Cannabis menu + case-card discipline — the merchandising decisions that move margin

Every customer who walks in encounters the case before they encounter the budtender’s recommendation. The case is the silent-sell. A product at eye level + with a clear case card moves 4-7x more units than the same product on a low shelf with no card. Multiply across ~3,000 cards in a typical dispensary and the merchandising decisions matter as much as the buying decisions. The case is the low-cost iteration loop — re-arrange this week, see what moves, adjust next week.

1. 1**House Picks (eye-level, brightest section).** 6-8 products the GM + senior budtenders genuinely recommend this week. Earned position; rotates every Monday based on what’s currently selling well + what we want to push. Case card carries a budtender name + reason: ‘Charlie picked this for the limonene-forward terpene profile + the freshness — packaged 11 days ago.’ Per /guides/cannabis-budtender-hiring-rubric, the genuinely-curious-budtender trait surfaces here.
2. 2**New This Week (left side, bright).** Drops + new cultivars + new edibles. Customers who shop weekly look here first. Case card mentions the drop date. Product moves out of New This Week after 14 days regardless of sales — keeps the section meaningful.
3. 3**Customer Favorite (eye-level adjacent to House Picks).** Top-velocity SKUs from the last 30 days. Pure data, not opinion. Customers anchor on social proof; this is the section that signals popularity. Case card: ‘Top-3 best-selling Sativa this month.’
4. 4**Best Value (right side, bright).** Highest-margin or highest-quality-per-dollar products. NOT the cheapest — value isn’t price. Case card frames the math: ‘Same potency at $4 less per gram.’
5. 5**Featured Vendor (rotating section, prominent).** Co-merchandising lever. The vendor co-funds the case card + case-position; we get a vendor partnership story to tell + the vendor gets prime real estate. 2-week rotation. Per /guides/cannabis-vendor-diligence-fire-or-keep, this is leverage with vendors who deliver well.
6. 6**Higher Shelf — Standard (eye-level secondary).** The bulk of the case. Organized by category (Sativa / Hybrid / Indica + edibles + concentrates) with terpene-profile sub-organization within each. Case cards minimal: name, vendor, potency range, terpene chip. NOT marketing copy.
7. 7**Lower Shelf — Clearance/Aging (lowest position, smallest signage).** Products approaching test-result expiry OR slow-mover from past 60 days. Honest pricing. Customers who price-shop find this section + appreciate the transparency. Case cards small + neutral.

1. 1**Monday morning, 30 minutes pre-open.** Manager + senior budtender walk the case together. House Picks rotated. New This Week refreshed. Aging SKUs moved down. New arrivals integrated.
2. 2**Wednesday mid-week check.** 10 minutes. Anything that’s NOT moving as expected gets re-positioned. Anything that’s flying off the shelf gets reordered before it stocks out (per /guides/vendor-reliability-and-the-math-of-reorder).
3. 3**Friday afternoon prep.** 20 minutes. Weekend prep — top up the popular sections + push the slower products to spots where the weekend rush will surface them.
4. 4**Vendor pop-in alignment.** When a vendor rep visits, they want to talk about their products. Use the visit — they often bring case cards + samples. Co-design the Featured Vendor card with them. Their stake in the result + their product knowledge make better cards than you can write alone.
5. 5**Quarterly: full reset.** Once a quarter, walk the case as if you’re a first-time customer. Question every section. What’s confusing? What’s out of date? Which sections aren’t earning their position? Reset.

Case cards are advertising under WAC 314-55-155. Every word is subject to the same rules as your website + your GBP listing per /guides/cannabis-google-business-profile-wac-advertising. The good news: case cards live behind glass on the premises and aren’t read by the same scanners that target dispensary websites. The bad news: WSLCB inspectors read them DIRECTLY when they visit. Disciplined operators write case cards that survive a walk-through.

• **Allowed:** Strain name, vendor, potency range (THC/CBD%), terpene profile, packaging date, suggested-pairing language (‘pairs well with after-dinner downtime’), cultivation method, geographic origin.
• **NOT allowed:** Efficacy claims (‘great for anxiety’ / ‘helps you sleep’), ‘cure / heal / treat’ in any form, ‘best’ / ‘premier’ / ‘highest’ without substantiation, comparative health claims (‘less harsh than’), references to medical conditions, any imagery suggesting on-property consumption.

• **Vendor-supplied marketing copy** that violates WAC 314-55-155. Vendors’ own marketing teams operate under DIFFERENT rules than your dispensary; their copy may not be WSLCB-compliant for in-store display. Re-write to your store voice + WAC-clean framework.
• **Stale dates.** A ‘packaged-on’ date 90 days old reads as old product. If the product’s been on the shelf 90 days, decide: clearance section, or rotate out. Don’t leave a stale date visible.
• **Strain-effect language past the strict factual.** ‘Sativa-leaning’ OK. ‘Energetic + creative’ — gray zone. ‘Helps you focus’ — efficacy claim, NOT OK.
• **Inflated potency.** Some vendors round up; some labs inflate. Per /guides/cannabis-coa-reading-discipline, your case-card potency should match the CoA. If a third-party verification differs from the vendor’s label, list the lower number — protects against a customer-complaint or WSLCB-audit follow-up.
• **Hand-written cards on rush days.** Hand-written reads as unprofessional + the writing varies day-to-day. Pre-print the standard cards; reserve handwriting for rapid ‘TODAY ONLY’ moments where the speed matters more than polish — and even then, in pencil with the date so you don’t leave a 3-week-old ‘TODAY ONLY’ sign up.

• **Case card auto-generation** — the per-product page in /admin/products generates a print-ready case card (5x3 inches, store-branded) with WAC-clean fields auto-populated from the product record. Manager edits the optional 1-line description; the rest is locked to the data. Per-product re-print on demand.
• **WAC-155 strike-list scanner on case-card descriptions** — same engine that runs against GBP + website copy. If a manager types ‘helps with anxiety’ into the description field, the form rejects + suggests compliant alternatives.
• **Case-position tracking** — `products.case_position` field with values like ‘house_picks’ / ‘new_this_week’ / ‘customer_favorite’ / ‘clearance’. Surfaces in /admin/operations/case-rotation as a 7-section grid; manager drag-drops Monday morning. Auto-bumps stale ‘new_this_week’ entries past 14 days.
• **Velocity feed for House Picks rotation** — /admin/operations/case-rotation surfaces last-7-days unit-velocity per SKU so the manager picks House Picks based on actual data + not gut.
• **Vendor-co-merchandising tracker** — Featured Vendor section logs which vendor + which 2-week window. Per-vendor co-merchandising-impact report (vendor velocity in vs out of feature) feeds back into vendor-relationship discussions per /guides/cannabis-vendor-diligence-fire-or-keep.