Buried down in CNN’s reporting on the immediate demise of Party City – like all 800 stores nationwide, which may or may not have their doors open as of this very moment – is a slightly ambiguous but pretty damning detail about the end which we’ll just copy verbatim from the article:

“The news of the company’s impending collapse began to trickle out among the company’s corporate staff over the past couple weeks. Party City’s product development team was recalled two weeks ago from its yearly trip with vendors and told to return home immediately, according to a former Party City corporate office employee, who wished to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the media. The team was told the company believed the trip posed a safety risk, because Party City had stopped paying its suppliers,” CNN writes, emphasis ours.

It’s fairly but not 100 percent clear given the flow of the story that the leaks were the main reason for the pullback, that the vendor reps, knowing that Party City was about to shutter and would never pay them whatever was owed, were a safety risk. Or they didn’t know it and were still fucking pissed enough to be a safety risk. Either way that’s a pretty stark sign of how bad it must’ve gotten.

Still, were they buying piñatas from a front for the Sinaloa Cartel? Paper plates and cups from the Chinese Communist Party? More seriously, what rep from a normal manufacturer of retail party goods and Halloween costumes would assault a product development rep from freaking Party City over the company failing to pay invoices? Someone’s gotta pin the tail on the donkey here, fill in some more details about this oddly tantalizing angle to a larger, more tragic story.