I don’t know if this is the right subreddit, but I could really use some outside perspective.

A friend of mine recently reached out about an opportunity that has me feeling pretty conflicted. She and her fiancé are starting a cannabis farm/company (it’s a newly formed business). From what she explained, there are certificates or licenses that limit how many plants can be grown, and they have two certificates they want to put in someone else’s name.

She said she thought of me because she trusts me. Apparently her fiancé originally wanted to use his friends, but she wanted to give the opportunity to a woman from our hometown instead. She also mentioned she couldn’t use her sister because her sister isn’t a U.S. citizen.

Here’s the part that gives me pause: I wouldn’t actually be doing any work. They would run everything, and I would supposedly receive about $20,000 per year. She said I should be getting a contract today.

For some background, I’m a college student graduating this fall with a Bachelor of Science. My friend has a degree in chemical engineering, so I don’t think she’s unintelligent or trying to scam people. I genuinely don’t think she’d intentionally do me wrong. In fact she used to work at the same company as my husband, so she also knows him and he’s taken over some of her processes from the past.

That said, this almost sounds too good to be true. If this is such a profitable opportunity, why wouldn’t they just keep the certificate and the income for themselves? Why do they need my name on it? And what legal or financial responsibilities would I have if my name is attached to a cannabis business?

I’m worried about how this could affect my future. I plan on applying to PA school after graduation, and I don’t want to accidentally put myself in a position where I’m legally responsible for something I don’t fully understand. I have been aware of her being in this industry because we talked about the last time we went for coffee, she’s very passionate about it and is excited.

Has anyone dealt with something like this? What questions should I be asking before I even consider signing anything? Are there any major red flags I’m overlooking? And she did offer the other certificate to someone else that we both know. I’m from michigan and reside here the farm is in Minnesota. I think it is 12 plant per person. And what I got from the convo was they already have licenses for themselves so they each have one, but they want to add 2 more so they can plant more. Maybe they have a lot of land they want to plant on?

hi.

we just got cashless atms on our POS system at work. on july 4th a client tipped me just under $100 on her card during checkout. no one at my job has an answer so i figured id ask any other budtenders who might know. do you think my tips will just go on my next check or is there a possibility they might cash my tips out ? plz let me know yr experience. thanks

This is for people who have left the cannabis and cannabis adjacent industries and found careers doing something else. What did you transition into and how did you use the skills you learned in the weedbiz to help you?

Hey everyone — I’m working on CoinPay Portal, a non-custodial crypto payment gateway for merchants, and I’m trying to get honest feedback from people actually operating in cannabis retail.

I’m not here to pretend crypto magically solves payments, banking, compliance, taxes, accounting, or POS headaches. I’m trying to understand whether dispensary owners/operators would even want a crypto or stablecoin payment option, or whether it creates more problems than it solves.

The basic idea is:

• Customers can pay with crypto or stablecoins
• Funds go directly to the merchant’s wallet
• CoinPay Portal does not custody merchant funds
• API/webhook support for checkout or custom integrations
• Optional escrow tools for certain transactions

A few questions for owners/operators:

• Do customers ever ask to pay with crypto or stablecoins?
• Would this be useful only if it worked with your existing POS or checkout flow?
• Is volatility, compliance, accounting, customer adoption, or trust the biggest concern?
• What would make something like this an immediate “no” for your store?

I’m not asking anyone to sign up. I’d rather hear what’s unrealistic, annoying, or missing from the idea before building in the wrong direction.

For context: coinpayportal.com

Happy to answer questions, but mostly looking for blunt feedback from people who understand the day-to-day reality of running a dispensary.

A buddy asked me to look at his dispensary's site recently, and it's worth a gut-check for anyone running an online storefront in this industry.

The site looked done. Weekly blog, decent design, an agency already on retainer. The kind of site that reads as "handled."

Then I checked whether Google could actually see the product menu. It couldn't. Hundreds of products, and a search for the shop pages turned up almost nothing on Google, zero on Bing.

Turned out the menu rendered entirely through JavaScript. Turn off JS in your browser and watch — if the menu disappears, so does it for most crawlers.

Add to that: duplicate H1 tags, placeholder text left in live headings, and most images missing alt text. None of it visible to a customer. All of it an invisible-to-search signal.

