Do Arizona budtenders know less than they used to?

[[{“value”:”In seven years as a budtender, Matt Simonson has seen a thing or two.

The dispensary business was wild, in its youth. “We used to watch a lot of the video of all the crazy things that would happen — we’d get off work and check out the security footage,” Simonson said. In 2019, when he was working in Las Vegas, his dispensary lost power when an unhoused man “climbed the side of the building and cut the power with a machete.” Simonson and his coworkers watched it happen after the fact on security video.

“He’s, like, smoking the weed we sold him,” Simonson recalled.

It’s not like that anymore. For one, Simonson moved to Arizona during the pandemic, just as recreational weed was heading toward legalization in the state. Since then, he’s worked as a budtender at Nirvana, Harvest and now Curaleaf, making the first sale at Curaleafs’ Scottsdale dispensary in 2022. That experience makes Simonson quite the veteran in the budtender world. Budtending has become a career.

“At the outset, you would think that it’s an entry-level position. But the concept of longevity comes into play,” Simonson said. “This work allows you to make between 23 and 27 bucks an hour pretty seamlessly. If you know the product and have been around it a while, it becomes real easy.”

When it comes to budtending in Arizona, those last parts — knowing the product, sticking to the job for a while — are key. Since recreational weed became legal and the number of dispensaries around the state exploded, many people in the industry feel the quality of budtending has slipped. When only medical dispensaries dotted the landscape, customers rightly expected a certain depth of knowledge. Now, with vastly more budtending jobs to fill — and with huge corporations dominating the dispensary landscape — budtenders aren’t guaranteed to provide the expertise they used to.

Jon Udell, a Phoenix lawyer and the communications director for Arizona’s chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said he has sensed a change in budtender knowledge. Before recreational weed was legalized by Proposition 207 in 2020, “dispensaries had to have a medical director” and “budtenders were pretty capable of answering questions and pointing you to strains,” Udell said. Now, though, “I feel like I often know more than they do.”

“I’ll be like, ‘Let me get some good concentrates.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, we’ve got some great shatter in,’” Udell said. “And that’s the worst kind of concentrate on the market. I want the good kind!”

That fits a common theme among weed industry folks who spoke to Phoenix New Times. At best, budtender experiences are widely variable. Many people have had a handful of great experiences with knowledgeable budtenders, and some less-than-stellar interactions buying products from people who don’t know much about what they’re selling. Most of the time, it’s an average affair, like buying something at Target — the customer who just wants some flower or edibles isn’t looking to quiz a worker’s knowledge.

But even those routine purchases underscore what has changed about budtending in the past few years. The job used to be a way to put one’s deep cannabis knowledge to good use — and, of course, many longtime budtenders and boutique dispensaries still see it that way. Yet at many other shops, particularly some owned by huge companies, it’s become something more rote.

You take the money, you hand over the weed. The end.

What does it take to become a budtender in Arizona? Not much.

Dispensaries in the Valley typically operate with about 25 budtenders, though the figure varies from store to store. Kaila Strong, a senior director of marketing at Curaleaf, said 10 or 12 of its 15 stores employ about that number of budtenders. And judging by job listings, there’s a fair amount of turnover.

There are currently dozens of budtender or “retail associate” positions listed on job board websites like Indeed. Dispensaries appear to start new hires at around $15 or $16 an hour and look for workers with customer service skills and cannabis knowledge. Some job postings lean heavier on the customer service requirement.

“If you have customer service experience from places like Starbucks, Target, or other retail and food service-oriented positions, we’re willing to train you on cannabis,” reads one budtender job posting at JARS Cannabis.

The quality of that training — and to what extent it exists — is up for debate.

Legally, prospective budtenders in Arizona must be 21 and submit an application through the state, which includes a background check and fingerprinting. (Becoming a bartender requires clearing more hurdles — to serve liquor in Arizona, you must complete a Title IV training course every three years.) Only two of 24 states with legal recreational weed have a concrete training requirement. Illinois has a “responsible vendor training program” for aspiring budtenders, while Washington requires budtenders to learn CPR and complete 20 hours of a medical marijuana consultant training program.

Despite that, Ann Torrez of the Arizona Dispensaries Association said in a statement to New Times, the requirements to be a budtender are actually substantial. “The background checks and fees associated with security a Facility Agent Card” — a budtending license, basically — “provide the public and marijuana employers a more elevated workforce than in many other retail-type industries, but may prevent some individuals from accessing these jobs,” Torrez said. She added that the ADA “values the accessibility of cannabis roles like budtending” but also recognizes “the continued opportunity for elevated training to ensure public health and consumer confidence.”

Some dispensaries in Arizona do take training seriously. ANC Dispensary — one of the few stores in the Valley that isn’t a chain — started off as a medical marijuana dispensary. Co-owner Lori Hicks estimates that about a third of her 25 budtenders have been with the dispensary since day one in 2018. “We do still do continuing education,” Hicks said. “We don’t want a 70-year-old grandma falling down because we gave her too much cannabis.”

But industry veterans say many other dispensaries — particularly those owned by multi-state chains — have let trainings become less of a priority. Nick Fredrickson, a former budtender and union leader, blamed a lack of investment from companies like Curaleaf, where he worked for four years. In his time at Curaleaf’s midtown location, Fredrickson said there was only one vendor training, in which a brand comes out to train workers on their products.

“It’s a decline in the level of training and care that these employers put into the labor force,” Fredrickson said. “There are things that have completely disappeared from our industry.”

