The tech helping shops – and Santa – deliver this Christmas from BBC NEWS

With December now upon us, bear a thought for just how busy Santa Claus will be on the night of Christmas Eve, and in the early hours of Christmas Day.

Every year he faces a logistics puzzle – how to deliver all the presents to all the children around the world who celebrate Christmas.

A study from a few years ago puts some figures on just how frantic his night is. Researchers at the University of Leicester calculated that there are some 715 million Christian boys and girls across the globe.

They then assumed an average of three children per household, which means that Father Christmas has to deliver to 238 million homes. This, in turn, requires Rudolf and the other reindeer to pull Santa’s sleigh at half the speed of light. That’s 336 billion mph (540 billion km/ph).

While Father Christmas is no doubt continuing his final preparations and limbering up, Christmas is, of course, also the busiest time of the year for retailers – none of us can sadly rely solely upon presents that are magically delivered via our chimneys.

And with online orders now accounting for more than a third of all Christmas season sales, retailers have to focus intently on their delivery systems.

In the future drones may mean that you can order all your Christmas presents on 24 December, and get them delivered that afternoon.

But in the meantime, Kate Lester says it is best to order your presents early. «Get your orders in soon, because it will be fatal to leave it until 21 December to do it this year. Because I think this December is going to be chaos [busy].»

Unless of course you leave it all for Father Christmas to handle.

Additional reporting by New Tech Economy series editor Will Smale.

Read the full article at: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59487935

 

 

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