How cannabis retailers can maximize holiday sales

Stephen Gold (Courtesy photo)

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Here’s something most cannabis retail operators get wrong about the holidays: they treat them all the same. And regardless of location, they treat every store the same: same deals, same hours, same staffing.

The hard data says that’s a mistake. And this isn’t survey data or a third-party estimate

At Gold Standard, we manage the marketing for licensed cannabis retailers across several states. We track every one of those stores’ real sales, order by order, through their point-of-sale systems on our attribution platform.

When we pulled this year’s holiday numbers, three of the New York stores we run made the point impossible to ignore.

And their holiday missteps fall into the same pattern we watched play out in every market.

What happened with cannabis sales on the Fourth of July?

Start with the Fourth of July.

A neighborhood shop in Queens ran a “Buy 3 Get 1 Free” promotion straight through the holiday. Aggressive deal, whole store, live on the Fourth itself.

And on July 4, sales dropped 23% below a normal Saturday. They gave away free product — and had one of their worst days of the week.

Turns out the money came earlier. That same promotion drove revenue up 45% the Tuesday before. The Thursday before the long weekend was the single biggest day of the run.

What happened?

Nobody’s shopping for cannabis on the Fourth. They stocked up midweek and on the day itself headed out to the barbecue.

A Brooklyn shop running its own scaled “buy more, save more” deal that same week saw an identical curve. Sales peaked three days out, then fell below average on the holiday itself. Two stores, two different offers, one lesson.

On the Fourth, the promotion doesn’t move the date, the customer does. You win in the days before or you don’t win at all.

What holidays are best for cannabis sales?

But here’s where it gets interesting, because holidays aren’t all built the same.

At both of those neighborhood stores, Memorial Day was one of the strongest days of the month. People were home, relaxed, and happy to make a run.

Now take a store in Midtown Manhattan, an area that’s busiest when people are at work. On that same Memorial Day, sales were cut in half, down 50%.

The same holiday that boosted the neighborhood shops crushed the commuter one, because Midtown’s customers are office workers and tourists. On a holiday, they’re all gone.

That week leading up to Memorial Day? Midtown was actually up double digits. The holiday itself just flatlined.

None of this is a New York quirk. We see the exact same behavior in every state we work in. Whether you’re in Manhattan or Minnesota, a residential neighborhood shops differently than a business district, and a cookout holiday empties out a store no matter what zip code it sits in.

The map changes. The human behavior doesn’t. So the playbook below travels anywhere.

How can cannabis retailers prepare for a holiday rush?

So before you plan your next holiday campaign, run this playbook.

• Know your neighborhood. A residential store and a commuter store should run opposite strategies for the same holiday. Where your customers go on their day off changes everything.
• Know your holiday. Some are won in the days before (July 4th), some peak on the day (Memorial Day in the right neighborhood). Pull last year’s numbers before you assume.
• Front-load when it counts. For shop-ahead holidays, your heaviest push should land two to four days out, not the morning of. And in a commuter district, that pre-holiday workweek is the whole game.
• Run the day-of deal for basket size, not foot traffic. Customers expect a promotion on the holiday, so run one, but know what it’s actually doing. The day itself will be lighter no matter how good the offer is, so a day-of deal is there to protect your average order value, not to fill the store. Put your volume push in the days before and let the holiday deal do its narrower job.

What data should cannabis retailers rely on for holiday planning?

Here’s best part: any operator can reverse-engineer this for their own store, no agency required.

Export your own point-of-sale data for the past year. For each day, don’t compare it to yesterday, compare it to that same store’s average for that day of the week, so a Saturday is measured against your typical Saturday.

Do that for last year’s holidays and two things jump out immediately: which holidays spike in the days before versus on the day itself, and how your specific neighborhood behaves.

That is your map. A single-store operator in any state can build it in an afternoon, and it will tell you more about your next holiday than any national trend report ever will.

With Labor Day around the corner and Green Wednesday close behind, the winners won’t be the ones with the loudest sale.

They’ll be the ones who knew exactly when, and where, their customers were actually going to shop.

Stephen Gold is the founder of Gold Standard Solutions, a cannabis marketing agency that helps retailers and brands drive revenue through data-driven marketing strategies.