Last month in their reporting about the demise of national chain Party City, CNN had dropped a vague but tantalizing anecdote about an ominous sign that had foretold of the company’s collapse, writing their “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.The team was told the company believed the trip posed a safety risk, because Party City had stopped paying its suppliers,” emphasis ours on the threats of violence not typically associated with the normal course of operations in corporate America, even in a bankrupt shitshow.

National Zero found that particular detail intriguing and now finally CNN has followed up and explained that the product development team were actually in China at the time and yeah, that’s probably legitimately a safety risk if they owed money. “This was disgraceful. Don’t know how else to say it,” an employee who had been on the China trip told CNN. “I just can’t sit back and say this is OK. It was scary. We left our families for this company, and you sent us there and you left us out to dry.” The article contains nothing explicit about the threats, just an example of a sternly worded email from a Chinese-based Halloween costume supplier from September 7th saying “We have provided you all your orders in due time. You will make your money as you got your costumes. 50 percent of payment is obviously not enough to recover even only raw materials payments.”

“One of our agents in China suggested we leave,” another employee on the trip said. “He said ‘I think you should leave the country and not stay another night. It doesn’t sound good. It’s risky.'”