Updated analysis and chart of the Legal Retail Landscape 9/30/2014

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*Cannarex is our featured new retailer for this update.  To become a featured retailer, please contact the Center with good information and with a kind spirit. Thank you Cannarex for modelling both!

by Dominic Corva, Executive Director

Today we update what we know about the retail landscape so far.  My research over the last several days shows information for 44 retail stores are now open, out of 61 retail licenses issued.  Blaine Stum, marijuana policy advisor for the City of Spokane, recently reached out to let me know he counted 51 open stores, so we are missing 7 open stores in the list below.  If yours is one of them, please contact us so we can list you.

It is a little surprising that many stores do not have their own web sites, although some of these have Facebook pages.  Most are listed by Leafly, Allbud, and Greenlight Washington.  If you are a retail store that does not have a web site AND a Facebook page AND listings on all three of those locators, you should consider moving on that.  Advertising restrictions vary by jurisdiction but most have rigorous limits, so not taking advantage of these basic options is hurting your business.

Given limits on advertising, it is also surprising that so many retail location names are not clearly indicative of the product being sold.  This is especially problematic in rural Washington, along major transit routes such as I-90.  The Ellensberg Apothecary, for example, sits on a major tourism transit route for folks wishing to recreate outdoors.  But since they cannot for legal reasons make clear in their store signage that they sell recreational cannabis, and since an apothecary might be any herbal medicine store, they could probably use “Legal Cannabis” somewhere in their name.

I also want to give a shout out to Cannarex, which just opened in Mt. Vernon and has a very nice web site.  They called me last week to make sure I knew they were opening, and given my lack of human resource support they made my job much easier.  Thank you Cannarex!  I am happy to help publicize retailers free of charge for providing information so I don’t have to go digging for it.

If any of this information is incorrect, please email dominic@caspcenter.org and I will update the list.

I did my best to update from the hours of operation that were made available to us a month ago, but it’s clear that things change rapidly and many folks are only “sometimes” open due to supply issues, in addition to many folks changing their hours of operation.  Most of the following 44 entries are updated, but not all.  Please call before assuming the information is current.