A retail bonanza
FILE: Vendors, guests and others enter the Planet 13 Orange County dispensary through an arch as the digital waterfall cascades from the ceiling during a preview event on Thursday, June 24, 2021, in Santa Ana, Calif.
Photo by Leonard Ortiz/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
When California voters approved recreational marijuana in 2016, many imagined a straightforward shift from clandestine deals to bright, welcoming storefronts. Three years later, the reality at some locations feels more like a theme‑park excursion than a quick errand.
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First, like at most legal weed stores in California, you check in at a front desk. But, this being Planet 13, it’s not just any desk; you have to hand your ID over to an employee who is sitting beneath a 50‑foot wooden awning. Then you walk past a fully intact VW bus that happens to also be equipped with a smoke machine for some reason. There’s a long wall lit up with space‑themed displays, a Super Mario Kart video game station, a giant octopus statue sitting under dozens of umbrellas that hang from the ceiling and 20 different glass cases of cannabis products.
FILE: Brianne Puffer, left, of Long Beach, and friend take a photo in front of a restored VW bus that emits smoke when a button is pushed from inside, on Thursday, June 24, 2021, at Planet 13 in Santa Ana, Calif.
Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Once you’ve navigated all that and blinked a few times to give your overworked eyes some relief, you can finally walk up to a register and buy some pot.
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Can I get some light weed?
In the first days of legalization, this kind of unbridled retail bonanza would make front pages. Today, the largest weed store in California really just feels like a huge waste of time.
How does an octopus statue (or any other feature inside this odd building) benefit my cannabis‑buying experience? The Los Angeles Times explained all the quirks and gimmicks in a glowing 2021 review, calling them a clever marketing trick: Pot shops are legally restricted from buying ads on most of the internet, but Planet 13 beat the system by having customers do the marketing for it by taking selfies in front of the VW bus or the space wall. The Times predicted Planet 13’s “immersive, entertaining and totally Instagram‑worthy approach to cannabis commerce is going to become only more prevalent.”
It’s now three years later, the rules against advertising cannabis on the internet are starting to relax and I have yet to see any other store copy Planet 13’s megastore concept.
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My wife and I visited Planet 13’s Santa Ana superstore, its only location in California, this spring, and it seemed like even the staff was confused by some of the store’s amenities. After checking in at the front desk and walking past the Volkswagen bus (I felt no urge to take a selfie or engage its smoke machine) I saw the Mario Kart game station and convinced my wife to play a game with me. I mean, why put a working video game console inside the store if you aren’t up for people playing it, right? But less than one Mario lap in, I heard a sales associate yelling my name across an empty sales floor. Well, technically there were three other customers in the cavernous store at the time, but I could still basically hear my name echo off the walls. I waved to the young woman asking for me from across the airplane hangar‑like space, and she crossed the equivalent of a football field to ask if I was ready to check out — despite the video game controller still sitting in my hand.
FILE: Patrons view the Tyson Ranch brand of cannabis products on display at the Planet 13 dispensary on Wednesday, July 21, 2021, in Santa Ana, Calif.
Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
While looking around after finishing our race (I won) my wife and I agreed that Planet 13 does live up to its superstore concept, at least in the sheer number of products it sells. That’s also part of the annoyance, though. For some nightmarish reason, each product is displayed inside a glass retail case that also contains various props. The items for sale are spread out between an unending sequence of nonsense trinkets and baubles, requiring you to walk nearly every row just to try to find out what is actually being sold. It was like visiting a Chinese restaurant with a 40‑page menu, only you had to walk 10 feet to read every page and a signed Mike Tyson boxing glove or decorative fake plant separated each dish. I guess it’s a benefit to shoppers looking to walk 10,000 steps a day.
That wasn’t the only problem on the shelf. My wife and I are both experienced stoners, but as we’ve aged we’ve realized that we enjoy cannabis that has lower amounts of THC and contains at least some CBD. Like many other adults, we’ve found that modern recreational cannabis is too strong. We also prefer to buy outdoor‑grown cannabis, both because it’s far better for the environment and because we find that it has more flavor and a more interesting high. After spending 10 minutes walking from case to case I couldn’t find a single strain of pot that had any CBD in it, so I asked the sales agent assigned to us: Did they know of any lower‑strength cannabis strains or cannabis grown outdoors that we could see?
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The salesperson said she didn’t know if any of the pot was grown outdoors. “As far as flower, I don’t think we have anything with CBD,” she added.
Now, to be fair to Planet 13, finding low‑strength pot or sun‑grown cannabis is hard at most of California’s retail stores — a ridiculous situation given that weed’s ridiculous strength has become a cliche. But shouldn’t California’s largest retail store have room for some lower‑strength weed? Maybe ownership could shorten the 50‑foot awning, or roll the VW bus out of the way slightly.
Costco doesn’t need hot dog statues
Planet 13 has supersized the worst aspects of legal weed. Cannabis contains hundreds of active compounds, yet most of the display cases only listed the product’s THC percentage without even specifying that it was THC. Planet 13’s unspecified percentages are like an unrealized admission that the company simply does not understand the cannabis plant it is trying to sell.
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Planet 13 doesn’t seem to be particularly successful with its business model, either. The company, which has an even larger store in Las Vegas and is expanding to Florida, lost $73.6 million last year. That’s not surprising, considering it seems hellbent on overstuffing its marketing budget and undercutting its core demographic. I’m a cannabis editor, I’m supposed to want to spend time buying products I care about from a pot store! