You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and Vixen,
Comet and Cupid and Donder and Blitzen.
But do you recall?
The most famous…trucker of all?
There’s a good reason why the Reindeer Union demanded they get credit for hauling Santa’s sleigh. Santa is nothing without those antlers leading the way, especially on that foggy night when Rudolph came to the rescue.
You know who else deserves credit and isn’t getting what they deserve?
American truckers!
Stack up American truckers during the holiday season against Santa’s Posse and truckers win every time. We know this because we pitted the data head-to-head. So with due respect to Rudolph and Co., it’s really the truckers that should go down in history.
Trucks carry about two-thirds of all freight in the US, about 108 billion tons annually. Roughly 18% of that, or 20 billion tons, gets hauled during the Christmas season. That’s nearly 40 trillion pounds of toys and accoutrement. That gets broken up across roughly thirty days among 3.6 million truck drivers. It’s a massive endeavor that rivals the rescue of Allied forces at Dunkirk…and it’s an annual affair.
This gigantic effort is what qualifies truckers as the real-life Santa Claus’ (or reindeer if we don’t mix metaphors) and the real heroes of the holiday season.
Compare this to Santa’s hauling operation. At first, it appears the Santa is more impressive, given that he covers the entire world and not just the USA. Look closer, however, and realize that Jolly Old Saint Nick uses an extra-dimensional sack to carry unlimited toys and that gives him a major advantage. He also somehow manages to make several billion stops over the course of one evening, which should raise a lot of suspicion about how he executes this plan. He has the additional advantage of routing software that optimizes his travel past from east to west, allowing him to go back in time by constantly crossing time zones.
So how on earth can we claim that truckers are better than Santa and his reindeer?
We must compare apples-to-apples, which means Santa’s hauling data must be compliance-adjusted.
Truckers are limited in how much freight they can haul, both by regulation and by the laws of physics. Santa has neither such constraint. Were he limited to a regular sack, or even a bunch of sacks, his load capacity would be significantly lower. We also know he claims exemption from FMCSA capacity limits because he flies his freight around the world, rather than drives, and he also claims exemption from airspace regulators because he claims to only uses sub-orbital space. That sounds fishy to us.
Truckers are subject to Hours of Service Rules, which limits how long truckers can be on duty which includes driving time and specifies number and length of rest periods to ensure that drivers stay awake and alert. Santa apparently has received some kind of HOS waiver, yet a Freedom of Information Act request on this matter has not revealed anything. This doesn’t even mention that truckers work throughout the year including the Christmas holiday season, while Lazy Kris Kringle works one day per year!
Truckers are limited by fuel efficiency in terms of diesel and vehicle capabilities. It’s one thing if Santa only got 6 miles to the gallon, but obviously he’s either feeding those reindeer something the elves cooked up, or he’s got an unlicensed, unauthorized, unregulated fusion-powered flux capacitor on his sleigh.
Finally, truckers spend a lot of time and effort ensuring the safety of their vehicles with patented solutions like Electronic Verified Inspection Reporting (EVIR). Does Santa or anyone else even bother to inspect that rickety old sleigh? We doubt it.
After adjusting for compliance through our proprietary method known as the Santa’s Solid Compliance Adjustment Metric (Santa SCAM), we find that truckers haul nearly 78 times more toys than Santa does during the holiday season. We swear that’s a precise number.
