The Cannabis Dispensary Is One of the Most Inclusive Spaces in Retail

Walk into most retail environments in America and you’ll notice that they were not all designed with everyone in mind.

The music, the staff, the marketing on the walls, the assumptions are in every interaction. Retail has a long history of making certain people feel welcome and everyone else feel like an afterthought.

The cannabis dispensary and the industry are one of the most inclusive spaces, especially to the LGBTQIA+ community.

Cannabis didn’t come up through traditional retail channels. It didn’t have corporate backing, infrastructure, or a playbook inherited from industries that spent decades excluding people. It built itself from scratch and the people who built it were largely outsiders themselves.

When an industry is born outside the mainstream, it attracts people who were also born outside the mainstream. The queer community, people of color, women, immigrants, advocates, artists are the people who showed for cannabis, built the culture around it, and shaped what the industry became before it was legal.

Think about what a modern cannabis dispensary looks like compared to most retail spaces.

The staff reflects the community around it in a way that most retail environments still don’t. The customer base is diverse across age, background, gender identity, and reason for being there. The conversation is non-judgmental. Nobody is making you feel like you don’t belong.

Cannabis has some of the most diverse ownership in any legal industry in the country. Women-owned brands, Black-owned dispensaries, queer-owned businesses all exist here in numbers that most industries still haven’t come close to matching.

That said, it’s not perfect. The same systemic barriers that exist everywhere else show up in cannabis licensing, access to capital, and retail placement. The diversity that exists was fought for, not handed over and it’s still going on.

What makes cannabis different is that a meaningful part of the industry acknowledges the problem and keeps pushing on it.

We’re in a moment where a lot of brands are quietly pulling back on their commitments to diversity and inclusion. The political climate is making it easier to say nothing, to not show up, to decide that June is just another month on the marketing calendar.

The cannabis industry has never been that kind of industry. It has always had skin in the game when it comes to who gets included and who gets left out. That’s not a political position.

At High 90’s, our community has always included people across every identity, background, and walk of life and that’s not something we take for granted.

The cannabis dispensary being an inclusive space is a model for what retail can look like when it’s built by people who actually care about who walks through the door.

That’s worth celebrating this Pride Month and acknowledging how it happened and why it matters. The industry got here because outsiders built it. The best thing we can do is make sure we never forget that.

Happy Pride from High 90’s!

-TSS