12 April 17th-April 23rd, 2025 phoenixnewtimes.com PHOENIX NEW TIMES | NEWS | FEATURE | FOOD & DRINK | ARTS & CULTURE | MUSIC | CONCERTS | CANNABIS | employ about that number of budtenders. And judging by job listings, there’s a fair amount of turnover. There are currently dozens of budtender or “retail associate” positions listed on job board websites like Indeed. Dispensaries appear to start new hires at around $15 or $16 an hour and look for workers with customer service skills and cannabis knowledge. Some job postings lean heavier on the customer service requirement. “If you have customer service experi- ence from places like Starbucks, Target, or other retail and food service-oriented posi- tions, we’re willing to train you on cannabis,” reads one budtender job posting at JARS Cannabis. The quality of that training — and to what extent it exists — is up for debate. Legally, prospective budtenders in Arizona must be 21 and submit an applica- tion through the state, which includes a background check and fingerprinting. (Becoming a bartender requires clearing more hurdles — to serve liquor in Arizona, you must complete a Title IV training course every three years.) Only two of 24 states with legal recreational weed have a concrete training requirement. Illinois has a “responsible vendor training program” for aspiring budtenders, while Washington requires budtenders to learn CPR and complete 20 hours of a medical marijuana consultant training program. Despite that, Ann Torrez of the Arizona Dispensaries Association said in a state- ment to New Times, the requirements to be a budtender are actually substantial. “The background checks and fees associ- ated with security a Facility Agent Card” — a budtending license, basically — “provide the public and marijuana employers a more elevated workforce than in many other retail-type industries, but may prevent some individuals from accessing these jobs,” Torrez said. She added that the ADA “values the accessibility of cannabis roles like budtending” but also recognizes “the continued opportunity for elevated training to ensure public health and consumer confidence.” Some dispensaries in Arizona do take training seriously. ANC Dispensary — one of the few stores in the Valley that isn’t a chain — started off as a medical marijuana dispensary. Co-owner Lori Hicks estimates that about a third of her 25 budtenders have been with the dispensary since day one in 2018. “We do still do continuing education,” Hicks said. “We don’t want a 70-year-old grandma falling down because we gave her too much cannabis.” But industry veterans say many other dispensaries — particularly those owned by multi-state chains — have let trainings become less of a priority. Nick Fredrickson, a former budtender and union leader, blamed a lack of investment from compa- nies like Curaleaf, where he worked for four years. In his time at Curaleaf’s midtown location, Fredrickson said there was only one vendor training, in which a brand comes out to train workers on their products. “It’s a decline in the level of training and care that these employers put into the labor force,” Fredrickson said. “There are things that have completely disappeared from our industry.” Strong, the Curaleaf marketing director, declined to comment on that claim. Simonson confirmed that Curaleaf doesn’t typically organize vendor trainings, adding that trainings tend to be conducted in-house. The previous four dispensaries he worked at would line vendors up to explain their products to budtenders. “These dispensaries, they’ve gotten so big and there’s so many of them,” Simonson said, “training at this point for the industry has kind of fallen by the wayside.” That’s on the vendors, too, he said. He thinks many brands have figured out that they can skimp on training if they overload their packaging with information. “It’s like, there’s a frickin’ novel written on the back of some of these gummies now,” he said. “And so, I think they figured that out and rolled back the vendor training.” Is that cheaper? Probably. Good for the consumer? Not so much. A CHANGING CLIENTELE As access to weed has become more main- stream, so have the customers who push through the doors of dispensaries around the state. Simonson said recreational sales are far more focused on health than he would have thought. “If you would have told me, ‘You’re gonna be a budtender and most of what you’re gonna do is sell grandpa sleepy gummies,’ I would have been like, “Yeah right! We’ve got all this weed and we’re gonna have a great time,’” Simonson laughed. “No, no, no.” For Julie Gunnigle, the legal director of NORML, that shift in the market only shows how important a knowledgeable budtender is. Many customers don’t walk into a dispensary to get high as a kite. They buy weed products for treatment purposes. She’s among them, having used mari- juana to treat a shoulder injury she suffered while snowboarding decades ago. “In my view,” Gunnigle said, “someone who is highly trained and knows the prod- ucts they are selling is worth the world.” Hicks said her dispensary, ANC, oper- ates with that kind of service in mind. “We still treat everybody almost as if they are a patient,” she said, adding that many former patients have stopped using a medical card. “We have an enormous number of people that are 40 or older. They are not doing it as much to go home and just get blasted as much as they need it for pain, or they want to know how to sleep, or they want to make sure they’re not doing too much THC when they need to work.” Because many customers are essentially self-medicating, some in the industry feel the term “budtender” is too trivial given the responsibilities of the position. (Bar patrons may also be self-medicating in a sense, but not in a way they should be.) Gunnigle said the term “kind of irritates” her. “There are potentially higher training and standards for bartenders in Arizona, but the level of skill to be really good at your job as a budtender, I think, is much, much higher,” she told New Times in a phone interview. “And I think the risks are much higher when someone screws up — if a bartender screws up and my old fash- ioned tastes nasty, that’s different than someone trying to access their medicine.” (Others find the term misleading for other reasons. “I always thought the The legalization of recreational weed in 2020 changed the composition of the customer base at dispensaries. (Jacob Tyler Dunn) Jon Udell, a cannabis attorney and director at Arizona NORML, said he’s often underwhelmed by the knowledge of budtenders he buys from. (Katya Schwenk) You’re Highered from p 10 >> p 14
