The heyday of marijuana sales in Colorado — back in 2020 when recreational and medical sales topped out at a combined $226 million — is a distant memory, as the state’s dispensaries struggle through an economic downturn, with sales plummeting and small businesses foundering.
With weed sales plummeting, career opportunities in the industry are growing scarce. Colorado ranked as the No. 2 state forin the past year, with more than 10,000 eliminated, according to the Vangst Jobs Report. “There’s too many stores, there’s too much cultivation, there’s too many products,” she said in a phone interview. “Right now, all the investors are sitting on the sidelines, and kind of waiting to time the bottom — and nobody knows exactly when that’s going to happen.”
Beth Bice of Charlotte, N.C., smokes a joint on the bus during a marijuana tour hosted by My 420 Tours in Denver on Dec. 6, 2014. Bice saw a video advertising the tours and said, “lets go to Colorado.” During the day, tourists visited La Conte’s grow facility, La Conte’s Clone Bar & Dispensary, Native Roots dispensary and Illuzions Glass Gallery. Even some of the big players in Colorado’s cannabis industry aren’t immune to the changing tides.
At Native Roots, he described the average basket order as down, with customers buying fewer products and visiting less often. But the broader Colorado market is facing problems right now because it’s competing within three separate industries, Hodas said. The first is the regulated marijuana industry and its issue of price compression, while the second is the black market, which doesn’t tax consumers.
The agency, which regulates Colorado’s largest cannabis market in terms of stores, is “working hard to educate the industry on the importance of our safe storage rules for product and cash to be in a locked safe overnight to reduce opportunities for burglaries, which can be especially devastating to smaller operators.”For Truman Bradley, executive director of the Marijuana Industry Group, “Colorado is the ghost of Christmas future.