She Hasn't Bought Weed Since College. Here's The Playbook To Bring Her Back

Lauren is a composite, built from what the people we interviewed described. She is not a real person, and the stores in her story are not real stores. Everyone quoted in this piece is real, and their words come from Cannabis Professional's interviews.

Lauren is in her early 40s and works in an office in Philadelphia. She's in New York for a long weekend, staying with a college friend in Brooklyn. Her friend has a work dinner tonight, so Lauren has the evening to herself.

She hasn't bought cannabis since college. Back then it came from a friend of a friend, in a sandwich bag, with no label. Now it's legal here, and she's curious. It's been a long week. What she wants is simple: something to help her unwind and sleep. What she doesn't want is to end up too high in someone else's apartment.

She expects the visit to be a little awkward. She figures the store will be intimidating, the staff will talk in jargon, and she'll overpay because she won't know what to ask for.

Here is Lauren's night, from the search bar to the counter to the morning after. At each stop, the people who build dispensary software, sell to dispensaries or run one in Queens explain what decides whether a first-timer like her comes back.

Lauren doesn't walk the block looking for a green cross. She sits on her friend's couch and picks up her phone.

That's the move Chris Violas expects. "Most people go in and if they don't know what's going on, they'll type cannabis near me or something like that," Violas, co-founder and CEO of dispensary software company Blaze, told Cannabis Professional at Hall of Flowers NYC. "So as an operator you need to win the e-commerce game."

For a dispensary, that search carries more weight than it does for the pizza place down the street. Google's advertising rules don't allow ads for marijuana or for services that help people buy it recreationally. A U.S. dispensary generally can't pay to sit at the top of Lauren's screen. It has to earn the spot with its own website, menu and Google business listing.

"You need to have a great customer experience online. It needs to be [SEO] optimized so you show up on Google. That's ultimately where their journey is gonna start," Violas said.

Lauren's screen fills up fast. This is New York, and there are a lot of stores. Ben Berk, an account executive at Blaze, said that in a tourist-heavy market like New York, the fight for search is already under way, and many stores are losing it without understanding why.

"So really starting to think about search, dispensary near me, but how the pages on your website are indexed," he said. "So people are searching by brand, is that also gonna pull your site?"

Lauren is exactly the visitor Berk described. She's a tourist, and the only brand name she might type is one a friend mentioned. He put the pressure simply: "that search game is coming to cannabis and the more saturated we get, the more important it will be."

She won't study every result. Broader research on local search, not specific to cannabis, shows how fast people like Lauren narrow it down. In a July 2026 survey of 1,227 U.S. consumers who had searched for a local business, the local-search firm BrightLocal found that 72% look at three or fewer businesses before deciding. More than half, 52%, said they looked at a business during their most recent search and decided not to contact it. The top reason people picked one business over another was clear, complete information: hours, address and phone.

Lauren scrolls past a store with no hours listed. She skips another whose menu won't load. She taps a third. It's a short walk away, it says it's open until late, and its menu shows prices. She grabs her jacket.

At the door, Violas said, the store has to live up to what its website promised. "Make sure your floor can be easily walked, don't have stuff in the middle of the floor, right? Make sure your branding's on point everywhere," he said. "So many times I walk into dispensary and it's just dark and you can't even look in the product cases properly."

Lauren steps inside. The room is bright and open, and she can see into the cases. Some of the tension she carried in from the street eases.

Violas said the store should also be ready to teach. Shops need "good resources, digital and in-store for helping people understand, you know, cannabinoids, terpenes, what that means for them. If you can provide kind of effect education, all good stuff."

Lauren doesn't know what a terpene is. She's about to find out whether anyone here will explain it without making her feel foolish.

Lauren walks up to the register and does what a lot of first-timers might do. She scans the menu, sees a column of THC percentages and assumes the highest number is the best value. If she's paying New York prices, she reasons, she might as well get the strongest thing on the shelf.

That's the moment a good budtender slows things down. Jade Rodriguez of flōr de fred, a family-run shop in Ozone Park, Queens, said it was the first cannabis store in Ozone Park, and that this conversation happens at its counter every day. Rich Molina, a part owner, also budtends at the register and does all of the store's buying, she said. His knowledge of flower is what he brings to the counter.

"You can't judge a bud just [by] how it looks or a strain. Sometimes you can. It can look pretty, but it's always going to be how it smokes, how it makes you feel," Rodriguez told Cannabis Professional in a Nov. 13, 2026, video call.

The work, she said, is steering the customer away from the number. The shop has to "do a lot of the work on the back end to educate the customer. It's about how it makes you feel, and you would be shocked. Low percentage flower can have you feeling amazing."

"It's the whole experience. … It's not just what's on the barcode or whatever, or the lab results," she said.

