4/20 2026: Two Channels, One Holiday — How Dispensaries and BevAlc Played Out

The cannabis trade ran two completely different 4/20 holidays this year. Across 9,355 licensed dispensaries in 28 states plus Ontario, our data captured **$814.1M in estimated GMV** over the 5-day window from Thursday April 16 through Monday April 20 — moving 30 million units across more than 18,400 brands. Monday 4/20 itself was the single biggest sales day of the year so far, at $220.6M, 35% larger than the next-biggest day. The BevAlc-channel hemp THC story is dramatically smaller in scale: roughly $210K in weekend GMV across the four chains we track (Binny's, TotalWine, Specs, ABC Fine Wine). The licensed dispensary channel did approximately 3,900x more THC volume than BevAlc retailers in the same five days. But the channels reach different customers, follow different shopping rituals, and have very different competitive dynamics. This is the deep dive on both.

The most striking pattern in the data is when each channel peaks. Licensed dispensary sales peaked on Monday 4/20 itself ($220.6M), which is 35% larger than the next-biggest day in the window (Friday 4/17 at $175.1M). Customers came on the holiday. The BevAlc THC channel peaked four days earlier. At Binny's — the only BevAlc chain where THC moves in measurable volume — Friday 4/17 was the biggest THC day at $55K, a 55% lift over the prior Friday. Saturday and Sunday stayed elevated. By Monday 4/20 itself, Binny's THC sales were back to weekday levels (still +53% vs the prior Monday, but only $23K in absolute terms because Mondays are structurally low-traffic days at liquor stores). This split says something real about the consumer: **licensed dispensary cannabis is an on-day holiday purchase**, while **BevAlc-channel hemp THC is a weekend stockup**. Cannabis customers wait until Monday to celebrate; THC-seltzer customers buy on Friday and crack a can with friends over the weekend.

Trulieve dominated the brand leaderboard. Their two flagship lines — Modern Flower (#1 at $22.0M) and Roll One (#2 at $21.1M) — combined for $43.1M, more than every MSO portfolio except Verano's. Trulieve's total weekend GMV was $57.2M across 16 states and 9 brands, with Florida specifically being their fortress (Roll One led every single day in FL). The top 5 MSOs for the window: 1. **Trulieve Cannabis** — $57.2M, 16 states 2. **Verano Holdings** — $46.7M, 18 states (top brand: Müv) 3. **Cresco Labs** — $33.7M, 11 states (top brand: High Supply) 4. **Green Thumb Industries** — $31.3M, 22 states (top brand: RYTHM) 5. **Curaleaf Holdings** — $29.2M, 21 states (top brand: Grassroots) Those five companies alone booked $198.1M, or 24.3% of all licensed dispensary GMV in the five-day window. Below the MSO tier, the top brand houses (independent multi-brand owners) were Rove ($12.6M), DreamFields/Jeeter ($11.5M), Wyld ($10.6M), Connected Cannabis Co ($7.9M), and Kiva Confections ($6.4M). For retail operators (chain stores), Pop's Cannabis led at $18.2M from 38 Ontario stores, followed by High Tide at $17.1M from 97 Ontario locations and JARS Cannabis at $16.8M from 48 stores across three states. The top of this list skews Ontario-heavy because the Hifyre menu provider feed (the source of our Ontario sales data) only began landing reliably on April 16 — meaning Ontario chains have a full window of measurable sales whether or not they had pre-holiday baselines available. Flower carried the category leaderboard, accounting for $417M (51% of weekend GMV), followed by Vape at $230M (28%), Pre-roll at $126M (15%), and Edible at $107M (13%). Concentrate, tincture, topical, and other formats together made up the remaining 8%.

California posted the biggest single-day 4/20 spike in the country: $14.5M average across the four pre-holiday days, then $31.9M on 4/20 itself (+118%). STIIIZY led every day of the window. Florida saw a +75% Monday spike to $35.5M with Roll One leading. Michigan came in at +49%, with The Deli (JARS Cannabis's flagship) on top. The state ranking by 5-day GMV: 1. Florida — $116.5M 2. California — $89.7M 3. Ontario — $88.5M (data caveat: see methodology section) 4. Michigan — $66.3M 5. Pennsylvania — $66.2M 6. Arizona — $37.5M 7. Massachusetts — $32.9M 8. Illinois — $31.3M 9. Missouri — $27.1M 10. New Jersey — $26.7M Maryland, Ohio, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Connecticut, Maine, and Virginia round out the list of measurable markets. Every legal recreational state plus established medical-only programs (and Ontario) shows up.

Promotional intensity is where the two channels diverge most dramatically. Across major dispensary states, average in-market discount depth ranged from 26% (Massachusetts) to 44% (Arizona). On selling SKUs specifically — products that actually moved units during the window — average discount went up: California 39%, Florida 50%, Pennsylvania 41%. Florida's promoted SKUs averaged half off, the deepest of any major market. The lift on promotional pricing — meaning how much more a discounted SKU sold compared to what it would have at MSRP — was highest in Florida (+10%), Pennsylvania (+9%), Illinois (+8%), and New Jersey (+8%). Arizona's lift was lower (+3%) despite their 44% baseline discount, suggesting that AZ promo activity is so universal that an additional discount no longer drives meaningful incremental volume. This is what a saturated discount market looks like. BevAlc-channel THC is essentially the opposite story. Only Binny's discounted THC products at any meaningful scale — they marked down 2,588 SKUs on Thursday 4/16, averaging 12% off and going as deep as 28% off. The deepest discounts were on Collective Project (-28%) and Cheech and Chong (-19%). TotalWine ran promos on a single-digit count of THC SKUs all week. Specs ran zero. The dispensary channel uses promo as table stakes; in BevAlc, promo is still a differentiation lever.

