Why Are Concentrates and Cannabis So Much!!!

CannaBusiness
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#1

Okay so I’ve been buying one lb of Cannabis once a month for 500$ and extracting it into two trays.

I am not a vendor I am a customer and one thing I’ve noticed is the prices for dispensary cannabis is too much and the concentrates are too much.

Who the hell would pay 350$/an ounce for cannabis and 70$+/ for a gram of shatter and 90$/a gram for disty.

Honestly I am really wondering the need to sell concentrates and whole leaf for so much money.

I’m glad the states that are legal made it so you could make rosin and alcohol concentrates as well as growing your own cannabis. But come on. It’s ridiculous and I wanna know if anyone knows why it’s like this?

MA Distillate Price at Dispensary
#2

Overhead

The added $ covers lease, power, employee pay.

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#3

After the peak though it goes down, right. Like in Colorado it cant be 70$ a gram of shatter, right? I’m in Massachusetts and they haven’t hit thier peak. I just wanna know if I should put more knowledge now into growing better crops.

#4

depends where you live in colorado. they say the whole legal thing is for the consumers. it isnt. it’s so the government can consolidate and tax sales. even with dispensaries everywhere, prices can be fixed. also, most people running dispos are 1.) greedy and 2.) stupid unfortunately. They are penny wise and pound stupid. They get their weed at 600-1000 dollars a pound and sell it for 2-300 an ounce.

None of you can say shit. I was there, I saw how much they pay. OG medicinals indoor for 1100. sold for 280 out the door. Sell one pound and the 2 workers you have there are paid. I saw tiny dispos make 5k in sales a day. I’ll fight over this.

So what are you paying for? You are subsidizing poor investments, business practices, and greed.

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#5

Is any other industry different? Automobile, clothing, electronics, ect ect…
@GroovyOctopusLabs did that $500 # come with a COA or are you OK with smoking eagle 20, Avid and whatever else the grower decided to use? A state R&D test is $800 in Cali, employees to grow, employees to harvest, buying the property, setting up the grow, licensing fees, property tax. The list goes on and on my bro. At the end of the day you cannot compare a black market # to a legal #. This is why the prices are so different from the street to the store. The beard brothers have a good write up following a G from seed to sale and the way it’s taxed. They have it on their website, you should read that.

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#6

Nah grams of shatter and wax are 10-20$ a gram. Shatter and wax are dead. Solventless is the new heady thing and it can be 45-120$ a gram. Can get very good ounces of tree for 100$ an ounce. The 400$ an ounce is just trendy strains and selling to idiots or trust fund kids. Distillate is also like 25$ a gram. Carts are the only thing in Colorado that are stupid as shit at 20-40$ a half gram and 50-80$ a gram for carts… absolutely stupidly over priced and I’ll just buy live resin and make my own carts for 1/3 the cost. Don’t even get me started it’s retarded

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#7

Pueblo aint trust fund kids. I went to every spot out there. 100 dollar ounces were trash. I could literally go get a better 100 dollar ounce in FL than in CO. If you are anywhere near CO springs and you rely on legal weed, you are screwed.

That argument only works for the operations that are on their shit. Some groups rely on their license as a barrier to competition. Many of the dispensaries in Colorado had pesticide ridden shit. Maggies farm was next to a power plant, just bio-accumulating heavy metals.

Many operations had workers doing stupid shit like hand filling pre rolls and scraping weeds. I know you are big on labor efficiency, but not everyone is.

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#8

Oh ya springs and Pueblo are shit. Talking about Denver. And springs is only med. allthough I lived in the springs in 2016 and i got one of the best ounces I’ve ever smoked for 120$. Gotta point your homies to some better dispos down there

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#9

With no interstate commerce pricing heavily depends on the number of licensees in a given market. Massachusetts is of course theoretically an unlimited license market on the state level, but on the county/municipal level there are a ton of retail moratoriums. Not to mention the long time it takes to get licensed in MA (plan for 1.5-2 years if you’re starting from scratch and aren’t an equity provisions applicant), correct me if I’m wrong but only around 19 adult use dispensaries are operational in the entire state. And until that greatly increases, the existing retail stores will continue to have high prices.