Rodriguez said customers shouldn't be afraid to ask for recommendations. "Our store thrives off of recommendations and we take a lot of pride in our budtenders," she said in an email, adding that most have been with the shop since the beginning. "If customers know what feeling and vibe they want, they should always let us know! We will always steer them in the right direction."

Picture Lauren's budtender working the way Rodriguez describes. Instead of pointing at the top of the THC column, the budtender asks how Lauren wants the night to go. Lauren says she wants to relax and sleep, not feel out of control. So the conversation turns to feel instead of potency. The budtender steers her toward a flower meant to take the edge off and is honest that the prettiest jar or the biggest number isn't the right pick for her first time in years. Lauren hadn't expected to be asked anything about herself. That question does more to win her trust than any discount would.

Before the total, the budtender suggests a vape pen as something easy to carry. Lauren would like to try one, so it goes in with the flower.

Then it's time to pay, and the counter has one more chance to earn or lose her trust. Violas said many first visits go sideways at the total, when a shopper hears a number they can't see. "They're just waiting on their [budtender] to tell them the order and I think that's you don't build trust that way," he said. He described a customer buying a couple of pre-rolls and hearing a total they didn't expect: "You're like, how did we get there?"

That's the fear Lauren walked in with. She's an out-of-towner, she doesn't know what the taxes come to, and she worries she's about to overpay.

Violas's fix is a screen facing the customer at the register "so they can see the totals, they can see the products they're getting, they can also see the taxes and everything else that comes with it." That screen, he said, "alleviates a lot of that pressure and you build a lot of trust which translates into loyalty over time."

At Lauren's register, the screen lists each item, the flower and the pen together, and the taxes before the budtender says a word. She reads it, nods and pays. There's no surprise.

A customer-facing display is not one company's product. The test is the same on any system: can the shopper see the line items and the taxes before anyone says the total out loud?

She sleeps well. The next afternoon she reaches for the pen, and nothing happens. The battery is dead.

Lauren doesn't think about the brand on the box. She thinks about the store that sold it. She's leaving the city in two days and wonders whether it's worth the trouble of going back, or whether this whole experiment was a mistake.

What happens next depends on the brand standing behind the pen. Verita Richardson of Dime Industries, a vape brand, told Cannabis Professional how Dime says it handles that moment.

"We do have a 100% guarantee where we're always gonna make sure that you get a new device from the retailer that you purchased it with," Richardson said.

Richardson said the guarantee covers all of Dime's vapes, including a pen whose battery doesn't work or one that leaks, which she said is very rare. She said Dime handles the replacement on the back end so it goes smoothly, the customer brings the device back in, and the brand wants every Dime customer to have the best experience possible.

If Lauren's pen were covered by a promise like the one Richardson described, the fix could be simple. She could bring the pen back to the store where she bought it and leave with a new one, with the brand handling it behind the scenes, as Richardson put it. Cannabis Professional has not reviewed Dime's written warranty terms.

Asked whether the guarantee matters to dispensaries, Richardson said: "Absolutely. It allows our dispensaries to know that we are a serious and a trusted business partner." She said the brand also sends people into stores: "We have in-field marketing support to not only educate your [budtenders] but to also educate your customers."

In the version of the night that goes right, Lauren walks back in, and if the brand stands behind the pen the way Richardson described, she leaves with a new one. While she's there, she asks the budtender what else might suit an evening like the last one. That's her second visit, and it's the one that counts.

Berk said most stores already have the data to see whether a visit like that happened, and they don't use it. "Like a sales purchase does more for them than they understand, you know? Like, is that the first time they bought a new category? Is that the first time they tried this new brand?" he said. "You know, does velocity actually translate to satisfaction, are you getting the repeat customers?"

In a store's system, Lauren's first trip was a new customer buying flower and her first vape. Her second trip is the answer to Berk's question.

That's Lauren's whole night. A search the store had to win. A budtender who asked how she wanted to feel instead of pointing at a number. A total she could read. And a bad pen that could be made right, if the brand stands behind it the way Richardson described. Any one of those could have sent her somewhere else. Together, they bring her back, and the next time she's in New York, she knows where she's going.

This is not legal, technology or warranty advice. Use it to set the agenda with your e-commerce or POS provider, your brand reps and your state cannabis office.

The budtender who asks a newcomer like Lauren how she wants to feel, shows her the total on a screen and swaps a dead pen without a fuss is the reason she comes back. Nominate that person for the Canna 50 at canna50.com. Nominations close Dec. 31, 2026, and winners are announced Jan. 8, 2027.

The Canna 50 recognizes the most influential budtenders in the country. It looks for three things: passion for the plant (the big one), a real desire to help customers and patients, and working well with others, from helping fellow budtenders to helping the store sell safely and responsibly through education.

Nominees need an Instagram account to be considered. Nominations close Dec. 31, 2026, and winners will be announced Jan. 8, 2027. Got a budtender like that behind your counter? Send them to canna50.com today.