For Nick Rinella, CEO of Missouri-based Hippos Cannabis, Saturday’s 4/20 Day was the best of the times and the worst of times.
The best: Customers lined up at Hippos’ three dispensaries in Missouri, which includes locations in Chesterfield, Springfield and Columbia. “A lot of customers showed up,” Rinella says. “We had DJs there and fun activities.”
The bad news is that Hippos’ point-of-sale system, Dutchie, crashed. Rinella says the dispensaries were not able to check out customers at a normal pace over a period that stretched to a frustrating five hours. At one point, people were waiting as long as 40 minutes for their purchase to be completed.
Perhaps the surprising thing is that some people did stay — but certainly not everyone. “We probably lost $150,000 to $200,000 in sales,” Rinella says. That number goes up even higher if you calculate lost sales at the dispensaries across Missouri that Hippos supplies, many of which also rely on Dutchie. “We have over 100 different retail customers we sell our products to, and they were down as well so they couldn’t sell our products. We probably lost a couple million dollars across our system.”
Indeed, Dutchie’s woes were not limited to St. Louis, or
