4/20 Lessons and Prepping Your Shop for Cinco De Mayo

Apr 30, 2024by Ian Black

As the dust, or should I say smoke, finally settles around the 4/20 rush at your shop, it’s time to look around your barren shelves to do a bit of good old fashioned reflection. Don’t worry, you don’t have to look at your reflection, shattering mirrors is bad luck after all, but instead, take a gander at your inventory to see what sold, what didn’t, and why.

Once we have a better grip on the overall results of your 4/20 sales, we can extend our pirate spyglass 354 days into the future, to look at how you can start prepping today, for next year's holiday. Not only that, with Cinco De Mayo coming up at the end of this week, you have the perfect trial run for some mini discounts and targeted sales to test all you’ve learned.

So let’s charge head first into the fray and check out this Smoke Shop Blog to guarantee that your two giant steps ahead of the competition.

How To Go About Evaluating Your 4/20

In order to properly reflect on the effectiveness of your sales it's important to divorce yourself from any emotional ties you may have to the idea of selling X over Y. Instead it’s time to think like a cold monolith of capitalistic indifference, or Starbucks for short, and look at things purely through the lens of numbers. To help you accomplish this we recommend using the sales info from your POS system and plugging it into an excel / google sheets document in order to see how many units you moved, at what sale price, and for what total of money.

Once you have these totals, you can accurately compare if the discounts that you applied to certain products were monetarily worth it for your smoke shop. Everyone is going to have a different bottom line based on their individual market, so while there is no right answer to this question we recommend looking at products that moved a large amount first, before moving down the conga line.

To help those just starting out or in need of an example, we have created our own google sheets document to help you organize your sales info. Simply click here to access the file, create yourself a copy on google drive, and feel free to go crazy with it changing, using, or sharing it around! The document itself is dead simple to use, you simply enter your values into the corresponding columns and you will end up with how much $$$ you made vs how much $$$ you took off the top to do so. We’ve put in a couple of example products within the doc to show you how it's supposed to work and act as a guide stone for your own DIY accounting.

Cost Benefit Analysis

While this may be an overpriced accountant's way of saying “Did I make enough money to make this worthwhile?” The end goal of all this is moving forward knowing what methods should be repeated and which ones should be taken behind the woodshed. They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result, so let's use our own precious data to break any loops of lost profits for good.

For example, if your discount of 10% off on Boarding Pass 5000MG Amanita Mushroom Gummies lead to a massive amount of sales in comparison to your yearly rates, why not try either permanently extending the “sale” or just marketing the price down from here on out.

Both of these methods accomplish the same goal of bringing your prices closer to what the market is willing to pay for them. While not an exact science and requiring some amount of experimentation to nail, the fruits of your labor will be worth it once you see your earnings start creeping up point by point.

Lessons for Next Year

Now to prepare for next year's 4/20/25, there are three big questions to ask of your Smoke Shop: What Sold Well on Discount? What Sold Poorly on Discount? What Sold Well NOT on Discount? Let’s go through these point by point and see how the work we just did will help answer these questions accurately.

What Sold Well on Discount?

This is the easiest to deal with of the three. Did something sell well on discount? Mark it down in your notes and well, do it again next year! Items that do well on sale are often ones that customers have had their eye on for a while, but just needed the monetary excuse to finally purchase it. If for instance you did well discounting Puffco Peak Pros, then why not double down on the Puffco sale next year, as you’ve already figured out that customers are inclined to pull that purchase trigger when they see the % off sign.

What Sold Poorly on Discount?

Less fun than the previous but equally if not more important, as these are the items customers saw and either said “I can get that later” or “That discount isn’t worth it”. For the first complaint some items may seem less essential to shoppers on these sale days and thus aren’t picked up on their radar. While you shouldn’t abandon these, maybe don’t display them as prominently during the next holiday rush.

The other point to notice is that if a product is already cheap an additional 15% off isn’t going to sway someone's decision making. For smaller products like this it's more beneficial to do alternative discounts such as a buy one get one 50% off, so as to make the savings to customers more apparent.

What Sold Well WITHOUT a Discount?"

Now this is truly the wild card category as these are items that customers who rushed to 4/20 decided to buy despite there being no discount. These can be seen as either essential items for the holiday or ones that shoppers see as still worth it due to the holiday. In the latter case, the “discount” is in effect the ability to buy the product on such a hot shopping day.

Think of it like you have the last pallet of Turbo-Man in stock and it’s X-Mas Eve, time to jingle all the way to the bank by riding the wave of popularity. For next year make sure to have enough of these on deck and if you truly want to start a frenzy, potentially put them on sale next year! A double whammy!

Mexican Building in celebration with Cinco de Mayo

The Cinco De Mayo Trial Run

While not one of the key targeted holidays for Smoke Shops, the celebration of Cinco de Mayo is still a massive holiday where loads of people will be getting ready for a weekend of fun. This means that you are bound to have some revelers in your Shop this upcoming week and weekend, so why not try a miniature sale on one of your 4/20 highlights to test some of your newfound observations. Not only that but if you start doing a Cinco de Mayo sale every year, overtime the notion will catch on more and more; thus you are organically building extra sales boosting days for your shop.

May the Fourth Be With You

If you wanted to, you could extrapolate this idea and move it towards other non-traditional smoke shop holidays to make sure that you stand out. Whether it’s a Fourth of July BBQ or a Thanksgiving meal, when people come together to celebrate it is always a time when new pipes are needed and purchases are guaranteed to be made.

For a timely added bonus tip, if you have any products that are either space or specifically Star Wars themed - try putting them prominently on display with a sale as the day before Cinco de Mayo, 5/4, is the faux holiday “May the Fourth”, an unofficial Star Wars celebration that sees many shops pushing this brand to capitalize on the punny name. While not likely to be huge, this is a great extra little sale idea to try and move some of your more specific merchandise.

In Conclusion

Now that we’ve all taken a deep breath and reflected on our 4/20 sales, it's time to put these lessons into action by altering our actions going forward with informed decision making. No matter how well you did this year, there is always room to improve and with enough planning you can easily watch those profits rise year after year. For more Smoke Shop info and tips, make sure to check out our Got Vape Wholesale blog here!