Select Page

April 20th is a famed holiday with the cannabis community , and it is no surprise that this day typically brings huge profits (on average 2.2 times the volume of sales).  With such high volumes of sales in the past,  many dispensaries have had problems with their technology not being able to keep up with the demand.  This has cause system outages  throughout the United States.  Harry Brelsford of The CannaTech Group sits down with Gary Cohen of Cova Software to chat about the upcoming holiday and what Cova has done to prepare. 

Video Transcription

Harry Brelsford 

Welcome back to the Canna tech podcast. We’re back with Gary Cohen from Cova. How’re you doing, Gary?

Gary Cohen 

I’m doing great, Harry, it’s good to see you. Good, good, good.

Harry Brelsford 

Good to see you. Where do we find you today? Are you in Denver, Colorado?

Gary Cohen 

I’m in Denver. We’ve got springtime already here. So that’s exciting.

Harry Brelsford 

There we go. Well, hey, right around the corner is April 20. And last year, I certainly recall, I went to a dispensary in Seattle just to kind of soak it up long lines. And there was a system failure. I don’t remember the exact details. But apparently the sales volume was overwhelming nationally for for some of the infrastructure in place. So what do you know about that? What do you recall from last year? And do you think we still have those some systematic issues?

Gary Cohen 

Well, there’s, there’s a whole long history in our industry, around 420 failures. And I got to pat ourselves on the back because we built Cova from day one, it with the enormous infrastructure capable of taking on not just existing volumes in our business, but really, we’re in a high growth industry. And it’s probably better to try to build and get ahead of what’s necessary than try to catch up. In that catch up is what catches everyone on for 20. So when you if you go back to like my old industry, the the telecom wireless industry, for 100 years, the phone systems would fail on Mother’s Day. Mother’s day was the day everyone was on lot. Back when long distance was a thing. You know, that’s when everyone called their mom and Mother’s Day was on a Sunday. And the network’s you know, and this is at&t and all the baby Bell phone companies would get busy signals that you couldn’t get through the system was busy on Mother’s Day, because you don’t build for peak days, the other 364 days a year you don’t, you don’t need that capacity. Well, in our industry, what’s happened is that most of the players in the point of sale business, which is really what’s crashing on for 20. They’re, they’re trying to keep up in a growing industry, with the demands placed on their networks or their systems. Yes, and you can try to harden your network, you could try to add more capacity, add bigger database capabilities. But if you don’t really engineer in by for the, for the load that’s coming your way, you’re gonna have these outages or crashes. And if you go back in Google, all of the kind of primary point of sale companies, and I’m not going to mention them all, and type in their name in 420. And what you’ll find is, you know, a half hour, two hour four hour crash. And what happens is, dispensaries need to roll over and start processing by pencil and paper, which in an enormous rush when you’re trying to capture that whole tracking number, because all products are batch tracked that 23 digit letters and numbers sequence plus the product, the the cost, the quantity and the price, in addition to figure out your taxes. It’s almost unworkable. But that’s your backup plan. And as a result, oh well. And there’s some states you can’t do that. Because in some states, you need to hit the state registry to see what the purchase limit per customer or patient is. And you can’t do that in Illinois, Arizona, places like that, that have a registry for Ohio.

So, to get back to Cova when we launched, we built our platform on the same rails that our parent company handles at&t, Verizon, T Mobile, Rogers, Bell, and TELUS up in Canada. So even when we had two dispensaries, we were still riding on the same rails or handling the same transport capabilities with the same uptime requirements that you know, fortune 50 companies require. Yeah, that’s part one. Think part two for Cova. We built Cova with this feature called the offline mode. Meaning if you have your internet or your power, since Cova, runs on tablets, if the powers cut off to the store, the tablets retaining not only the credentials of all the employees, so that they can log on and off of all the tablets in a store. But it’s downloaded all the inventory in a update in a manner that updates about every 15 to 30 minutes. So you can continuously transact, even without power internet. And then once it comes back, you can you can upload everything. Unfortunately, that’s usually not the problem, that you’ve lost your connectivity. It’s usually the systems if the volume like where you started this question, the volume. Now one last thing, and then I’ll shut up. Sorry. But the other thing that happens on 420. If you go back and you look at type in Cova, and 420, we put out all the stats for the US and Canada. So it’s the one time of year where we compile week over week. On whatever day of the week it is. So if 420 falls on, I don’t even know what day it falls on this year. But then we look at what were the same same store sales week over week. And on average, it’s it’s something like 2.2 times the volume. Yep. So if your system’s not built for it, it’ll, it’ll fail.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah. Yeah, no kidding. And yeah, I’m seeing some information, folks. Google Cova for 20. And you’re absolutely right. Here are some interesting results that I’m going to run and run and read about so Well, Gary, we’ll see you next time. Thanks for your contributions.

Gary Cohen 

You’re welcome. It’s good to catch up. All right.