Santa Needs Self Storage!

Santa’s Workshop at the North Pole has plenty of room for his elves to make all toys for all 1.9 billion children who live in the world.

But storage space? Eh, North Pole leaves a little to be desired when it comes to storage.

2986-01CEA

Once the elves construct all of these toys, Santa doesn’t have much space to keep them. He needs a practical place to store all of these days between the time they’re made and the time he departs on his sleigh the night of Christmas Eve.

Santa_in_Sleigh

A simple calculation shows how much space Santa will need to lease at the self-storage facility located nearest to the North Pole. (Santa might need to consult the Yellow Pages for Greenland to locate the best facility.)

Assuming each toy is the size of a shoebox, and there are 1.9 billion children on Earth, then Santa needs about 608 million cubic feet of storage space. How’d we get to that calculation? At most self-storage facilities, the largest unit for rent measures 10 feet by 20 feet, equal to a total of 1,600 cubic feet. Each shoebox measures about 0.32 cubic feet. So, each 10×20 unit can hold 5,000 shoeboxes.

To put a fine point on it, Santa needs to get out his checkbook and pay for about 380,000 storage units.

(Santa may need to locate more than a few dozen storage facilities in the Yellow Pages.

jet

If the children of the world have their eyes set on larger Christmas toys this year, Santa will really need to lease a bunch of space. If the average size of each toy is the size of, let’s say, a Jet Ski, then he’ll need to rent out 238 million storage units.

xxx

For Santa’s sake, let’s hope that the hot toys on kids’ Christmas lists are a bit smaller. Perhaps the Apple iPhone X? If each child gets an iPhone X, then Santa only needs to rent about 12,000 storage units.

Now that’s a happy Santa!