10 Dispensary Red Flags to Watch Out For

1. High Prices

Sorry, investors and owners looking to make a quick buck—your dispensary is not better than the shop down the street because it's cooler. As long as your prices are high when the market is low, we don’t care about your frills or hardships—not even those of small companies (which seems to understand the importance of value brands much more than their deep-pocketed counterparts, for what it's worth). We have seen the wholesale sheets and know how much you are all making. At least throw us a penny preroll to suck on, would ya?

2. Fake Discounts

Not all customers check their receipt after making a purchase, but we do, especially when there's supposed to be some kind of bundle deal applied. And roughly one out of every three times, it doesn’t show up. Cut that shit out.

3. Fake Promotions

For example, if you lure us to your store with the promise of a food truck, your company had better be paying for our damn falafel, got it?!?

4. Limited Inventory

We’ll keep this one simple: it’s okay to push your own company’s brands, but when they make up more than half of your menu and they’re not significantly less expensive than they would be elsewhere even though you removed all the middlemen, then you’re no better than ripoff breweries and your dispensary sucks and we’re not shopping there.

5. Paper Menus

We can’t believe we have to say this in 2023, but if you’re still printing daily menus without a digital option, you’re not ready to be in business. Close it up now before you waste any more of our time.

6. Virtue Signaling

There’s nothing wrong with being good people, respecting others, or anything of the sort. But in order to show us you really care, you’re going to have to go much further than hanging up a Pride flag for one month out of the year.

7. Unneccessary Waiting

Look, it’s one thing if there is a line because you have a lot of customers. It’s another thing entirely if your dispensary is set up in such a way that it takes an extra several minutes for workers to retrieve products.

8. Law Enforcement

We understand that a lot of your host communities are extorting you and making you hire former detectives with big chunky white sneakers to work the front door. But those are cops, retired or not, and they should not be in a dispensary. Please show them the door, or we won't be walking through yours.

9. Lack of Dabs

Concentrates are small. It doesn’t take a lot of space to store them—even if you’re doing the right thing and keeping the live resins and rosins on ice. Our advice: stock at least 10 options, with at least two of those dabs in the $30 to $40 range.

10. Cringey Managers

Let’s just put it this way—at no point do we want to feel like your store’s older managers are banging your younger employees. This isn’t TGI Fridays in 1994.

This article originally appeared in Talking Joints Memo and is syndicated here with permission.