Placemat guides
Empty shelves are costing your cannabis store more than your POS shows
Your sales report only counts what sold. Here's how to see the sales you lost to empty shelves, and how to stop ordering less because of them.
October 16, 2026 · 5 min read
Your POS is very good at one thing: recording what sold. It can’t record what a customer wanted and couldn’t buy. When a best seller runs out, its sales drop to zero. On a report, that looks just like a product nobody wants.
That gap quietly shapes your next order.
The empty-shelf trap
Here’s how it usually goes:
- A popular product sells out midweek.
- For the rest of the week it sells nothing, because there is nothing to sell.
- Next week’s order is based on last week’s sales, so it looks like demand fell.
- You order less, it runs out sooner, and the cycle repeats.
Meanwhile, slower products that never ran out keep getting reordered at full speed. Cash drifts from what sells to what sits.
How to estimate what you missed
You can get a fair estimate from data you already have:
- For each product, count the days it was in stock and the units sold on those days.
- Divide to get its in-stock daily rate.
- Multiply by the days it was out of stock.
Example (made-up numbers): a pre-roll sells 6 units a day when it’s on the shelf. It was out for 4 days last week. That’s roughly 24 units missed. At $30 each, about $720 in sales, for one product at one store in one week.
It’s an estimate. Some customers buy something else instead. But across your top sellers and several stores, the total is usually bigger than people expect.
Five habits that keep best sellers on the shelf
1. Order from the in-stock rate, not last week’s total
Last week’s sales are the wrong number for any product that ran out. Use what it sells per day when it’s actually available.
2. Track days of cover for your best sellers
Divide stock on hand (plus what’s on order) by the daily rate. If cover is shorter than the time until your next delivery arrives, you’ll run out before it lands.
3. Protect your top sellers first
When the budget is tight, fund the products that sell fastest before anything else, then spread what’s left. A full shelf of slow sellers doesn’t make up for an empty spot where a best seller should be.
4. Trim slow movers on purpose
Products with weeks of stock and few sales are holding the cash your best sellers need. Order fewer, or skip a week.
5. Listen to the floor
Staff hear “do you have…?” all day. A simple weekly check-in with each store on what customers asked for catches demand your POS never sees.
How Placemat helps
Placemat models true demand for each product at each store, including the sales lost to empty shelves, and builds every order from it. It protects best sellers first, trims what’s sitting, and shows you the share of best sellers on the shelf each week, so you can see the gaps closing.