April 20 is a day recognized globally for celebrating cannabis culture, but it’s also like the cannabis industry’s Black Friday.
Dispensaries offer deals designed to inspire people to flood their stores to stock up.
However on Saturday, dispensaries across the state using an inventory platform called Dutchie were hamstrung for hours by technical challenges, which caused many of their registers to go down or move at snail pace.
It was the second year in a row that a 4/20 sales surge caused the system to crash.
“Imagine running a restaurant where you have one burner working and you normally have 20 stoves operating,” said Nick Rinella, CEO of Hippos Cannabis dispensaries. “We had one burner going.”
Each Hippos location went from selling around 500 items per hour to less than 100 because of the issues the outages were causing, he said.
Dutchie is similar to the platforms major stores, such as Home Depot and Walmart, use to scan items at check out. However, Dutchie also has the special function of communicating with the state’s seed-to-sale tracking system called Metrc.
It keeps the stores compliant with the state’s stringent tracking requirements of marijuana products.
Rinella said all three Hippos dispensaries in Springfield, Chesterfield and Columbia faced delays all day