This story was republished with permission from Crain’s Detroit and written by Dustin Walsh.
Business was humming on Saturday at Bazonzoes’ three marijuana dispensary locations. Hundreds were in line to take advantage of the retailer’s large 42% discount to celebrate the 4/20 holiday.
Then it all started to fall apart as Bazonzoes’ point-of-sale system, Dutchie, began to experience outages. The cannabis retailer quickly adjusted by handwriting sales, calculating taxes and discounts using a calculator. Pandemonium.
“We were out for about two hours total,” said Erin McCann-Sabo, operations director for Bazonzoes, which has two locations in Lansing and one in Walled Lake. “We were already at a backup of 35 minutes to an hour and a half due to the sheer volume of people in line. We had to rely on our budtenders to quickly do math and transcribe METRC numbers (the state’s product tracking system). For people to hand-write METRC, excise and sales tax on a subtotal with various discounts is an exercise in not only math skills and patience, but in perseverance. Especially in front of 400 angry customers.”
The Dutchie point-of-sale system outages began at about 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, about 30 minutes after the west coast of the
