Page 31 - BusinessWest February 6, 2023

CANNABIS >>
After the
Green
Rush
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
[email protected]
The numbers are impressive, to be sure.
Adult-use cannabis shops in Massachusetts posted close to $1.5 billion in sales in 2022, up from $1.33 billion in 2021. Since recreational sales began in late 2018, the total figure is closing in on $4 billion.
That’s a big pie.
The problem, for the hundreds of
dispensaries already open and many
more at various stages of planning and
development, is that each slice of that
pie is getting smaller. As a result, prices are crashing, with some products selling for half of what they did a year or two ago.
That’s great for cannabis consumers. For businesses? Not so much.
But it’s not an unexpected development, not is it any sort of cri- sis, said Michael Kusek, publisher of Different Leaf magazine and one of the nation’s leading experts on the cannabis industry. But it’s certainly a challenge, one that promises to weed out some of the cur- rent players.
“You can’t solve the overabundance of product in the marketplace by transferring it to another market,” Kusek told BusinessWest. “You can’t make the product go away, so the price bottoms out. This has happened in every other market, so it’s not a shock.”
It will, however, require business owners to think smarter, focus- ing on quality, the customer experience, and other ways of differenti-
As Competition Depresses Profits, What’s Next for the Cannabis Industry?
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