Retailers will tell you THC drinks have never sold better. Many wholesalers and drink distributors will tell you they've had to stop ordering them. Both are true, and that's the problem. Nobody gets fired for skipping a purchase order in October. Plenty of people get fired for sitting on forty pallets of unsellable, possibly illegal, seltzer on December 12th. So the orders get smaller, then later, then they stop. Congress hasn't technically banned anything yet, but the supply chain has already been forced to vote early and many are voting the safer play. The category is selling out from the front of the store while it starves from the back. The holidays and Dry January, the two biggest moments on the calendar, land right in the gap. A lot can change politically between now and December but, for now, the emptying pipeline is the real deadline, and it arrives weeks before the legal one. Retailers don't leave a hole in the cooler. Once hemp beverages lose their place in line, it's hard to get it back. Even with an eleventh-hour fix from Congress (or, more likely, another temporary reprieve), the damage may already be done, and the widening hole in the supply chain will not be a quick one to fix. How long does it take to refill a pipeline that has learned not to trust the calendar?