Missouri Dispensaries Fume as Point-of-Sale System Crashes on 4/20

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 even Missouri. The Bend, Oregon, company experienced "widespread outages," in the words of MJBizDaily.com.

“We had so many angry and disappointed customers, and we were literally helpless,” Jerry Hicks, an operations manager at a Michigan dispensary, told the online outlet.

What makes Rinella even more frustrated is that this year was the second major 4/20 crash involving Dutchie. Last year, the system was also plagued by nationwide complaints, as the RFT reported at the time. And Rinella says that other than some back and forth by text with their tech contact during the outage, he's heard nothing from Dutchie.

"Their job was to provide a platform that worked flawlessly," he says. "That didn't happen." He adds, "We're likely going to have a to make a pivot so we don't experience this again."

Asked for comment via email, Dutchie's CTO Chris Ostrowski told us this: "This year’s 4/20 was a record setting day for the majority of Dutchie powered dispensaries. Our systems powered over 2 million transactions, representing $165 Million dollars in retail commerce — a 50 percent increase from 2023 4/20. While Dutchie and our partners prepared extensively for this year’s 4/20, a group of customers local to a specific instance of our POS system experienced serious issues that impacted their ability to transact. Dutchie is committed to stability and will be continuing to invest heavily to provide a reliable platform for all customers.

"To note, while it was a significant event for those impacted, less than 20% of all customers experienced any performance issues."

“While Dutchie and our partners prepared extensively for this year’s 4/20, a group of customers local to a specific instance of our POS system experienced serious issues that impacted their ability to transact," the company said. "Dutchie is committed to stability and will be continuing to invest heavily to provide a reliable platform for all customers.”

For Rinella, one silver lining is that some of the customers who gave up on Saturday may well have made 4/20 Day an entire 4/20 Weekend. He says, "We had a record-breaking Sunday across all our stores."

This story was updated soon after publication to include a statement from Dutchie.


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