Dealer's
Diary

Revelry Buyers Club 2026: The Details When: Tuesday, May 13, 2026. 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM. Where: Basilica Hudson, 110 Front Street, Hudson, New York. What: A curated B2B cannabis trade show connecting licensed buyers, brands, cultivators, processors, and industry professionals. Who’s behind it: On The Revel, co-founded by Lulu Tsui and Jacobi Holland. Looking […]

Here is a number that should make every small cannabis operator uncomfortable: 56 percent of cannabis companies have no dedicated HR department at all, according to NACB data. Meanwhile, turnover in cannabis retail runs between 40 and 60 percent annually. Budtender salaries dropped nearly 5 percent in 2025. And state labor departments actively target cannabis […]

What is the most important role in the cannabis industry right now? I can answer that pretty easily. Cannabis Procurement. No matter what state you’re in, no matter where you are in the build, the person doing the buying is the person who makes or breaks everything else. The real ones know what I’m talking […]

You know that feeling employees get when someone says “I’m going to have to loop in HR”? The pit in the stomach. The immediate assumption that HR exists to protect the company from them, not to help them. Nobody invented that distrust overnight. An entire industry built it over decades by teaching HR professionals to […]

NECANN Boston is back and it’s basically cannabis industry Christmas in New England. The New England Cannabis Convention returns to the Hynes Convention Center in Back Bay this Friday and Saturday, April 24 and 25. It’s the largest B2B cannabis event on the East Coast, the second largest in the country, and the one weekend […]

You spent weeks sourcing candidates. Screened resumes. Ran interviews. Made the offer. Got the yes. Felt good about it. Then came onboarding. Then sixty days later, that hire is gone. No dramatic exit. No blow-up. They just stopped showing up, or they put in their two weeks with some version of “it wasn’t what I […]

You built your dispensary from the ground up. The last thing you’re thinking about is an employment lawsuit and HR mistakes. But here’s what I see working with 50+ cannabis operations across the country: the lawsuit usually isn’t coming from a disgruntled customer. It’s coming from a current or former employee. And it almost always […]

There is a number sitting inside your P&L right now that most cannabis operators either do not know or are too afraid to look at. It is called your labor to sales ratio, and it is one of the most important metrics in your business. If you run a dispensary and your labor costs eat […]