Retail cannabis stores in Colorado reported another day of strong demand for recreational cannabis, though some said they are already running low on edibles and other infused products.
Lines formed outside many of the licensed retail shops in the Denver area on Thursday, with customers forced to wait an hour or two to get inside. However, the crowds were not as big as on Wednesday – the first day of recreational cannabis sales – when wait times hit up to five hours. Some customers were also turned away when shops closed for the day.
The first stores to serve the recreational market posted record sales over the past two days. Patient’s Choice/Bud Med in Edgewater recorded 595 total transactions on Wednesday, up from its average of 30-40 when it focused solely on medical cannabis patients.
Most transactions so far have involved raw marijuana, typically an eighth.
But many consumers are also clamoring for baked goods, candies, beverages and other products infused with cannabis. The increased demand for edibles, coupled with delays by some infused-products manufacturers in obtaining licenses, has sapped inventory at numerous shops.
Patient’s Choice/Bud Med in Edgewater, for instance, said its primary vendor would not receive a license until Jan. 17. Currently, Bud Med’s inventory of edibles is from the store’s one-time transfer of medical products.
“It would help if we had a list of all licensed [edible] businesses,” said Brooke Gehring, owner of Patient’s Choice/Bud Med in Edgewater. “Edibles are turning out to be tricky.”
Edibles were also running low at The Green Solution in south Denver, where management maintained a limit of a quarter of an ounce of marijuana per customer.
Shops said their inventory of raw marijuana is holding up better, as they had much larger quantities of cannabis flowers on hand.
