We are all familiar with the supply chain and logistics issues that accompanied the pandemic, but few businesses have endured as much as Santa Claus. As you know, business is highly seasonal, with every customer – even those who purport to not believe in him – demanding product delivery on one particular day of the year. This has traditionally not been an issue, despite the rather unorthodox combination of long-distance reindeer transport and last mile chimney services.
What is not so well known is that the COVID lockdown rules struck the North Pole factories particularly hard. Governments worldwide determined that the services provided by the North Pole were non-essential, and as such, the elves were dispersed throughout the lands and expected to work remotely. Elves who had never been further from the pole than the traditional summer vacation spots on Baffin Island, well north of the Arctic Circle, were suddenly found wintering in popular snowbird areas from Florida to Baja California. In one particularly scandalous case, two were filmed while playing the steel drums moonlighting at a reggae club in Montego Bay.
And the logistics problem? Post-COVID, a substantial percentage of the elf workforce simply refused to return to the office and insist on working remotely, usually blurring their beachfront views on zoom calls so that they can pretend to be in Bangor, Maine, snowed in again as usual. Since the reindeer local union chapter refuses to work more than one day per year, private delivery services have been deployed to deliver the remote elf production to North Pole warehouses.
Traffic reports on northbound routes have been suppressed by the media and tech companies, but our Winnipeg based colleague Gary Warkentine of Exceed Analysis privately told us that his inside sources at the RCMP tell tales of two hundred mile backups of UPS and Fedex trucks on the normally lightly travelled highway north of Yellowknife. The NPASA (North Pole Advanced Spatial Analysis) team has chosen the locations of several hundred secret warehouses to serve as collection depots, but the problem remains severe. Bottlenecks remain, especially at the normally sleepy border crossings between Montana and Alberta which have been overwhelmed with middle of the night delivery truck crossings.
Meanwhile, back at the North Pole, the real estate prices have plummeted due to the high vacancy rates in the aftermath of the elf exodus. Commercial brokers have been especially hard hit, as utilization rates have cratered.
So, if your delivery is late, or you get coal, don’t be too quick to call customer service. Even if you do drag them off the beach in Key West, they probably won’t be overly sympathetic to your plight. So, send that elf on the shelf packing and be part of the solution, lest you get coal in your stocking this year.
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