Summers Juana, host:
Among the teeth of vampires, giant balloons, streamers and shiny napkins, a festive shop throughout America – the city city. Well, Juggernaut is now bankrupt, turning off music and closing them all. Alina Selyukh of NPR has this memory.
Alina Selyukh, Byline: What came first – America’s obsession with Halloween or City Party?
(Soundbite of AD)
Unidentified Music Artist: (singing) This is a thriller.
Unidentified narrator: Halloween party city.
Steve Mandell: After my first year in business, I said, wow.
Selyukh: This is Steve Mandell that, in 1986, launched Party City with a single New Jersey store.
Mandell: I never, never, never expected Halloween to be such a thing.
Selyukh: And his original idea was to focus on party supplies-a shop with a birthday stop or holiday holidays.
Then: napkins and cups and tiles.
Selyukh: But the first year, he realized that the costumes were the gold mine.
Mandell: We actually expanded our original store to really accommodate Halloween in the proper way in the second year.
Selyukh: Soon, there were more shops, a franchise. At the time when then he left in 1999, Party City was a national chain. This was the era of category killers – a megastore that dominates some aspects of purchases, the roof of the toys ‘r’ and Barnes & Noble and, for parties, City Party.
Theresa Peverley: The first and only place we have shattered was the city of the Party. You went there.
Selyukh: Theresa Peverly, then with a budget of college students, equipped all her wedding reception in the backyard at City Party, buying so many ribbon to tie silver and its napkins.
Peverley: I think I was a little excited because I think I bought nine or 10 spools. Twenty -six years later, we still have some of these ribbon spools, and have tied them for children’s gifts and graduates. And it just makes me laugh and think with love for the City Party when I have to draw more strips.
Selyukh: When you ask people for memories of the city city, buyers remember significant milestones – a pension, a reunion sorority, the last day of their mother’s chemotherapy, their son’s 4th birthday in a pandemic blockage. A woman thinks again in the absence of miniature flags after the 9/11 attacks. A teacher describes a giant balloon bow that she will buy for a school event.
At Party City in Maryland, cashier Christina Marin remembers the first time someone gave her closed results of an ultrasound scan.
Christina Marin: I was the first person to know, like gender. It was really special.
Selyukh: They wanted a gender to discover the balloon.
Marin: I was nervous’ cause the balloons, they become really big, and sometimes the pop. And I didn’t want her to pop and the whole confett to come out (pH).
Selyukh: In fact, if you are looking for workers for party city memories, the balloons swim at the top.
Jonathan Darcangelo: Everyone on Saturdays and Sundays are balloon duty. You tie balloons pretty all day long.
Selyukh: Jonathan Darcangelo began as a shareholder in the late 1990s and left as a manager in 2003 after tieting strips to thousands of balloons.
Darcaangelo: Sometimes I laugh. I think my fingers can have a permanent curve in it from making all these balloons. Years later, I can still tie a balloon quite quickly, so I still have the technique down.
Selyukh: Darcangelo first got the work in high school. Many people did. Party’s teens employees gave stores a vibe income-you-you, with workers dressed in Halloween costumes, slamming to buyers poorly prepared to fill a dozen balloons in a two-door car.
Darcangelo: They didn’t understand, like, oh, well, I bought all these balloons, how will I take them home, you know?
Selyukh: Balloons and wigs and costumes, they are fun to buy personally, which protected the city’s city from online competition for a long time. In 2012, the chain was purchased by private capital and was charged with mass debt. This was manageable as sales increased, until they did.
Darcaangelo: Unfortunately, with retail online, simply – there was no reason to go there except balloons, and you can’t earn so much money in balloons, I think.
Selyukh: In fact, a deficiency of helium made that business intricate. Meanwhile, the buyers were defective in Spirit Halloween and Amazon and Walmart – even Home warehouses with its giant skeletons. Then the Pandemia killed the parties, then the high inflation, and the debt of the city city haunted the chain to death.
Sherri Swartzi: I will really lose this place. I am very upset that they are closing, really upset.
Selyukh: Swartzit Sherri found sale of liquidation in her neighborhood party hometown, shopping for her 6th birthday party the night before. Next time …
Swartz: I think I will have to be more organized and do it because of Amazon now Amazon will own the world.
Selyukh: The rules around it scream 20 to 75% discount of caramel and tiles and baskets of Easter. One buyer tells me that prices still look very high, though she can return to the last second, she says, to see if the discounts become larger. Alina Selyukh, in News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.