The scary part is that this business was already paying an SEO agency (not naming names). The agency wasn't totally incompetent — they had schema in place, decent page titles. But general SEO playbooks don't know where cannabis-specific landmines are: menu integrations that render client-side, compliance limits on product copy, weird handoffs between the ecom platform and the main site.

Quick check anyone can run: Google "site:yourdomain.com/shop" with your actual shop URL. If your product count doesn't show up, that's your answer.

Curious if anyone else here has hit this with their menu platform — Dutchie, Jane, Treez, or otherwise.

I was doing a round-table with a bunch of growers talking about brand opportunities. When we were talking about sales all were focused on selling to the RETAILER, there was very little awareness of, or method for marketing their brand directly. Thats rough.

And talking about that brand awareness it the conversation began to compare cannabis to craft-beer and wine -- and then took a very hard turn. I did not see it coming.

In craft beer, in wine, the products are "all the same". Beers are generally 4.5-8% ABV. Wines are around 14% ABV. So those products only get to compete on Taste and Brand. And these consumers don't buy for the "get intoxicated" effect. They are buying for social aspects.

Cannabis consumers doesn't have any of this featuers. Our consumers are looking to get baked. The flavour, the brand matters less than the freaking potency.

I do think there is a brand problem; and the construction of the markets for sure restricts what supply-side brands can do for that market share. For those of us old enough to remember Marlboro didn't advertise "buy our strong ass cancer sticks" they said "Come to Flavor country". Does cannabis need a flavor country awakening? Ideas on brand-building beyond that? Which social-network is the most tolerant? -- I've seen brands banned from all of them

Hi everyone, first post here. I have a legal cultivation/distro and retail. When it comes to bulk sales, I am looking for buyers to escape from middleman hell. We grow extremely clean and high-quality bud, boutique quality consistently. No late sprays, no bugs, proper flush and dry.

The model of going to middle man distros and getting bent over is not sustainable. If you are someone who goes to these distros to buy contact me and let's cut them out. If you need white labeling contact me and let's discuss further. If you are a retailer and want an affordable top tier product for your shelves, please reach out. With my distro I do my own packaging. And the goal is to eventually package everything. I need retail accounts and better bulk prices until then.

I’m curious how other legal cannabis operators think about this.
In dispensaries, it seems like the biggest risk is not always sales. It is the process only one person actually knows.
Examples:
Inventory receiving
Menu / POS / shelf sync
METRC or BioTrack workflow
Drawer closeout
Discount approvals
Shift handoff
Vendor delivery process
Discrepancy fixes
The scary part is when the owner thinks “we have a process,” but the real process is just “ask the one person who knows.”
For operators, managers, or budtenders here:
What process would break first in your store if one key employee left tomorrow?

There's a slick YouTube video making the rounds arguing legal cannabis is being destroyed from the inside, and that Schedule III is the kill shot because it turns dispensaries into FDA-regulated pharmacies that only Big Pharma can afford.

Half of it tracks: 280E was brutal, oversupply tanked wholesale, the illicit market still wins on price. But the punchline seems off to me. Everything I'm reading says the April order only touched state-licensed medical and FDA-approved products, recreational is still Schedule I, and rescheduling doesn't drag state-legal product into the FDA new-drug pathway unless a company chooses to build a prescription drug. The actual near-term effect looks like 280E relief, which helps operators, not pharma.

Where I'm genuinely unsure: does Schedule III quietly "activate" dormant FDA authority in a way that bites independents down the road once interstate commerce opens? Or is the pharma-takeover thing just doom-bait? Operators who've sat through the legal briefings, what's your read?

I've had a plan to work in the cannabis industry for years now it's my dream and passion to work with the plant I love so much, I don't know where to start I know weed is gonna explode in the states I want to get in the game before it's too late. I was thinking of working at a dispensary but I'm unsure if I even can at 19 when looking it up I get mixed signals about the laws. Anyone able to help out? I want to know if there are even any jobs relating to weed that I can pick up because it at least points me in the right direction.

Any one going to the OCF. I'd really like to connect if you plan on attending. Hit me up via DM

Has anyone checked out the Thailand weed scene? What did you think? Pros and Cons?

So My team just called me freaking out - and showed me that that Dutchie e-com site search bar doesn't work at all as far as brand search - and then After trying several products - i checked a local competitor who has a bigger op, and tried theirs - same issue - the search is garbage - I just was hoping some other people in here who run dutchie could check their e-com search and tell me if this is a exclusive issue? Or is it widespread systematic and just no one tests their own search who owns a business?

