Dispensary Pricing Is Mostly a Racket

Cultivation tax, excise tax, sales tax, testing fees — legal cannabis genuinely carries more overhead than the guy who used to text you. That part's real, and it's the honest excuse every shop leans on when a $45 eighth shows up on the shelf.

But that excuse gets stretched to cover plain markup. The same batch shows up at two shops twenty minutes apart at $38 and $65, same THC on the same COA, same brand, same week. That's not tax. That's a shop pricing to what the neighborhood will tolerate, not to what the flower is worth.

My take: price should track quality and cure, not just brand hype or a strain name that's trending on Weedmaps. I've paid $70 for jars that couldn't touch a $35 jar from a shop two towns over. If a budtender can't tell you why a jar costs what it costs beyond "that's just the price," that's your answer.

Vote with your wallet. Track the strains and brands that actually deliver at a fair price, skip the ones riding a name, and say so publicly. Pricing only stays honest where people are loud about getting burned.