SPECIAL DELIVERY
Christmas in 2019: Is that Santa Claus or just my delivery driver?
I magine t he t r adit i onal Santa Claus — red suit and hat, long white beard, bulging belly, sleigh and reindeer. Now forget that.
In 2019, Santa, or at least his helpers, is in a khaki outfit with work tennis shoes, rides through town in a truck filled with presents and has killer calf muscles.
“In a way, we are kind of the modern Santa ,” said FedEx delivery driver Mickey Stanley. “People will wait out on the front porch for you. They'll say, `Oh, we're so glad you're here, you've brought this or that.' They'll ask for a picture, and you'll say `Yeah, OK, but you've got to make it quick because I'm in a hurry to my next house!'”
In the last decade, online shopping has exploded, changing what it looks like to deliver Christmas.
For delivery drivers and shipping-store employees, this means no breaks from Thanksgiving to Christmas.
“Things have definitely changed ,” Stanley said. “Used to, it would be dead up until the 13th or 14th of December. ... Now, it stays busy all month long with e-commerce.”
Stanley, 49, has worked 21 Christmas seasons with FedEx in Oklahoma City. He's driven the same residential route for 15 years.
A typical day for Stanley starts at 4:30 a.m with quiet time to read his bible.
Then it's to work by about 6:15 a.m. to do the “stretch and flex” routine before lining up at the sorting conveyor belt where packages roll by. After loading his truck for more than an hour, it's off to his route.
It can be up to 160 stops throughout the day, and Stanley said some days he walks 20,000 steps during the holiday season.
So instead of milk, this Santa keeps an ice chest in his truck filled with water (and the occasional chocolate milk). In lieu of cookies, he fuels himself with the intermittent Fig Newton taken from a basket of treats left for him on a porch. And replacing Christmas carols is talk radio and sports shows
as he drives through the neighborhoods.
Package numbers will increase from 10,000 a day out of his facility to roughly 15,000, Stanley said. Some days reach 20,000. And his hours will balloon too, some days up to 12-hour shifts.
“You do have to stay on your toes,” he said. “This job makes it a little more difficult to love Christmas, but you still do love the season. People are happy and they want to do things for other people.”
Cindy Simpson, who manages the UPS Store at 3000 W Memorial, said some customers will be cranky, but mostly, Christmas brings an emotional boost.
She said it takes the entire year to get ready for the holiday, with seasonal help being hired as early as summer to handle the roughly 50% increase in customers.
“We' re Santa' s workshop—at least, that is how the staff view it to psychologically get themselves ready,” she said with a laugh.
Christmas is a happy time in the store, and the staff focuses on building relationships with customers.
One older woman was a regular at the store for years, shipping out her homemade baked goods all over the country and bringing treats for the staff.
“Well, last years he didn't show,” Simpson said. “But her daughter did. She had instructed her daughter to deliver presents through our store and to deliver us the same snacks. And it happened again this year.
“We' re not just shipping out stuff. We are shipping out things that are invaluable to people.”
Oklahoma's economy will also see a boost with an average increase of nearly 1,000 people employed in delivery jobs, according to data provided by the Oklahoma Employment Security Commission.
In various news releases, FedEx said it planned to hire 55,000 additional workers; UPS said it would hire 1 00,000; a nd Amazon said it would hire “tens of thousands.”
“We're ready to flex the UPS network to handle an increase of 60% over our normal daily volume,” said UPS spokesperson Kim Krebs. “Our customers can count on UPS for dependable service from dock to doorstep through the holiday season and beyond.”
For Stanley, being Santa for a few weeks every year lets him experience the Christmas spirit up close. But this Santa isn' t too much different from the rest of us.
“Last night, one of my daughters had a choir concert and one of them had an orchestra concert, so we had to divide and conquer. And we all have the same thing,” Stanley said. “We put in a lot of hours, and this absorbs a lot of our lives at Christmas time, but we still try to enjoy the time and live like everybody else.”