20,000 civilian aircraft and 20,000 military aircraft, most of which are not capable of long-haul flights.

This mean you’ll need to ship everything by ocean and road, which (luckily) is the most cost-effective option. A standard 40- foot shipping container can take about 6,000 presents meaning we’ll need 405,000 containers for 4.86 billion kg with a volume of 48.6 m 3.

The world’s largest container ships can carry about 9,000 containers, so we’ll only need 45 ships to carry all the presents.

North America

Hong Kong to Los Angeles $1,400 x 31,667= $44.3 million.

Europe and Russia

Hong Kong to Rotterdam $750 x 48,500= $36.4 million.

Asia

Hong Kong to Shanghai $400 x 507,167= $39.5 million.

South America

Hong Kong to Panama $1,450 x 23,167= $33.6 million.

Africa

Hong Kong to Egypt $625 x 66,500= $41.6 million.

India

Hong Kong to Mumbai $600 x 68,500= $41.1 million.

The presents will then need to be transported by road to their end destinations. The only way to work this out is to take an average distance — in this case, we’ll use 3,853 km (about the distance from California to Philadelphia ).This would cost around 1,100 per container in the USA, so using this as the overall cost we get a total of $446 million.

5. Rooms and board for your Elves.

Once Christmas is over, you’ll need to relocate your elves back to the North Pole or Alaska, where presumably they’ll undergo intensive product development, prototyping and research for next Christmas, as well as welcoming visitors to your year-round Christmas wonderland.

Let’s assume you have a full- time workforce of around 50,000 elves, Using the average rent in Alaska of $1,050 for a two bedroom apartment, that’s $2.6 million per month, or $31.5 for the year.

As for the food, the average cost for a family of four is $122 per week, which works out to $1.5 million per week, or $18.3 million for the year.

Total food and board costs= $49.8 million.

6. Other costs.

Health insurance for elves. You want to be a good employer, and if we’re assuming the elves live in Alaska cost of the year, you will need to provide them with adequate health insurance. The average annual health insurance cost per person in Alaska is $5,112.

Total health insurance cost= $255.6 million.

The suit. You will, without question, need a high quality Santa suit, and you’ll want at least ten of them to ensure there’s always one available (even when some are being dry cleaned). A high-quality, custom-made Santa suit can easily cost $1,000, so you’ll be looking at ten times that cost at a minimum. Suit cost per Elve=$10,000.