Party City, a store adored by many, has recently gone out of business due to increasing inflation. Known for its fun Halloween costumes, supplies for birthday parties and decorations for countless holidays, the fall of a company as practical and niche as Party City is part of a larger crisis other companies are facing.
Many WCHS parents have recollections of going to Party City and buying decorations and supplies for their kids on their birthdays. People also purchased yard decorations for holidays, such as ghosts or spiderwebs. As parents feel nostalgic for these past memories, WCHS sophomore Bailey Shabat also looks back on these moments.
“I remember one of my favorite things to do around my birthday was to go to Party City to pick out little things for the goodie bags,” Shabat said. “They had all these fun little things like princess Rubix cubes, bouncy balls and candy. I remember picking it all out and it was so fun and it’s kind of sad to think that no one can do that ever again. I mean, there’s other party stores, but it’s just not the same.”
Many WCHS students reminisce about all the shopping memories they have from when they were younger. Party City was the store that many kids would go to to buy festive decorations, toys and costumes. According to a report from Bankrate, a personal finance website, consumer prices are 23% more expensive now than they were in February 2020, before the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S.
“It’s kind of interesting because I’ve lived in this area my whole life, so it’s really insane to watch different stores filter through a mall,” Shabat said. “Stores filter through the same lots in a mall and it’s kind of sad. I don’t even remember all the stores that used to be in the mall, but I remember Sears. That was huge.”
Many WCHS students often go to the Montgomery Mall to hang out with friends or go shopping. For students who have lived in this area for a while or even their whole life, they find it hard to experience changes within the area as they grew up with these stores.
“I think that there are a ton of local businesses that suffer because of these huge companies like Amazon,” Shabat said. “Especially artists, because I am an artist myself and I have seen tons and tons of people, like small business artists, whose work gets copied and resold for cheaper prices by big companies and the quality is horrible and I feel very awful for them because that’s their work and it’s literally being capitalized off of.”
A lot of small businesses do not get enough customers because of bigger companies that have more sales and demand, causing them to go out of business. Furthermore, work is often stolen or copied by these large businesses that do not give creation credit for their creations. Students are not content with large corporations plagiarizing ideas but they like to acknowledge the impact of former stores on their youth.
“I remember when I was a kid and ToysRUs closed and I was so upset,” WCHS sophomore Sarah Jung said. “That place held a lot of childhood memories and even though I didn’t go there too often, I was actually kind of sad when it closed down.”
ToysRUs was stocked with countless children’s toys and collectibles. Now, younger ages are more interested in technology rather than physical toys, leading to a loss of many stores and thus questions about generational preferences.
“I don’t have a job, but I feel like the kids at school who do have jobs kind of depend on those jobs,” Jung said. “Not just for money but also for experience, and so if all these stores are closing down, there’s going to be no real part-time jobs left. Also, these businesses won’t be able to pay their workers.”
With the amount of stores that are closing down, it not only affects teenagers but also many grandparents of WCHS students. A lot of the elderly people in the community do not participate in online shopping and prefer to go to their local stores to get goods.
“Since the elderly don’t really use the internet, they’re more used to going to in-person stores,” Jung said. “With businesses going out of business because of online shopping, there’s going to be a lot less stores for them to shop at. It’s actually really sad to know that some of their favorite stores could be going away because of recent times.”
