Party City Employee Spends More Than 2 Hours on Order for 306 Helium Balloons

To quote the unparalleled Mean Girls movie, apparently, when it comes to buying balloons from Party City, the limit doesn't exist. A balloon counter employee, @shmikshmok, shared in her TikTok video that she received and fulfilled an order for 306 balloons all by herself. I don't even know how she fit that many balloons in the store and kept them until they were picked up, but this is legit.

In her TikTok, the user, whose real name is Taylor, explains that she has to fill a collection of black, white, and gold balloons and apparently, she has to do it all by herself. But before she can do that, she has to “hydrate” the inside of each balloon, which adds another step on top of inflating, tying, and adding string to each and every balloon. And I’m exhausted just watching this play out.

In her video, Taylor starts filling the balloon order at 7 a.m. and, for starting on such a large order alone at such an early hour of the morning, she is in (mostly) good spirits. Although she admits that saying “good morning” is a bit of a lie since her workday is starting off with such a wild task.

Since these are balloons and helium doesn't last forever, it's not like she could have gotten a start on the order the night before. In order for Taylor to get started, though, she has to squirt Hi-Float into each and every balloon and massage the balloon to evenly coat the inside of it.

Hi-Float is a liquid that hardens against the inside of a balloon and holds the helium inside of it longer than the balloon would hold helium without the Hi-Float. And it may seem like a no-brainer to have that added to your balloon order. But, um, imagine that times 306.

By the end of the video, Taylor finishes inflating and stringing the 306 balloons and she walks underneath each solar section to show viewers the finished product.

It’s a little confusing how those balloons even fit on the store ceiling in addition to any other balloon orders of the day. But, Taylor says in the comments, at least her fingertips didn't bleed this time from tying that many balloons. So there’s that, I guess.

If you’re like me, you may have tons of questions about how someone fulfills a balloon order of this magnitude and who in the world even places the order.

And then, of course, how it’s transported after that. My car feels packed to the gills when I pick up an order of two bunches of birthday balloons. I can't imagine 306 balloons and their tangled strings.

“I need the person who picks these up to stitch with how they picked it up,” one user commented. And another wondered, “I'm just wondering how many cars, people, trips, etc. [that] this took them to transport all these.”

However, someone else has experience with a huge Party City balloon order. “Biggest order I got when I worked there was 600 balloons for a sweet 16,” they shared. “They had rented U-Hauls to transport, it took so long.”

Honestly, the only thing that stresses me out more than the idea of filling 306 balloons is picking up and transporting them.