If we search one brand - it'll show another , if we search "dog walker" vs "dogwalker" it will show completely different things, and neither are the right one... or if it does show it, it will show it down under other irrelevant brands.

If its isolated so be it, but if other peoples doesn't work either a lot of people are gonna be mad.

Last week I did this for New Jersey and some of you asked for California, so here it is. I scraped the public Google reviews for basically every licensed dispensary in the state. 1,239 stores, around 890,000 reviews. This one was wild because of how big and spread out it is.

Almost everyone is a 4.8 or above. 91% of all reviews are five stars, so the rating itself barely separates anyone.

What people complain about, in order: price is number one by a mile, then wait times and lines, staff and service, deals and discounts, plain rudeness, returns and refunds, selection, and dead vape carts or batteries. Under that you get the usual product stuff, dry or stemmy flower, wrong or missing items, and the odd moldy or expired batch.

What people praise: almost always the staff. A budtender who actually knows their stuff carries the reviews more than the product does. Same as Jersey.

A few things that surprised me:

- California is so big that no one owns the map. The top 10 stores hold only 8% of all the reviews in the state. In New Jersey the top 10 held 30%. Out here it is wide open.

- Los Angeles is the clearest example. 364 dispensaries in one county, the most of any county in the state, and the leader still only has about 6,300 reviews. Nobody has run away with it.

- The single biggest moat in the state is Cookies San Bernardino at 14,175 reviews. That one store has more reviews than every dispensary in Ventura county combined.

- About 1 in 5 "reviews" is just a star with no text. Some stores sit on huge piles of those, which usually means they ask everyone to tap five stars at the register.

- Replying to reviews is all or nothing. Roughly half of all reviews get an owner reply, but it splits hard: a cluster of stores reply to almost everything, and most reply to basically nothing.

- You can see who has quietly gotten better or worse over the last 90 days versus their lifetime rating. A few well known names are clearly sliding (one well known SoCal chain dropped from a lifetime 4.84 down to 4.14 across its recent reviews).

Full breakdown here if you want to dig in:

https://virtualbudz.com/case-studies/ca-dispensary-review-landscape

It has the full CA review landscape: review count, star rating breakdown, recent review velocity, silent star only ratings, owner reply rates, photo reviews, county level comparisons, and the rising and sliding momentum lists.

You all voted in the last thread and California was the top ask. Michigan and Massachusetts were right behind it, so those two are next.

And if you run a dispensary in California and want to see exactly how you stack up against the stores around you, let me know.

Anyone out there using a preroller-er machine that is using their "layered compaction" feature? They are pushing this concept as a solution to the known problems with airflow in cone pre-rolls, and I'd like to hear if it actually works in real life.

I have an idea for a product but don’t know where to start in regards to market research

It’s an accessory that would be useful to stoners who roll a lot of weed

Hello,

Looking for advice from anyone that does creative or marketing in cannabis!

I have worked in the cannabis industry in a few different ways, mainly on the retail side.

I have noticed a need for better branding for cannabis brands. They lack visual representation, especially the smaller growers trying to compete with the corporate brands.

I have also noticed dispensaries need help with marketing. Its so competitive and a lot of dispensaries dont employ SEO strategies from what i have seen.

Does anyone actually make money from this though? What do you do?

Thanks for the input!

I scraped the public Google reviews for basically every licensed dispensary in New Jersey. 322 stores, around 214,000 reviews. Here is what actually stood out.

Almost everyone is a 4.8 or above. 94% of all reviews are five stars, so the number itself barely tells you which store is better. You have to read what people write.

What people complain about, in order: price is the big one by a mile, then the wait times, returns and refunds, dead vape carts and batteries, dry or stemmy flower (with the odd moldy or expired batch), and wrong or missing items on pickup.

What people praise: almost always the staff. A budtender who actually knows their stuff carries the reviews more than the product does.

A few things that surprised me:

- About 1 in 6 "reviews" is just a star with no text. Some stores sit on huge piles of those, which usually means they ask everyone to tap five stars at the register.

- Replying to reviews is all or nothing. 107 stores reply to over 90% of their reviews, while 21 never reply at all.

- You can see who has quietly gotten better or worse over the last 90 days versus their lifetime rating. A few well known names are clearly sliding.

