The provincial belle of the legalization ball, Newfoundland and Labrador, had several stores that had to stop sales because they ran out of product. One store owner, who the gods must be laughing at, said out of all goddamn times they somehow ran out of weed at 4:20.
It’s not something he’s very happy about.
"I'm a little shocked that I sold out so fast, and also very upset that I don't have product for everybody,” Thomas Clarke, who runs THC Distribution in Portugal Cove-St Philip’s,
told the CBC. “I'm letting down a lot of people here and I was assured that if I paid for the cannabis I would receive it."
Clarke told CBC he didn’t get the full supply he ordered from his producer, so he was starting out with low stock. This isn’t a unique problem, other stores have similarly sold out across the province and the country.
In Quebec,
customers waited for hours in lines to get into the store but many were sent home without being served; even if they did get in, they found a limited supply. One disappointed customer told
the Montreal Gazette, “for me, the score is: black market, 1; government, zero.” Moving west
to Saskatchewan—where no stores opened in their major cities—some stores simply didn’t open on October 17 because they just couldn’t get enough supply on time. Turning our eyes north to the Northwest Territories, the only store selling weed in
Yellowknife ran out of supply before the end of Wednesday.
Perhaps the biggest snafus occurred on the incredibly busy online stores, which were the primary options for the majority of consumers in the country—especially those in Ontario, Nunavut, and BC. Customers of the online stores were hit
with glitches, sold out products, and at times, the websites failed.
In Ontario, the online store offerings slowly got smaller and smaller as more products sold out—within hours only one product grown by the country’s largest producer was available. In British Columbia, the weed province, within minutes of opening their online stores sold out of the cheapest bud it was offering, and by the morning
most of its product was gone. The website in Nunavut
crashed several times throughout the day and by the time it was up and running for most customers, its stock was sold out.
One company in Winnipeg
sold out completely online in the early morning, selling $50,000 worth of product by the time they were done. The province of Alberta
sold out of cannabis oil. Only
limited products were available in some Nova Scotia stores. The examples go on and on.