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#10

Honestly if I had an in state supplyer to source me a legitimate # of cannabis for up to 750$ a month because thats that my budget supports then I would be buying legitimate cannabis. I’m currently buying 500$ #'s of home grown that are total bullshit with out a lie and with out a doubt total shit!

I’m also a registered medical cannabis patient and have been for 6 years. I remember when atg in salem opened up and it was expensive af. Though the technical caregivers that sold medical cannabis out of thier vans pre-dispensary weren’t any cheaper either. Same thing tbh 350$/ounce. Great stuff just too much for such a small amount.

Its only been this year that ive been getting a lb monthly cause a friend of mine is trying to just move it as quick as possible.

Still though I would be buying better quality if I could or had access to it at a cheap price.

#11

Part of it is that they cannot operate like a regular business. They are bound by the 280e federal tax, since cannabis is still a controlled substance under federal law, they cannot claim business deductions other than the cost of goods sold.

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#12

You can break down your business into several smaller businesses. Your labor pool business can deduct labor. Your real estate company can deduct property improvements/maintenance. Your grow store can deduct fertilizer and equipment costs. These companies can operate at a loss.

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#13

Just read into that. Yeah that’s I’d have to say is about 1/2 the reason.

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#14

Sure any business owner in any industry should try to mitigate their tax liability. Setting up other businesses will incur their own costs, licenses, and problems as well and you better hope the IRS sees it the same way. It’s not fair to expect cannabis companies, or any company, to operate at a loss because some people cant afford their product.

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#15

I can only speak for California, but being a licensed operator here bears an incredible cost. Whether by design or not, it seems that only those with the deepest of pockets with practically unlimited access to capital will be the last ones standing. Because it’s almost a guarantee that any licensed manufacturer is going to be operating in the red for the first few months as they go through the process of becoming compliant.

But aside from that, California has a big conundrum on its hands, because the market seems to be sharing your disdain for legal weed prices. Some municipalities are causing consumers to pay up to 40% on taxes, which is enough to make even the most health conscientious consumer go back to the black market. Lawmakers just saw $$$ and went for the money grab, without thinking through the fact that they would have to be competing with a thriving underground economy that is the black market. Now they are wondering why they’ve only collected $400 million of the billion in revenue they projected to receive for this year.

The BCC has just launched a public awareness campaign that’s attempting to educate the consumer on the benefits of buying from licensed dispensaries, but i doubt it will be very effective at convincing people otherwise. The only way i can see something like this being effective is by going all in with a reefer madness style fear mongering borderline propaganda camapaign highlighting the levels of contaminants found in black market weed and extracts, and some of the fatal consequences that have occurred from consuming it.

I noticed that with the recent uptick in enforcement that’s playing out here in Cali, that black market prices are also back on the rise. It’s interesting to see how all this is going to play out. These are interesting times we are living in here in the wild wild west.

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#16

One thing about getting flower from dispos in maine is they are always tumbled. So, yeah, you might be getting a zipper for 140, it taste like fire, but its not sticky. I am personal and had some bad luck a year ago and was out for a few months and had to rely on a dispo and it was piss poor. The carts seemed to last forever but you had to rip on them pretty hard.

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#17

Down in DC, the shady sort of people who tumble also sometimes spray stuff on the buds to try and replace the kief they remove. Lowest of the lowlife. Poisoners.

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#18

Yeah that’s what the inner city dispensaries do, they tumble the buds and your left with stuff that burns so quick you wonder why you purchased it. The dispensaries further out from boston have great cannabis. Inner city dispensaries are better for carts and concentrates not at all while leaf.

#19

Nonononononono, I’m not saying the entire business operates at a loss;

I’m saying your taxable businesses can shoulder all the weight of the tax burden. Your federally legal business can pay and deduct taxes, operate at 0 profit to a loss, and then pass the final cost to the Licensed Cannabis business.

That end price goes in to the price of weed. I know this works, as Los Suenos (the largest legal cannabis farm in the united states) utilized this trick. It lets you take out loans, bank, deduct taxes, and undercut people.

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#20

I trim for some commercial ops, they own dispos. All of the trim from my t4, they use for prerolls. It’s a mix of fans, sugar leaf, and about 10 strains. They normally net 25+lbs trim and preroll it out. Huge profits!

Same ppl wanna give 1600/lb, flip at 350oz.
Lol

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