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Article by Travis Scadron, SVP of Business Development at Surfside
For years, the cannabis industry treated 4/20 like a single punch on the calendar, with promotions, staffing, and inventory all built around one concentrated spike in demand. Whatever you didn’t move by midnight was a miss.
That model is over. Demand is no longer confined to a single day, and treating it that way leaves both revenue and customer acquisition on the table.
New data shows how cannabis retail’s biggest event is stretching across multiple days and segmenting across distinct shopper behaviors and purchase moments. The 2025 holiday cycle tells a more nuanced story, one with direct implications for how cannabis brands and retailers should be thinking about media investment, inventory planning, retention and customer acquisition well into 2026.
The Spike Has Become a Window
In 2024, 4/20 delivered a clean sales spike concentrated on the day itself. In 2025, when the holiday fell on Easter Sunday, demand dispersed across multiple days. The Friday before 4/20 became the single highest-volume sales day of the entire year, outperforming the full-year Friday average by 40 percent.1 Weekend sales overall grew 29 percent year over year, even as day-of sales declined from 2024 levels.
The holiday expanded, with 2025 4/20 weekend sales running 67 percent above the average weekend for the year. Plus, the holiday itself still drove a 70 percent lift in transactions compared to a typical Sunday.
With 4/20 falling on a Monday in 2026, the industry should expect a four-day demand window running Friday through Monday. The brands and retailers that plan for the full arc, rather than optimizing for a single day, will see the most sustainable returns.
Consumer Loyalty Is Fluid
One of the more underappreciated findings in recent retail data is what happens to consumer loyalty in the weeks before 4/20. Ecommerce traffic to dispensary menus rises sharply during the third week of April, yet conversion rates do not rise proportionally. Consumers are browsing, comparing, and holding off.
This window-shopping behavior is both an acquisition opportunity and a retention risk. For brands, it signals a high-value moment to interrupt consideration before purchase decisions lock in. For retailers, it represents a window in which their existing customers are actively evaluating alternatives.
The implication for retail technology is significant. Platforms that can identify this pre-purchase browsing behavior and activate personalized retargeting in real time, whether through on-site ad units, offsite display, or push notifications, are operating in a fundamentally different competitive tier than those still relying on static promotions.
Segmentation Is the Differentiator
Not all 4/20 shoppers are the same, and the data bears this out clearly. The vast majority of 4/20 purchases (89 percent) come from previous buyers. But 11 percent come from first-time shoppers, a cohort that is disproportionately valuable precisely because the relationship is brand new.
First-time buyers over-index on lower-psychoactive, easier-entry products: they show a 45% higher preference for topicals compared to the average consumer, followed by edibles (19%) and tinctures (17%). That preference profile is different from the heavy basket behavior of returning consumers, who are primarily driving a 30 percent increase in average basket size and outsized lift in high-velocity categories like THC beverages (275 percent purchase lift), edibles (202 percent), and pre-rolls (181 percent).
Treating these two segments with the same promotional strategy is a missed opportunity. The infrastructure to serve them differently, via purchase history signals, likely product affinity modeling, and audience targeting that distinguishes near-market newcomers from loyal regulars, is now commercially available to cannabis retailers. The question is whether operators are deploying it.
The Ecommerce Signal Is Loud
Ecommerce traffic on 4/20 runs 160 percent above the year-to-date average. Add-to-cart actions rise 116 percent. These are not passive browsing numbers. Consumers are engaging with intent.
At that moment, they need relevance in the form of a recommendation that reflects what they have bought before, or what matches their entry point into the category. Retailers who are surfacing personalized product recommendations at cart and checkout, rather than relying on blanket promotions, are capturing incremental basket value that compounds meaningfully across the volume 4/20 generates.
The Strategic Frame Has to Change
The cannabis industry is still early in its retail media maturity, but many operators are running 4/20 campaigns with the same playbook they used in 2021: push the discount, wait for the rush. The newest data from 2025 suggests that the highest-performing window is now the three weeks before 4/20.
Brands that are not building awareness in early April, retargeting consideration-stage shoppers in the second week, and conquesting competitor audiences in the week of the holiday are leaving acquisition on the table. Retailers that are not activating post-4/20 retention campaigns to convert first-time buyers into recurring customers are treating their most expensive acquisition cost as a sunk cost.
4/20 is a performance window, and the data clearly shows that the window is getting longer, the shopper segments within it are getting more distinct, and the technology to activate against all of it is ready. The only variable is whether the industry decides to use it.
