US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

But there's as many shuttered pot shops in Toronto as there are open ones. I think the industry is still shaking out and there's a lot of volatility.

There's a common notion that I've noticed, which is that if you just open up a "pot shop" that you'll make money hand over fist, meanwhile, they're fairly complex retail operations to run and you can loose your hat just as quickly as with any other business.

Same thing happened with cupcake shops and craft breweries.

While this is true, the remaining stores are continuing to capture more business. Users who only make legal source purchases are over 70% of the market now https://globalnews.ca/news/10367758/legal-cannabis-sales-pro...

Except cupcake shops and craft breweries are allowed to differentiate (gluten free, superhero themed, we only sell wild fermented German beers...) while the legal cannabis retailers in Canada are more akin to owning a Subway franchise.

You must purchase your cannabis from a select set of suppliers chosen by the government (yes, the very same ones your competition must purchase from), you are not allowed to offer discounts/freebies on cannabis products (only rolling papers or similar non-psychoactive products). It is still illegal to operate any kind of venue that allows consumption, so while you can decorate your retail space like an Apple store or a Pier 1, you can't run trivia nights or do movie screenings or anything that might result in people patronizing your business over the one next door offering the same product for $0.05 cheaper.

Pre-legalization, I could go to a store (not legally operated) and look at the bud in the jar, smell it, and make decisions based on something other than a sealed package with no artwork or description on it. Some stores even offered consumption of "dabs" which is a great model: those things cost a lot of money and aren't really fun to have in your home and maintain, and it was very competitive with "a pint after work". All of this went away after 2017.

It’s not a particularly easy industry to value add. Growing pretty good weed is probably less work than a brewery - and I have a very hard time telling the difference between the hundreds of different strains.

Then you have to have security, your staff is high 24/7, banking is a mess..

Growing might be more pleasant than running the shops but then you better like agriculture

I'm referring more to the "several times as many as the market can sustain get opened" phenomenon. Around here, every just-out-of-college set of buddies decided they'd get into brewing a few years ago. Probably 75% of them were gone in a year or two.

>But there's as many shuttered pot shops in Toronto as there are open ones. I think the industry is still shaking out and there's a lot of volatility.

That's fair as well. Being invested in cannabis is a whole other beast.