July is the birthday circuit's Black Friday, and I tracked every metric so you don't have to. 41 parties in 30 days. Average entrance-to-first-laugh: 9.2 seconds. Cake proximity incidents: 3 (all resolved, one with a face).
The stat that matters: parties where I arrived before the bouncy castle was inflated converted to repeat bookings at 2.4x. Arrive before the castle. The castle is the competition.