There is a version of a cannabis shop that works like a phone store. Staff are paid a percentage, the expensive thing is always the recommended thing, and a customer who came in for one item leaves with four. It is a legitimate way to run a retail business. It is not the one we are building.

Commission changes the conversation before anybody speaks

The moment a member of staff earns more by selling you the higher-margin product, every recommendation they make carries a second motive, whether they intend it to or not. Customers sense it. It is why so many people describe their first dispensary visit as faintly embarrassing: they knew they were being sold to, and they did not know enough to push back.

So nobody on our sales floor is paid on what they sell. Our staff are paid for what they know and how well they explain it. The practical consequence is that the answer to a question is allowed to be inconvenient.

The questions we ask before we recommend anything

A useful recommendation depends on things a price list cannot tell us. In a first conversation we will usually want to know:

  • Whether you have used cannabis before, and how recently. Tolerance from fifteen years ago is not tolerance today.
  • What you are hoping the evening or the afternoon looks like afterwards.
  • Whether you want to inhale anything at all. A great many customers do not, and there is a full menu for them.
  • How much time you have before you need to be functional again.
  • Whether anybody at home needs the product kept properly secured.

None of that is intrusive and none of it is a sales script. It is the difference between handing somebody a product and handing them the right one.

The vocabulary is a barrier, and it is our job to remove it

Cannabis retail has accumulated a private language: cultivars and chemovars, terpene profiles, distillate against live resin against rosin, full-spectrum, entourage effects, one to one ratios. Some of it is meaningful. Some of it is marketing. A customer cannot tell which is which, and pretending the distinction is obvious is a way of making people feel stupid for asking.

We would rather explain a term than use it. If a member of our staff says something you do not follow, the correct response is to stop them, and they will expect it.

Saying no is part of the job

Sometimes the honest answer is that nothing in the shop is right. Somebody describes a medical situation that needs a clinician rather than a retailer. Somebody is looking for an effect that cannabis does not reliably produce. Somebody wants to try an edible ninety minutes before driving home.

In each of those cases the correct outcome is that we sell nothing, explain why, and mean it. A shop that cannot afford to lose a sale will eventually make a bad one.

What this looks like on the floor

Printed menus at the counter with cannabinoid content, terpene results and batch dates on them, so you can read rather than ask. Certificates of analysis available for anything we carry. No minimum purchase and no queue management that pushes a decision. Staff who will tell you when the cheaper item is the better one for what you have described, because there is no reason for them not to.

We would rather sell one thing that works than four that do not. Customers come back to the first kind of shop.