Strong, the Curaleaf marketing director, declined to comment on that claim. Simonson confirmed that Curaleaf doesn’t typically organize vendor trainings, adding that trainings tend to be conducted in-house. The previous four dispensaries he worked at would line vendors up to explain their products to budtenders.

“These dispensaries, they’ve gotten so big and there’s so many of them,” Simonson said, “training at this point for the industry has kind of fallen by the wayside.” That’s on the vendors, too, he said. He thinks many brands have figured out that they can skimp on training if they overload their packaging with information.

“It’s like, there’s a frickin’ novel written on the back of some of these gummies now,” he said. “And so, I think they figured that out and rolled back the vendor training.”

Is that cheaper? Probably. Good for the consumer? Not so much.

As access to weed has become more mainstream, so have the customers who push through the doors of dispensaries around the state. Simonson said recreational sales are far more focused on health than he would have thought.

“If you would have told me, ‘You’re gonna be a budtender and most of what you’re gonna do is sell grandpa sleepy gummies,’ I would have been like, “Yeah right! We’ve got all this weed and we’re gonna have a great time,’” Simonson laughed. “No, no, no.”

For Julie Gunnigle, the legal director of NORML, that shift in the market only shows how important a knowledgeable budtender is. Many customers don’t walk into a dispensary to get high as a kite. They buy weed products for treatment purposes.

She’s among them, having used marijuana to treat a shoulder injury she suffered while snowboarding decades ago. “In my view,” Gunnigle said, “someone who is highly trained and knows the products they are selling is worth the world.”

Hicks said her dispensary, ANC, operates with that kind of service in mind. “We still treat everybody almost as if they are a patient,” she said, adding that many former patients have stopped using a medical card. “We have an enormous number of people that are 40 or older. They are not doing it as much to go home and just get blasted as much as they need it for pain, or they want to know how to sleep, or they want to make sure they’re not doing too much THC when they need to work.”

Because many customers are essentially self-medicating, some in the industry feel the term “budtender” is too trivial given the responsibilities of the position. (Bar patrons may also be self-medicating in a sense, but not in a way they should be.) Gunnigle said the term “kind of irritates” her.

“There are potentially higher training and standards for bartenders in Arizona, but the level of skill to be really good at your job as a budtender, I think, is much, much higher,” she told New Times in a phone interview. “And I think the risks are much higher when someone screws up — if a bartender screws up and my old fashioned tastes nasty, that’s different than someone trying to access their medicine.”

(Others find the term misleading for other reasons. “I always thought the name meant you get to work with the plants or with the weed,” said Rumin Tehrani, who has worked in cannabis production for six years, “but that just means you’re like working in the store at the counter, you know?”)

While plenty of budtenders have deep knowledge about the products they sell, Gunnigle suggests Arizona adopt a new position to fill the role many used to expect budtenders to play — cannabis nurses. Nurses who are certified as cannabis specialists are gaining popularity across the country, Gunnigle said. Notably, the American Cannabis Nurses Association is an affiliate of the American Nurses Association and is working to get serious about credentialing cannabis nurses.

“If you want to go one step further and have somebody who really understands the nuances of dosing or the concentration of (Rick Simpson Oil),” Gunnigle said, “you want a cannabis nurse.”

Short of an industry-wide investment in cannabis nurses, many in the weed business think the solution to the diminishing quality of budtenders must come from employers.

To be sure, plenty of entry-level budtenders advance to higher jobs. Victoria Zarod was hired as a budtender by Curaleaf at its Pavillions store on 83rd Avenue and McDowell Road after graduating from ASU with a fashion degree. She was promoted to a managerial position after eight months. “Once you realize how much more you can grow within a company like Curaleaf, they encourage you to keep expanding your opportunities and such,” she said.

But when budtenders change all the time, expertise is hard to retain. Some budtenders stay in the position for years, while others might leave between six months and a year after starting.

“I have the longevity of budtenders probably more than any other dispensary in this state. I have people that have been with me since we opened the doors — and they are still budtenders,” Hicks said. “They make friends with these customers. They gain knowledge of what these people like and can offer some real comfort to people. I think it helps my business to have the same faces in place.”

Gunnigle said more investment in the workforce will inevitably improve the customer experience. “Having skilled workers you’ve invested in absolutely helps consumers, and — we’re hoping — will help dispensaries’ bottom lines,” Gunnigle said. “We want folks to stay long-term in these positions.”

To Drake Ridge, a spokesperson for United Food & Commercial Workers Local 99, which represents cannabis workers, that also means union recognition. Three dispensaries — Sunday Goods in Tempe, Zen Leaf Chandler and Zen Leaf Local Joint — now have union contracts. Weed companies haven’t exactly embraced unionization, though. Curaleaf currently faces an unfair labor practices complaint filed by the union over the firing of Fredrickson two days before an April 20 picket last year.

If more shops unionized, Ridge said, weed workers and weed buyers alike would be better off.

“The best thing consumers can do is support dispensaries that treat their workers fairly and pay them a living wage,” Ridge said. “We hope that companies are responsive to the needs and requests of their budtenders, because the budtender-customer relationship is what has allowed this industry to become one of the fast-growing, most profitable industries in Arizona.”

Simonson also feels that the long-time budtenders have been critical to taking the Arizona cannabis industry from fringe business to mainstream cash cow. “We’ve built the system as we know it,” he said. “It was our money, our enthusiasm and our activism that created it.”

A dispensary that wants to keep its clientele — and attract a larger one — would do well to remember that.

“}]] Expert budtenders can match you with the right strain. Industry insiders say there are fewer of them than there once were.  Read More  

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