Cannabis Retail and Point of Sales, New York Cannabis Dispensary: TRENDS, Share Their Insights and Experience
Cannabis retail and point of sales (POS) systems have been getting a lot of press this year due to one of the biggest POS outages in the industry. On 4/20/2024, a point-of-sale system used by many cannabis dispensaries left customers, patients, budtenders, and managers in the dark for hours due to a nationwide system crash for the third year in a row. Four months post-incident, the national 4/20 POS outage is still being discussed.
6,000+ operators who experienced an outage told MjBiz Daily that they were left helpless, customers were angry, money was lost, and compared a major outage in cannabis on 4/20, to Walmart and Amazon experiencing an outage on Black Friday.
So how does a cannabis retailer choose their POS wisely? To pick the brain of a dispensary owner, I sat down with one of the founding partners of Trends Cannabis Dispensary (Trends) in Long Island City, New York.
Continue reading to learn more about Trends through Rodney Carter Jr., who led the interview, and provided insight on Trends’ backstory, the inspiration, the challenges of opening a cannabis dispensary, and some insight on how they chose Trends’ point of sales system.
Get to Know the Founding Partners and Owners of Trends
Trends is the first black-owned cannabis dispensary in Long Island City (LIC), New York, with over 2000 square feet of usable space that includes an event space and was founded by legacy operators: Rodney Carter Jr.- CEO, Brandon Carter- COO, Rodney Carter Sr. — Senior Strategist, and Stephan Dweck — Attorney.
Trends established itself as a community-focused wellness brand, serving the community they come from and reside in. The founding partners and owners come from the legacy market and have been impacted by prohibition; each has been arrested for cannabis-related offenses.
Before cannabis dispensary ownership, Rodney became the owner of Hurricane Fitness, a personal training studio in Harlem. Brandon became a software developer and computer programmer. Stephan became an entertainment lawyer and manages artists such as Ashanti. Rodney Sr. became a Process Server.
Trends, though a dispensary is an extension of the wellness brand. The founders are very health-focused, seeing cannabis as a medicinal plant, a bridge to healing and overall wellness. Rodney says what sets them apart from other cannabis dispensaries is that the founders are from and continue to be members of the community they serve.
He says: “For us, it’s more than just a retail store that makes money. It’s a community hub. We like to call our store the community hub.”
How Trends Chose its Point-of-Sale System
Rodney says vetting cannabis POS providers wasn’t inspiring and gives a lot of the credit in this space to Brandon, the lead for all things tech. Trends was in search of POS when the nationwide 4/20 outage happened. He went on to say: “We heard that the best provider was the one that experienced the nationwide outage; they weren’t an option for us. Then we heard of another one but also heard about all their issues, so they weren’t an option either.”
The focus was reliability; they wanted Trends to operate with no outages. Rodney recalls an event he attended where he met the founder of Cova Software (Cova), a provider of cannabis retail software. The team started to look into them. They asked around about POS providers and when they mentioned Cova, the thing that stood out was Cova hasn’t had any outages.
Trends had two important considerations discussed extensively: not crashing on 420 and for Trends to own their data. Rodney says: “We did our research and picking Cova as the POS provider for Trends was easy after that”.
The team didn’t make their decision based solely on popularity, they chose their POS provider because of no outages, reliability, efficiency, ease of use, and affordability. Rodney says his favorite things about Cova Software are the reporting analytics, the ease of use, and that it’s budget-friendly.
