BROKEN ARROW, Okla. — Recent wildfires have taken much attention from what Green Country was going through five years ago this month, but two Broken Arrow businesses can hardly forget.
MetroMerch Bin Store and Adventure Avenue are two very different businesses located near East 101st Street and South Elm. However, both were founded in early 2020 (the latter in its original Tulsa location), just in time for the novel coronavirus to spread to the Sooner state.
"It was chaotic. It was brand new for us opening," MetroMerch owner Tim Metrovich told 2 News.
"With COVID, that was a big challenge for us. We were literally on our last truckload that we could afford."
While the community endured wave after wave of the virus, Metrovich said his staff was almost constantly reinventing ways to keep his store in business.
"We had to order more appliances and get more of the necessity items: microwaves, washers, dryers, refrigerators," the owner said. "So we did quite a bit of that, and that got us through where we were essential. We were able to open back up and get things rolling again."
Adventure Avenue's specialty is kid's birthday parties. When health measures restricted in-person fun, its co-owners also made adjustments for a new normal.
"That's whenever we came up with our reservation system," co-owner Erica Trammell. "We cap attendance at 22 children still to this day, because as moms, we found it was very comforting to know that you were coming into a play situation and it wasn't too full. It was a very comfortable environment."
There's another lesson to take from the pandemic the business owners are echoing a half-decade later.
"We always shop local. I'd strongly advise everybody to shop as local as they can," Metrovich said. "The one thing that does it for the city (is) it helps everyone out."
"We try to do a shout out on our social media accounts to other local businesses, so it's very important to us," Trammell said.
About 18,000 Oklahomans have died from COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. It also consistently ranked in the top five for worst death rates in the country, according to the CDC.
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