I n 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 secu- rity 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 expe- rience 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 dispensa- ries dotted the landscape, customers rightly expected a certain depth of knowl- edge. 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 knowl- edgeable 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. WHO CAN BE A BUDTENDER? 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 Legal weed is everywhere. Expert budtenders are not. BY TJ L’HEUREUX Illustration by Landon Armstrong >> p 12
