MedMen recently dropped its prices at its New York flagship dispensary in midtown Manhattan. This was no ordinary discount. The decline was sudden and steep.
MedMen dropped its price from $86 to $54 for a 400 mg vape cartridge, and from $53 to $37 for a 30-capsule bottle. Those are dramatic, double-digit declines of 37% and 30%.
At first, patients might have assumed it was the vape crisis, but that couldn’t be it, because capsules got a price cut, too. Why was MedMen lowering its prices? This happened shortly before the company announced it was laying off 190 workers, or about 20% of its staff, and more recently reported a quarterly loss, even as revenue doubled.
The New York flagship dispensary is a boutique retail space on Fifth Avenue. It looks rec, in typical MedMen fashion, even though New York is a medical-only state. The dispensary looks like the sort of place that would sell thousand-dollar stilettos, but there are no high-end shoes there—just MedMen T-shirts and yoga mats and other scarlet merch, with the cannabis hidden away in the back. It’s a cannabis retail centerpiece at the absolute nucleus of New York, just a short stroll between Grand Central and the Empire State Building, and within the shadow of Trump Tower.
It doesn’t seem to get a lot of traffic, as far as retail spaces go. It can’t cater to the international tourists who roam midtown with their credit cards, because only those with New York state-issued medical marijuana cards may enter those doors. The friendly staffers in their red MedMen shirts typically outnumber the patients at this so-called Apple store of cannabis.
A retailer explained to a patient recently (the only