On Monday 4/20 specifically, Binny's saw a store-wide lift across alcohol categories that didn't appear on any other day of the holiday week: wine +16%, spirits +13%, beer +7% versus the prior Monday. This is the cleanest signal we have that 4/20 drove incremental store traffic, not just THC-specific shopping. Cannabis-curious customers came in for THC and bought adjacent alcohol on the same trip. The one alcohol category that did NOT lift on 4/20 was ready-to-drink cocktails — likely cannibalized by THC seltzers competing for the same single-serve adult-beverage wallet. This is the most direct competitive evidence in our dataset that THC-infused beverages are starting to take share from non-alcoholic and low-ABV alternatives in the same channel. The THC sales themselves at Binny's lifted 20-55% Thursday through Monday vs the prior week. The biggest brand lifts were among mid-tier players: Collective Project +371%, Plift +105%, Cheech and Chong +119%, Delta THC +140%. Established leaders saw smaller relative lifts (Senorita +17%, Wynk +24%, Cann +57%) because their volume base was already high. Format-wise, ~95% of all BevAlc THC GMV is seltzers and beverage RTDs.

TotalWine carries 14,950 THC SKUs across 31 states. Their THC inventory levels per store are real and continuous. But the GMV signal is essentially zero — $13K across the five-day window, or about $4 per store per day. By comparison, Binny's 49 IL stores moved $182K of THC in the same window, roughly $750 per store per day. Specs (211 stores in TX) shows the same pattern at $9K weekend GMV, despite carrying 2,107 THC SKUs across the chain. ABC Fine Wine adds a fourth dimension: their THC catalog (24,347 SKUs across 128 FL stores, including Buddi, Plift, Cheech and Chong, Find Wunder, and Nowadays) only landed in our dataset on April 22, two days after the holiday. The previous version of our scraper crawled three top-level categories (Wine, Spirits, Beer) and missed the For The Bar > Mixers > THC Infused subcategory entirely. We caught the gap mid-investigation and shipped a fix the same day. Next 4/20 we will have a full ABC sales picture. The combined takeaway: the BevAlc-channel hemp THC opportunity is structurally underdeveloped at the chains carrying the inventory. Shelf placement, merchandising support, and consumer awareness are all weaker than the catalog count suggests. Whichever chain (or which alcohol major) decides to seriously merchandise THC will inherit category leadership in BevAlc retail with very little resistance.

We searched our BevAlc THC sales data for SKUs from the major alcohol holding companies — Constellation Brands, Anheuser-Busch InBev, Molson Coors, Diageo, Pernod Ricard, Boston Beer Company. None registered measurable THC sales in our dataset. The BevAlc THC category is currently 100% cannabis-native or independent: Cann (cannabis seltzer leader, ~$22K weekend GMV), Wynk (Indeed Brewing's hemp-THC seltzer, ~$23K at Binny's alone), Nowadays (independent alcohol-alternative spirits, ~$11K), Senorita (independent), Cheech and Chong (celebrity brand, $8K), Willie's Remedy (Willie Nelson's family brand, $9K), and tier-two newcomers like Plift, Buddi, Delta THC, and Collective Project. This is a strategic vacuum. The cannabis-experienced brands that show up in BevAlc THC don't have the alcohol-channel distribution muscle of the majors. Conversely, the alcohol majors haven't moved into the category — Constellation took an equity stake in Canopy Growth years ago, but that bet was on Canadian licensed cannabis, not US hemp-derived THC for BevAlc retail. Until the channel scales 100x or more, the alcohol majors have no urgent reason to enter; once it does, the entry barrier will be much higher. The interesting near-term dynamic is whether established cannabis MSOs (Trulieve, Verano, Cresco) will try to extend their dispensary brands into BevAlc retail under hemp-derived formulations, or whether the alcohol majors will acquire an existing BevAlc THC brand portfolio (Cann would be the most obvious candidate). Either move would compress the timeline for big alcohol's eventual category entry.

BevAlc THC sales are derived from `hemp_stock_movements`, a TimescaleDB hypertable that computes per-SKU per-store inventory deltas multiplied by selling price to estimate GMV-sold. The data is cleaned via a `hemp_stock_movements_clean` view that excludes 15 high-severity data-quality flagged scrape days. Some of those flagged days were caused by a now-fixed in-batch consumer concurrency bug at TotalWine (specifically 4/20 and 4/21, which previously showed phantom $297M and $58M GMV days from stale-state lookups during high-volume Kafka batches). The dedup fix shipped on April 22; future weekends won't have this gap. Licensed dispensary GMV comes from `mv_nationwide_product_sales_3m`, the same materialized view that powers cannmenus.com/420. The methodology mirrors BevAlc — menu-provider inventory deltas times selling price — but applied to dispensary scrapes. "Estimated" is the right word: this isn't POS receipt data, it's our best signal from publicly observable inventory movement. Ontario data only began landing reliably on April 16 via the Hifyre menu provider integration. Their intra-window day-by-day numbers are valid and directly comparable; comparisons to pre-window baselines aren't because we don't have meaningful pre-window data. We've kept Ontario in the national totals (consistent with how the live /420 dashboard treats it) but excluded all other Canadian provinces. ABC Fine Wine THC catalog only became measurable on April 22 because the previous scraper missed their THC subcategory. Next year we'll have full ABC coverage from the start of the window. For questions, deeper cuts, or to schedule a CannMenus Pro demo on this data, email vib@cannmenus.com or visit the live 4/20 dashboard.