Updated February 27, 2025 at 05:05 AM ET
What came first: America's obsession with Halloween or Party City?
Steve Mandell launched Party City in 1986 as a single store in New Jersey. He sold cups, napkins and other supplies for birthday and holiday get-togethers. But it was the costumes that became the goldmine.
"I never expected Halloween to be anything like it," Mandell says. "After my first year in the business, I said, 'Wow!'"
Fast forward 39 years and Party City is sweeping away the confetti and turning off the lights. Two bankruptcy proceedings have failed to get the chain's finances in order.
"I'm really upset it's closing. Really gonna miss this place," says Sherri Swartz, browsing in a Gaithersburg, Md., location the evening before her grandson's sixth birthday party.
Where will she go next time?
"I guess I'm going to have to be more organized and do it off of Amazon, because now Amazon will own the world," she says with a sigh.
The aisles around her scream up to 75% off candy, placemats, sparkly streamers and Easter baskets. Workers here say they still haven't gotten notice of their exact last day, but a banner blanketing the front window minces no words: "Store closing."
Several Party City franchisees say they plan to stick around and keep a few stores running, including in Hawaii and Virginia. Corporate representatives did not respond to NPR's inquiries. They'd said in December the plan was to liquidate by the end of February. Hundreds of locations have already been auctioned off, many of them to Dollar Tree and Five Below.
The store that decked out memorable moments
The stores became a mainstay after Baby Boomers decided that Halloween was not just for kids, but for adults, too. They raised new generations who love to dress up as movie characters and wrap their homes in ghostly spiderwebs.
Party City had the goods and made the money.
First, Mandell enlarged his original store to include a Halloween warehouse. Then came more stores and a franchise. By the time Mandell left in 1999, Party City was a national chain in the era of category killers — one megastore dominating some facet of shopping. This was the heyday of Barnes & Noble, Toys R Us and for parties, Party City.
"The first and only place we shopped was Party City — that's where you went," says Theresa Peverly of Illinois. In the late '90s, she outfitted her entire backyard wedding reception at Party City.
She remembers this well because, to this day, she uses leftover Party City ribbon she purchased to tie up silverware and napkins.
"I think I bought nine or ten spools. Twenty-six years later, we still have some of these spools of ribbons," Peverly says. She's used them to tie up baby and graduation presents, laughing every time she reaches for the Party City ribbon stash.
The retail chain dressed generations of Americans in scary masks, dramatic capes and vampire teeth. But if you ask people for memories of Party City, shoppers recall meaningful milestones: the 40th birthday bash, a sorority reunion, dad's retirement, mom's last day of chemotherapy, so many birthdays during the pandemic lockdown.
One woman thinks back to the shortage of miniature flags after the Sept. 11 attacks. A teacher describes a 35-foot balloon arch she'd bought for a school run.
"My 6-year-old daughter found her best friend at Party City," says Allie Mushlin of Massachusetts.
The friend was a clearance item on an impromptu visit to Party City: a pink squishy stuffed bunny, now named Cupcake and still the favorite toy two years later.
"We saw on the news that the store was closing," Mushlin says, "and my daughter asked, 'Maybe we should go and see if they have more of Cupcakes in the back.'"
Blowing up the balloon business
Now if you ask workers about Party City memories, they tend to talk about balloons.
"My fingers maybe have a permanent curve in them from doing all these balloons," says Jonathan Darcangelo, who joined Party City in Florida as a stocker in the late '90s and left as a manager in 2003.
He first got the job in high school, like a lot of people did. Party City's teenage employees gave the stores a come-as-you-are vibe, with workers goofing around in Halloween outfits and cracking up about ill-prepared shoppers stuffing a dozen balloons into a two-door car.
"They'd come in a little sedan," says former assistant manager Cali Gordineer, "and it was funny just to watch, like, 'You probably need a bigger car. You're not getting this through the door.'"
Gordineer worked at a Party City in New York from 2011 to 2016, and met her fiancé through the job: a coworker's family friend who saw a Facebook photo of her wearing a Catwoman costume over her work uniform.
At a store in Rockville, Md., cashier Christina Marin remembers the first time someone handed her sealed results of an ultrasound scan, asking for a gender-reveal balloon.
"They came straight from the doctor, and I was the first person to know the gender. It was very special," she says. "I was nervous because the balloons get really big and I didn't want it to pop and all the confetti to come out."
What killed the party
The balloons, wigs and costumes are fun to buy in person, which shielded Party City from online competition for a long time. For years, its stores would install a Halloween picture wall: dozens of photos of every costume in stock. It was like browsing online, but you could try on the stuff right there and then.
In 2012, Party City was bought by private equity in a deal funded with massive debt, which was loaded onto the company. It was manageable — while sales kept growing.
"Unfortunately, with Internet retail, there was no reason to go there except for balloons," says Darcangelo, who is now an infrequent shopper. "And you can't make that much money on balloons, I guess."
In fact, a helium shortage made the balloon business tricky. The debt payment left Party City little leeway to improve its vast network of stores or its online presence. Its prices started rising. Shoppers defected to rival Spirit Halloween, Amazon and Walmart, even Home Depot with its giant skeletons.
Then, the pandemic killed parties. And then, high inflation tightened party budgets. And Party City's debt haunted the chain to death.
Party City first filed for bankruptcy in January 2023, hoping to rein in its $1.7 billion in debt. A few months later it re-emerged, only to end up back in bankruptcy. By December 2024, it was "winding down" for good. Shoppers say they'll now have to recalibrate, turning to grocery stores for balloons, and dollar stores or the Internet for supplies.
Copyright 2025 NPR
