Holiday Shopping Make Or Break For Many Local Businesses

With holiday shopping season officially beginning Friday, Oklahoma City small businesses said they need our help more than ever.

“This has been a struggle for the last nine months and how consumers spend this season within the next 4 to 5 weeks is really going to change what our Oklahoma City landscape looks like for next year,” Black Scintilla Rachael Gruntmeir said.

It has been a time of innovation for small businesses.

“Some of them didn’t even have e-commerce in place, so they worked hard to build that,” Independent Shop Keepers Association Executive Director Cleo Rajon said. “Then the challenge of reopening their doors, having to serve customers and keeping them safe at the same time.”

For Gruntmeir at the Black Scintilla in Midtown, it has meant offering flat rate shipping, curbside pickup, and some local deliveries. In the store hand sanitizing stations are frequent and masks are required.

“Supporting small businesses is always a big deal whether it’s buying laundry soap from Plenty Mercantile or holiday shopping, it’s very important because it really creates our entire community,” Gruntmeir said.

“Just take a minute and picture what Oklahoma City would look like a year from now with all of our local shops gone and all we have left is Amazon and Target - because Amazon and Target will be here a year from now - these local shops might not be,” Rajon said.

On the Independent Shop Keepers Association website customers can search more than 70 locally owned stores by what item they’re looking for.