Hi everyone
What would be the best way to estimate the total number of people in USA/Canada that dress up as Santa Claus at Christmas? (Paid gigs only)
Is it fair to say that there is one Santa for every “x” number of people? If so, would it be as simple as finding out how many towns/cities on the continent have at least “x” number of inhabitants and doing the math?
What would be the threshold? 10,000 people?
The Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas claims a membership of 700, but this includes people who (1) sign up for membership in the organisation, and (2) actually have beards. The number of people who regularly dress up as a Santa in North America without meeting those two criteria is certainly far larger.
The Santa Claus Association of the Province of Quebec claims numbers of 40 permanent and 200 part-time Santas. Maybe you can extrapolate from that on the basis of Quebec’s population figure: The province has a population of 8.1 million, whereas the U.S. and Canada combined amount to 352.4 million (all Wiki figures). So extrapolating from the Quebec figures, assuming that the Santa-per-capita ratio is the same in Quebec as in the U.S. and Canada overall, gives you a total of about 1740 full-time and 8700 part-time Santas.
A bit of digging online says that there are about 1100 indoor shopping malls in the US. I would expect that most paid Santa gigs are at malls, and that most malls have a paid Santa, so that would probably be a decent estimate of the number of paid Santas. I expect that the order-of-magnitude difference from Schnitte’s second estimate is due to Santas working unpaid gigs, which are probably far more numerous (think of all of the organizations that have holiday parties with a visit from Santa).