Breaking down the real price tag of Tom Haverford’s greatest achievement: a sunup-to-sundown rager with a shrimp wall, a drumline, a real-life tiger and an Indiana Pacer

“The perfect party: It’s an elusive idea. People have to be completely entertained from the moment they walk in to the moment they leave. It’s a grand experiment, and I am a party scientist. Welcome to my laboratory.”

This ambitious thesis of partying originates from the mind of Tom Haverford in Episode Six of Season Four of Parks and Recreation. At the start of the episode (titled “End of the World”), Tom and his friend Jean-Ralphio discover Entertainment 720, their vague business venture, is reaching its end because they spent all of their money on hiring models and giving away free iPads instead of constructing a feasible business model. But while they’ve gone the way of Ask Jeeves, there’s a slight upside: They each will have $5,000 left.

Yet rather than learn from their mistakes and make sound future investments, the duo decides to throw a massive, sunup-to-sundown “End of the World” party that’s “the essence of everything we wanted the company to be.”

The party is, naturally, a fucking smash. It includes:

Six open bars

Several VIP sections (including one nobody is allowed into)

An inflatable pirate ship

Craps and roulette table

Snake Juice ice luge

Drumline

Cash booth

Shrimp wall

Indiana Pacer Roy Hibbert

A Bengal tiger

But there’s no way all of that could have cost only 10 grand, right? Especially considering that they needed to get everything the same day; they were being kicked out of their office space at noon the next afternoon.

So how much would this party have really cost? Let’s do the math.

For starters, a couple of things need to be taken into consideration:

Inflation. The date of the party appears to be November 19, 2011, based on the Reasonablists ’ literal end of the world celebration. (The Reasonabilists were a relatively harmless doomsday cult in Pawnee that spent the episode in a local park preparing for what they believed would be the literal end of the world, unknowingly inspiring the theme of Entertainment 720’s blowout party.) So 2020 pricing needs to be adjusted accordingly. The Number of Hours Servers, Bartenders and Bouncers Worked. When the party begins, the sun is about to set. According to timeanddate.com, the sun set on November 19, 2011, in Muncie, Indiana, at 5:21 p.m . (Why Muncie? Well, Pawnee is fictional, but Muncie seems to be its real-life inspiration, as Parks and Rec ’s co-creator would even follow events there to come up with ideas for the show.) We then see Tom emerging from the party as the sun is rising. The sunrise for November 20th in Muncie was 7:32 a.m. So let’s say the wait/bar shift began at 5:30 p.m. and ended at 7:30 a.m., for a total of 14 hours.

One more thing worth noting before diving into the numbers: There are a few things that wouldn’t have cost them any money, and should be struck from the tally.

The Event Space. See above, regarding their lease.

Hibbert and DJ Bluntz. Both were previously mentioned as retained Entertainment 720 employees, so let’s generously assume they were already compensated for their time.

Furniture. Most of the furniture was taken away at the start of the episode, but once the party idea struck, they may have delayed the tables and couches from being removed until the next day.

Gift Bags. They likely just gave away a bunch of the useless swag they made for the company.

That still, however, leaves a lot unaccounted for. And so, to calculate the rest of the costs down to the exact penny as best I could, I researched roughly how much each individual facet of the party would cost in a town like Muncie, and I reached out to local businesses to get their best estimates. (As for the fact that they needed to procure everything on a rush basis, let’s operate under the assumption that Tom’s fast-talking charm would have earned them some goodwill, allowing companies to waive potential fees for expedited services.)

Here, then, is my item-by-item breakdown:

That adds up to a grand total of $28,897, which, calculating inflation, adjusts to $25,128.01 (and about nine grand more if they couldn’t get a cheap tiger).

I should point out that these are just the expenses we were shown or told about. It’s likely this party actually cost a lot more. It is, of course, hard to be too surprised by that, given that financial illiteracy and reckless spending were hallmarks of Entertainment 720. With that in mind, chances are that after Tom came down from the high of kissing his former lover Lucy, he realized that he and Jean-Ralphio nearly tripled their budget and had plummeted themselves further into crippling debt.

But hey, that’s the price of being a party scientist. And despite not being the model of responsible businessmen, we all may want to take a page out of Tom and Jean-Ralphio’s playbook as we start planning our post-pandemic Beginning of the World parties.

I know mine’s at least gonna have a shrimp wall.