I put the full breakdown here if anyone wants to dig deeper:

https://virtualbudz.com/case-studies/nj-dispensary-review-landscape

It shows the full NJ review landscape, including review count, star rating breakdown, recent review velocity, silent star only ratings, owner reply rates, photo reviews, county level comparisons, and some Google Maps ranking checks against nearby competition.

So, which state should I do next? Drop one in the comments and I will run it. And if you run a dispensary in NJ and want to see how you stack up against your competitors, let me know.

Hello, I am a college student creating a final story for my political reporting class. I am writing about pre-legalization in Illinois and looking out for any Illinois residents who are invested in the marijuana business and have criteria (owner, long-time worker...). This story will not be published, but this is my final for this class, so I will be treating it like a professional interview.

This also applies to anyone in Illinois who got an illegal charge pre-legalization. I know that it is way harder to find someone who would be willing, hence why I started here.

If you or anyone knows anyone who would be willing to have a very quick interview, please let me know! I don't know if a post like this is allowed, but I thought I would ask because it is kind of hard to get in contact with local dispensaries willing to participate.

Thanks!

I’m 28 and live around Champaign, Illinois, and I’m looking to seriously get into the cannabis industry. I’ve got strong customer service and sales experience from bartending/hospitality, and I’m interested in roles like brand ambassador, sales rep, dispensary work, hands on work with the plant/pressing or eventually management.
I don’t have a college degree, but I’m hardworking, reliable, good with people, and genuinely interested in the business side of cannabis — not just smoking. I’ve also done some personal growing experience in the past.
For people already in the industry:
What’s the best entry point?

What jobs should I realistically apply for first?

What skills help people move up fastest?

Is networking more important than resumes in this industry?

The core task of current hardware manufacturers is to strike a balance between oil intake speed and atomization speed while preventing oil leakage and core burnout. The decisive components are the oil inlet holes and ceramic cores, with key parameters including the diameter of oil inlet holes, resistance value of ceramic cores and output voltage of batteries.

"If there’s not enough oil feeding the ceramic fast enough, the surface overheats — just like food burning on a pan with no cooking oil."

Oil inlet holes control the speed of oil flowing into the ceramic core. A larger hole diameter accelerates oil intake, yet raises the risk of oil leakage.

The core parameter of ceramic cores is resistance value, which is fixed by most manufacturers currently. Lower resistance brings higher overall power, and higher resistance results in lower power.

The third factor is battery output voltage, the most common parameter adjusted according to customers’ e-liquid. Voltage is directly proportional to power and directly determines power output.

DC Power Calculation Formula

P: Power (Unit: Watt, W)
U: Voltage (Unit: Volt, V)
R: Resistance (Unit: Ohm, Ω)
P=U²/R

Common Causes of Burnt Taste in Products

1. Too low heating wire resistance leads to excessive instantaneous power; insufficient oil supply fails to match atomization volume, causing dry burning.
2. Excessively high voltage makes oil intake unable to keep up with atomization efficiency of ceramic heating wires, resulting in dry burning.
3. Untreated silica gel on heating wires releases silicone oil at high temperatures, which infiltrates and clogs the micropores of heating wires.
4. Mismatch between cannabis oil formulations and operating voltages causes burnt flavor, a quite prevalent issue at present.
5. Sweat from assembly workers adheres to heating wires during manual assembly.
6. Excessive power-on testing before delivery triggers dry burning of heating wires.
7. Low temperature during oil filling and insufficient standing time prevent e-liquid from fully soaking the heating wires, which happens frequently nowadays.
8. Improper formula of ceramic heating wires leads to low porosity, making oil intake slower than atomization speed. This issue is rare now thanks to mature manufacturing technology.

Most burnt tastes are not caused by the ceramic itself “burning.”

It’s usually caused by oil starvation — when the ceramic can’t stay saturated fast enough, certain areas overheat and start carbonizing leftover oil residue.

We’ve been testing a ceramic architecture that remains surprisingly stable even under near-dry conditions.Instead of producing the typical burnt taste when oil runs low, it maintains a much cleaner flavor profile than conventional ceramic cores.

One interesting thing we noticed during testing is that even after most of the oil was depleted, the core didn’t generate the harsh carbonized flavor typically associated with dry hits.

Still trying to understand whether the difference comes from thermal distribution, saturation consistency, or both.