Cannabis sales surged in advance of Winter Storm Fern

Before Winter Storm Fern hit, some panic-buyers who cleaned out supermarkets’ shelves and freezers were purchasing something to ease that panic, too: cannabis.

Snow began in much of the Northeast in the early morning of Sunday, January 25, and was preceded by banner days for cannabis retailers on Friday and Saturday.

In New Jersey dispensaries, Friday was the biggest sales day of the past 12 months, outpacing what traditionally are the industry’s top sales days, April 20 (aka 4/20) and the day before Thanksgiving, Green Wednesday, according to an analysis from Lit Alerts, a data analytics firm focused on the cannabis industry. The next day, Saturday, marked the top sales day in the past year statewide in Connecticut and Massachusetts, per Lit Alerts.

The data helps “drive home the point” that as more states legalize recreational cannabis, these products become a “consumer staple,” Rick Bashkoff, CEO of Lit Alerts, told Retail Brew.

“This is a wellness and medical product now that people rely on,” Bashkoff said. “If they foresee being stuck indoors, they’re going to buy it like bread and toilet paper and other things because it’s going to help them cope.”

Representatives from dispensaries in New York told Retail Brew that they also had sales bumps in advance of the storm:

• Sales rose 11% for the week that included the storm over the previous week at the flagship location for Housing Works Cannabis Co on Broadway in lower Manhattan.
• Flower Daddy, a dispensary in Williamsburg, reported sales on the Saturday before the storm was about to hit were up 30% over the previous week.

Jared Schoder was interviewed by the New York Post as he bought $400 worth of cannabis products from Stoops NYC in the Flatiron District before the snow started.

“If we get snowed in,” Schoder told the paper, “I got everything I need.”