Booming business

Over the course of my career, there've been plenty of moments of boredom, but nothing comes close to the utterly excruciating degree of boredom I experienced when working retail. If there are no shoppers to wait on, there are only so many ways to straighten up the merchandise and dust the counter. 

My two stints in retail - at Filene's and Jordan's, a couple of late and still lamented classic Boston department stores - were both behind the stationery counter. And other than roaming the length of the counter, I had to stay put. 

Sure, there were occasional highlights to break up the monotony. Even when there was no one around who wanted to buy a box of Crane's letter paper or a fountain pen, I might catch the security person  - disguised as a shopper - nab a shoplifter at the next counter over. One time, the guy working the Aramis counter was pinched for having had his hand in the till. (I can still picture the Aramis guy: tall, good looking reddish-brown hair, neatly groomed beard, always dressed in earth tones.) Jackie Kennedy walked by once. (If camel's an earth tone, she was wearing earth tones, too.)

But, yikes, it could be boring. 

Since you couldn't leave your counter, there was no one to chat with. There was a little fold-down stool behind the counter, but clerks weren't allowed to sit for more than a minute or two. Needless to say, you couldn't read a book while waiting to wait on someone. The only reading material was the little books, issued every week by the credit card companies, that contained a listing of defunct or stolen credit card numbers. Back in the day - and we're talking 50 years ago - not as many people used non-store credit cards, and there was no automated way to check whether a card was valid. So, when someone charged an item, you had to take their card and look up the number in the book to see if it was good. Anyway, these little books, with their micro-font numbers, didn't make for very good reading, once you'd read (and memorized) the instructions up front.

Boring, so boring.

I always kept a scrap of paper handy, to entertain myself by, say, coming up with as many as four-letter words as I could make out of the letters in my name; or by extracting the square root of my Social Security number. 

Boring, so boring. Not to mention ill-paid.

So I don't blame anyone who has up and left their retail job for the greener pastures of a marijuana dispensary. 

According to the Washington Post, that's what's happening, anecdotally if not statistically.

Jason Zvokel had a long career working as a pharmacist at Walgreens.

Now instead of administering vaccines and filling prescriptions, he’s helping customers make sense of concentrates, tablets and lozenges. His pay is 5 percent lower, he said, but the hours are more manageable.

“I am so much happier,” said Zvokel, 46, who’s worked in retail since he was 18. “For the first time in years, I’m not miserable when I come home from work.” (Source: WaPo)

The cannabis industry is booming. It added 80,000 jobs during 2020, and 2021 is promising to be a big year, too. There are now over 300,000 Americans working in the industry. And because cannabis dispensaries dispense medical marijuana - more states have okayed marijuana for medically therapeutic purposes than have legalized it for recreational consumption - they were considered essential businesses that could stay open throughout the pandemic. And, of course, the pandemic no doubt caused plenty of recreational users to want to recreate and chill a bit more. So unlike the demand for, say, work clothing, the demand for gummies and bongs has, I'm guessing, been on the upswing.

This has translated into this bit of oddity:

The United States now has more legal cannabis workers than dentists, paramedics or electrical engineers.

When you look at it that way, well, it does look sort of astonishing. But the job ladder is actually a pyramid: lots of unskilled positions at the bottom, and things narrowing as you move up the skills requirements (and income possibilities). So, fewer dentists, paramedics, and electrical engineers occupying those more upper-echelon and better paid rungs on the career ladder. 

While working in a dispensary may be more fun that straightening out boxes of stationery - I have no doubt about that - it's still not well paid. Hourly pay tends to run in the $12-15 range: pretty standard across retail. 

But given the newness of the industry, entry-level workers can often move up in less than a year to more specialized positions, she said.

And let's not discount the fun factor. Wouldn't you rather say you worked in a dispensary than in Kohl's?

Because the industry is new, there are some who are hoping that it can become one that offers better pay and benefits, and opportunities for growth. That it can become the ticket to the middle class "much like the manufacturing industry used to be." Think unionization. 

This all may be a pipedream, but it's a good one. We really don't need a ton of dead-end, poorly paid, and god-awful boring jobs (c.f., "normal" retail) getting replaced with another ton of dead-end, poorly paid, and god-awful boring cannabis-related jobs. 

Because marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, there's pressure on the industry, for now at least, to create a positive work environment. There's a belief that it the cannabis industry can show that it's creating good jobs, there'll be a smoother path to full legalization. 

Like every other job, retail work in marijuana dispensaries will no doubt be automated along the way. AI will pick the right weed or edible for you, and a robot will package it up. 

But for now, here's hoping that, for those who want to escape the boredom of traditional retail work, the business keeps booming. 

Sure beats flogging stationery.