Santa Claus is a loser !
Santa's in the poorhouse
He's earning millions in mall appearances, but that doesn't begin to cover all his expenses.
Posted by Kim Peterson on Thursday, December 17, 2009 1:32 PM
Ah, Santa, what a life.
The big guy gets to kick around all year, but come November he gets practically chained to the mall food court. And then there's that one night where he gets no sleep, of course.
So are six intense weeks of work enough to cover the carefree rest of the year? Bankrate.com did an analysis and found that no, even the millions of dollars that Santa pulls in every year don't make a dent in all his expenses.
Here's how Bankrate calculated Santa's net worth:
Mall duty: Even if Santa just earned the federal minimum wage of $6.55, he'd still make a pretty penny from his 10-hour photo appearances at malls across the country. Estimating his total hours worked at nearly 401,000, Bankrate estimates his total wage at $2,623,576.30.
But Santa doesn't accept minimum wage. After working out a deal to get about $8,000 from photographers in each of the nation's 1,000 biggest malls, Santa takes home about $8 million every season, Bankrate reports.
Special appearances: Santa tends to butter his bread with a few extra gigs. In fact, I saw him the other day on the sidewalk, waving a sign for a cell phone company.
Between that and convention and casino appearances, Santa would probably get another $224,000 a year.
OK, so we know Santa pulls in the cash. But how much does he have to spend? Let's go over his expenses:
Gifts: At an average cost of between $30 and $35 per present, Santa would need to spend $778 million to supply gifts to the estimated 24 million U.S. children through age 6 (at which point kids start having second thoughts about this whole Santa thing).
Insurance: Insuring all those gifts would amount to about 15% of their value, or $117 million, according to InsureMyTrip.com.
Payroll: One payroll expert estimated that Santa would need to pay his elves about $1,624 biweekly. If Santa employed 8,500 elves (that's how many seasonal workers Macy's hires for its Western division), he'd need to shell out about $35 million for payroll over a five-week period.
So if you put Santa's earnings against his expenses, he ends up owing about $931 million every year. And does Santa even pay taxes?
No wonder he keeps out of sight most of the time.
http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/top-stocks/blog.aspx?post=1479616...
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Time again ; merry Christmas and happy new year (Read 3,532 times)
