The day before Thanksgiving is the second-busiest cannabis shopping day of the year, and we recommend you shop early, or pre-order online.

The retail carnage known as Black Friday has become an annual cash cow for big-box chain stores, but the budding legal marijuana industry is on the eve of its own color-coded single-day shopping jackpot. While 4/20 is the busiest day of the year at cannabis dispensaries, it's becoming more of a recognized pattern that the day before Thanksgiving  — dubbed “Green Wednesday” or “Weed Wednesday”  — is the second-busiest day of the year at cannabis dispensaries. People are stocking up for their long four-day weekend of hibernation, gluttony, and streaming TV binges, and you should expect lines and long waits at pot shops across town.

Nationwide, with more states having legal recreational cannabis sales, industry analysts expect dispensaries across the country to sell nearly $100 million of the sticky-icky in just one day. “Wednesday, November 24th, is expected to bring in $90 million in sales, a 78% spike from daily averages, making it the second-highest sales day of the year after 420,” according to the marijuana data company Akerna. “Last year was the first time that Green Wednesday beat out Black Friday in cannabis sales, a phenomenon that is expected to repeat this year."

For the whole holiday weekend, Akerna “predicts that US cannabis shoppers will spend $251 million for the four days around Thanksgiving (11/24-11/27), a 60% increase over daily average sales.”

SF dispensary owners tell us this Green Wednesday phenomenon is more than just hype. “Yes, the day before Thanksgiving, otherwise known as Green Wednesday, has historically seen a surge in sales every year,” Green Cross owner Kevin Reed tells SFist. “Traditionally, it was definitely in the running for the second busiest day of the year after 4/20. Of course the last year has been anything but traditional which has skewed the numbers. Still, the 2020 Green Wednesday was still one of our top five busiest days and we expect the same for tomorrow.”

We would normally encourage you to hit the dispensaries early to avoid the crowds, but even that may not even work this Wednesday. “Although our busiest hours on an average weekday tend to be in the afternoon, we're busy all day on Green Wednesday from late morning into the evening,” Reed says.

Your best bet may be to do advance orders and online pickup on Wednesday; that is, go to your dispensary’s website and place your order beforehand, and then they usually have a separate and shorter line for buyers like you. But as we saw on 4/20 this year at Purple Star on Mission Street, even the advance order line was just as long as the walk-up customer line. You may want to just order marijuana delivery, and be patient with your driver and tip a little extra for Danksgiving.

Related: Top Brands to Try on Green Wednesday, the Black Friday of Cannabis [SFist]

Image: Joe Kukua, SFist