Missouri’s 4/20 marijuana sales hindered by online system crash

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

Editor's note: the system that crashed is called Dutchie, a third party cannabis retail tracking system.

Saturday, on 4/20, a significant day for marijuana enthusiasts nationwide, stores across Missouri faced a hiccup as a popular online system for tracking cannabis sales crashed.

In Columbia, dispensaries were swamped with customers after the system rebooted, causing delays and frustrations. Liam Nugent, an employee at Green Releaf for two years, reminisced about last year's busy 4/20.

ABC 17 News asked the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, which oversees the state's marijuana regulation, about the crash. The department has not answered at the time of publication.

"We had a line going all the way to the cat cafe," Nugnet said. "There was a lot of people. Everybody just was ready to smoke. I hadn't seen anything like that in a long time."

Contrasting it with the challenges they faced this year.

"This year has been a bit rough," Nugent remarked. "We are having our problems with our system and back office and our register,"

After the registers resumed functioning, the dispensary encountered difficulties in managing inventory within the system. Nugent explained that if a product ran out, it remained inaccessible in the vault, disrupting sales.

By around 1:30 p.m., the registers were back online, but by then, the store was already running low on products.

"Now there's nothing to put out," Nugent said. "All the stuff that we have are on special right now we, cant put out because it's all in the vault. And that was all of our big money plays right there. We had a lot of stuff on special, a lot of items we were trying to get rid of."

By early 4 p.m., Nugent reported that operations were back to normal with everything running smoothly.

Despite the setbacks, dispensaries believe they can make up for lost time until closing.