This is the second of two articles on the state of Cannabis Retail. Part 1 covered Cannabis Retail Shop Limitations and Operations. This article focuses on the cannabis customer experience.
A recent poll of regular users shows that majority of people report getting their cannabis from legal sources (except in California!). But what does the consumer experience at cannabis dispensaries? What makes a cannabis dispensary good, bad, or ugly?
Different States, Different Rules, Different Cannabis Customer Experience
Regulators in all the legal states have a model for their cannabis businesses; Alcohol regulation.
Cannabis is still illegal federally, so cannabis must be regulated by the individual states. I’ve purchased cannabis in twelve of the 24 states with legal cannabis (hey, I can’t get everywhere!) including; Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Montana, Nevada, Illinois, Michigan, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Colorado. In each of these states, the dispensary consumer experience has many commonalities and some differences. Big differences.
Regulations can make a big difference in the consumer experience. For example, in Illinois you can’t smell the flower you want to buy. Like buying a bottle of wine without knowing what is inside the bottle, but cannabis stores can’t offer tastings or, as is the case in Illinois, even give you a whiff of the terpenes. In states where the product can be accessed (as in smelled), you can check the smell of the flower you are purchasing.
What makes the cannabis customer experience?
In any industry, great and good retailers care about their customers. In a good consumer experience, the budtender 1) gets to know the customer’s needs and 2) can describe the effects, the taste, and the quality of the cure for their various products. If the retailer is in a state where it’s legal to offer sniffs of the product, it makes everyone’s life easier.
Many retailers are not focused on the qualities of the product. A bad retailer focuses on THC content and profitability of product. Many (maybe most) consumers seem to be fixated on the THC content of the product, which is actually mostly irrelevant.
Showing care isn’t easy in the legal cannabis retail environment. Great retailers also care about who supplied the product. A store in Telluride, Colorado (Telluride Green Room) was particularly good about their growers. In fact, they were cultivating (pardon the pun) growers who were growing some heritage strains like Acapulco Gold. Really! And as of this writing, they appear to have some in inventory! The Acapulco Gold was fabulous and the remembered taste and effect were not just nostalgic, but real. And really good. But that’s one retailer in a really unfocused marketplace. Unfocused because all the states are separate and apart from one another.
The Good – A great cannabis customer experience: Taos, New Mexico
The best retailer I’ve met is in Taos, New Mexico where I get to live part-time. I’m lucky to live there and I’m also lucky to have met this retailer. He cares about the growers, the cannabis products he sells and he cares about the quality of the product he sells. He cares about his customers and he runs a very good operation to my eyes. The name of the shop is Bighorn Weed and it’s a delightful place to walk into. Nice open space where you don’t feel rushed…ever. The decor might be a bit spare in its design, but it works. His success is based on many things other than the quality of the cannabis. But it does start with the quality of cannabis products he sells. He cares about the growers and that means he cares about the customers too.
There are several other retailers who have impressed me as being concerned about their cannabis customer experience; One, the aforementioned Telluride Green Room and another in Taos, Dispensary 7884. This link is to their Weedmaps page. They don’t list their products on any of the sites with menus and they don’t have their own site. But what they do have is a wide selection and very friendly service. The store is veteran owned and the people there are highly knowledgeable and very pleasant to be around. You really can’t ask for more than that.
One last dispensary that is well worth mentioning in this article and it was the first dispensary I ever went to in 2014 is in the little town of Walsenberg, CO, just off Interstate 25. When I first went in I they asked to see my driver’s license. That gave me some trepidation about what I was going to experience, but I was seriously wrong. Colorado state requires showing drivers licenses when going into a dispensary, so my trepidation was unfounded. They were the nicest people and were happy to meet someone who cared about quality beyond the percentage of THC. The name of the dispensary is Bud Hut. It’s located in an old Pizza Hut location. And it’s well worth the trip off of Interstate 25 on the way to Santa Fe.
The Bad
Given all the good retailers I’ve encountered, what and who are the bad retailers. A bad retailer might be the product of an overly regulated environment. Sometimes it’s because the owners are assholes. Not everyone in the cannabis industry is nice. Such is the case with the one retailer, and I won’t mention their name, who had tons of promise. The retailer is vertically integrated; they grow and sell their own product. This seems like a good operational strategy, but…their employee turnover was sometimes 100% a month!!! One month. 100% turnover. While it’s nice to sell 100% of inventory a month, employees aren’t inventory. There are systems to learn, there should be product knowledge to gain. Employee turnover costs companies.
This same employer actually drove customers away because of poor service, which made for a bad cannabis customer experience. This same retailer tried to open another location a block away, but with a different name. Customers caught on immediately. The list goes on. There seems to be a high greed factor here, but it is what it is. They continue to sell product and at this point in the evolution of cannabis retail, the customers aren’t selective yet. It really hurts the cannabis consumer experience.
The Ugly
Ugly can be a different story. Almost every retailer in any business wants to have the classiest store as they possibly can. In the cannabis retail business, it’s sometimes not possible. In many legal states, municipalities don’t want pot shops. Why? While there are many reasons, they all boil down to we don’t want “that kind” of person in our town. But they’re already there! I’d rather not identify the town that forced this ugly shop to move outside the city limits, but it’s in the great U.S. north and is very close to one of the entrances to a huge National Park.
The dispensary, shown here, was forced to move just outside the town limits because the town didn’t want dispensaries plying their retail trade inside the town limits. Why? Probably because the town is a bit out of touch with the people that come into dispensaries and don’t seem to have a clue about the kinds of good a dispensary can do for a town and the retail in the town.
Customers
Sometimes the customers are the problem and help to destroy their own cannabis customer experience. The cannabis market is still in its early stages. A lot of consumers, maybe a majority, believe that the higher level of THC in their cannabis, the better it is. Fact is; THC levels do not equal a better effect (buzz). It’s just not the case. Cannabis is a very complex plant and it’s not just the THC. There are too many compounds to list that may (or may not) have an effect on the user.
Consumers drive a dispensary’s business, which in turn drives the grower. The result of uneducated consumers is that growers are under pressure to grow high THC plants and the labs are under tremendous pressure to ‘inflate’ the percentage of THC in the plants they test. Growers ‘shop’ labs that will give them a higher percentage of THC.
Finally
The true test for cannabis retail will be how regulators, retailers, growers, and consumers learn to work together—and to focus on the plant’s full story instead of just its THC number. When consumers make educated choices, retailers invest in product knowledge and atmosphere, and regulations allow safe, sensory experiences, every dispensary has the potential to feel less like a transaction and more like a community hub. The moment we shift from chasing percentages to celebrating terpenes, heritage strains, and genuine customer care is when legal cannabis retail will truly come of age.
