Party City Closing: Buy Sonic Supplies Now

 2025 begins and hopefully it'll be another great year for Sonic! (And fans)
Last year's "The Year of Shadow" went really well, there was plenty of merchandise for him, Sonic Shadow Generations game did really well, and popularity for all things Sonic continued in fine form around the world. From expensive pre-order bonuses in Japan (gee whiz 250 dollars worth of stuff), to all sorts of wacky and wild new things in the USA, 2024 was a very fine year for fans and merchandise. Sadly, the SonicGear site didn't really keep up with it all despite efforts. (Well, more effort did need to be applied but...)

However, 2025 also starts off with some bad news for shoppers in the USA Party City the party supply super store is closing all stores very quickly in 2025. They'll all be erased by February of this year. It's significant for Sonic though, because it was an easy and reasonably priced enough place to grab OFFICIAL Sonic party supplies without the pollution of a billion fake trash like on Amazon. Party City policed their stuff and only sold the real thing so you wouldn't have disappointed kids with ugly or nasty fake characters or unsafe materials like you do online.

Party supplies themselves are often a cool collectible because like a Sonic plastic cup doesn't have to be for a party you can just buy it for a dollar and use it for fun daily use. Posters, balloons and other stuff can decorate rooms as well as party areas. The supplies were also a constant on shelves, this stuff would be easily available for all fans for years at a time. Designs would refresh and then be re-added to shelves and then documented on Gear. Inexpensive, fun, long lasting and easy to get is a real winning combination--which is why this store going out of business is so sad to see.

So: If you see this post and want Sonic party supplies, get over there and grab while you can.

Why is it going away?
Of course all retail magazines and etc have something to speculate (the non-consumer side) but it seems from the outside that they got price-beat too often by online stuff like Amazon. Parties are rarely last-minute items, so ordering online and waiting for shipping to save dollars (rather than cents) was probably a big factor vs them. They had tried to diversify, like selling candy, and giving stores a makeover but it didn't work. There's also that mysterious "Debt Load" stuff that they 'couldnt pay off', which seems to be 'evil banker secret code' for what Bane Capital did to Toys R Us in order to ruin them, put it out of business and then eat all the land that the stores were on. Looking up what happened to TRU in the USA (not Canada) is actually quite a rabbit hole to go down.
Did something similar happen to Party City?
With 'debt load' being mentioned, it could well be, but they were also hit with going against Amazon's prices and free shipping, last-minute balloons buying couldn't sustain big footprints like that, and the general reason of inflation keeping people from...well doing as much fun stuff like decorating for parties it seems. 

A new years resolution this year is to get the updates going better.
The stuff seems to never end (a very good thing) but posting it all seems to just go further behind and it's rather frustrating to do the updates. Things also get in the way of them (like new internet installation that didn't go as well as planned) which results in more pile up of stuff. Hopefully 2025 is the year of the steadier update and catching up on things like the email where possible.