SPRINGFIELD, Mo. — Marijuana sales are higher than ever.
In Missouri, over $100 million has been spent on the product and the state is on track to be the fastest to reach over $1 billion in sales.
“It’s still busy every single day. You know, we went from a normal busy day being about 250 patients to now normal, average day is anywhere between 400-600 patients,” said Joshua Smith with Old Route 66 Wellness.
“We’ve seen a massive amount of influx of recreational users,” said Alex Paulson with Easy Mountain. “[In Republic], we’re not in a high tourist area or anything like that, but we are in an area that has a large population of recreational users.”
A huge rise in demand could worry customers about product availability.
KOLR10 checked in with local dispensaries who say that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon.
Paulson describes what he sees in his store as a ‘squeeze,’ rather than a shortage.
“What we’re seeing is not as much availability,” Paulson said. “We’ve seen suppliers that have previously given us early access to things and stuff like that have to go to completely taking away any wholesale availability just for them to put flower into their own stores and things like that.”
Paulson says one particular form people can buy marijuana is coming in slower than usual and it caught his attention.
“Flower is definitely the product that we’re seeing the largest amount of squeeze on,” Paulson said. “About 50 percent of our sales are flower, so that’s a massive amount of business for us.”
Even if a shortage were possible, local dispensaries are confident they can keep up.
“Around the time that we started hearing that [recreational] was going to go through, we automatically started preparing, expanding our product lines, ordering more bulk, having more inventory,” Smith said.
“While we do still have a steady supply, we are having to source from different vendors, which is really a good thing because we’ve ended up partnering with some new people,” Paulson said.
Both dispensaries say if they don’t have a specific item on the shelf, they still have plenty of options to choose from.
“We may not have that same exact strain in stock consistently, but if you’re just coming in for flower, indica, sativa or something like that, we’ll still have 25 or 30 options for you,” Paulson said.
“We keep that wide variety,” said Smith.