Party City closing all stores and Big Lots "going out of business" sales

As public officials continue to tell us the economy is going well, the Retail Apocalypse continues apocalypting in the background.  The word just came out that Party City is shuttingdown all of its  stores, and also that Big Lots is bankrupt and beginning "going out of business" sales.  Two more well known national chains of retail stores are going under.  This video above tells the story of the rise and fall of Party City.  It's December 20th, 2024 as I write this, office Christmas/holiday party season, and a week and a half before New Year's Eve.  Did everyone stop partying?  

I live in the San Fernando Valley these days, a place where there's a lot of wealth in the general area.  But one Big 5 just closed, and a Guitar Center store just closed as well, not to mention all of the 99 Cents Only stores that all closed down months ago.  This is in an area where there are hundreds of "mom and pop," privately owned, brick and mortar stores that are still in business.  But as the flood of pandemic stimulus money got spent, business has slowed back down for many stores, and major shutdowns are happening again.  Here's a video about the downfall of Big Lots.

The Rise and Fall of Big Lots

There are a whole bunch of reasons for these stores closing down, like the rise of online sales, getting bought out and loaded up with debt by private equity companies, and the sales slowdown of the pandemic.  These factors are part of the bigger picture of why these particular chains have closed down.  In any case, two more chains are going under, and hundreds of large stores are going to become vacant soon in cities across the United States.  

The term "Retail Apocalypse" popped up around 2016, as chain store closures and dead malls became a trend.  In reality, many stores had been closing for a decade before that, but those closures increased dramatically around 2015-2016-2017, as online sales surged.  Chalk up a couple more large chain closures to the list of dozens of other retail chains that have become extinct, like Toys-R-Us, Radio Shack, and others.  

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Nick from Reventure Consulting takes a look at California Real Estate- December 2024

Over the last couple of years, Reventure Consulting founder Nick Gerli has built an amazing app to look at residential real estate all over the United States.  In this video, out a few days ago, he takes a look at where prices are likely to go up, and likely to go down, around the state of California.  Hint: Here in SoCal, the region from downtown L.A. west through Beverly Hills, Brentwood, and Santa Monica is going one direction, and Orange County is doing the opposite.  Watch the video to see his overview of the state, and then check out Reventure App to check our neighborhood.  

There are no paid links in this post.  

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43 Years of people doing 360's on BMX bikes on video

Here is Andy Ruffel, doing a 360 off a jump, on a BMX bike in 1981, for a British TV show.  To the best of my knowledge, this is the first BMX 360 jump caught on video or film, and it happened 43 Years ago.  

In late 2021, I had a crazy idea for a blog post.  "What if I search YouTube for all the earliest, 'first on video' clips of BMX 360's and variations of 360's?"  I wondered just how far back the basic 360 jump on a bike went.  When I was first reading the BMX magazines every month, in 1983, I remembered a story saying that Eddie Fiola did a 360 over doubles in a race, at the Orange YMCA BMX track, I believe.  That was where I started my search, looking for the first 360 on video.  At the time, Mike Varga had just landed the first 1260 air, a few months earlier, at the X-Games in Riverside, California.  It seemed a good time to dig into the video archives of BMX spinning tricks.  

This basic search for the first BMX 360 on video opened a huge can of worms, and I wound up spending something like three weeks watching dozens and dozens of BMX videos, looking for 360's, 540's, 720's, 900's, and other variations.  The blog post was epic, with links to dozens of "first on video" clips of BMX spinning tricks.  Here's that post from November 2021:

 "Spinaroonies: A Brief History of BMX Spinning Tricks."  

In my research, this clip of Andy Ruffel had the earliest BMX 360's I could find, both 360 bunnyhops (also called a "360 whip floater" then), and a 360 over a small jump.  At about 25:20 in that clip, you see Andy Ruffel, in front of a moving airplane, do some 360 bunnyhops, among other tricks.  He also does a 360 off a mellow jump at 26:04.  Three years ago, that was the earliest 360 jump I could find, Andy Ruffel, in the U.K., in 1983.  Today, when I looked it up, the short video clip embedded above came up, again with Andy Ruffell, predating this clip by two years.  So now, it looks like the clip above, Andy Ruffell in 1981, is the very first 360 jump on a BMX bike that's out there.  That means we've now had 43 years of BMX 360 jumps on video, and that called for a blog post.  You can check that Spinaroonie blog post for dozens more "first on video" BMX spinning variations.  But here's a few more of the early ones.  

Hugo Gonzales- Big 360 out of the halfpipe and over the fence at Del Mar Skate Ranch- 1984? -  :43 in this clip

Eddie Fiola- First 540 air on video- Pipeline Skatepark- Summer of 1985- 2:16 in this clip.

Mat Hoffman- First 900 air video- 2-Hip KOV- Kitchener, Ontario, Canada- Spring 1989

Craig Campbell- first 720 jump on video- Ozone TV segment- Calabassas jumps- San Jose, CA- 1989- 1:49 in this clip.

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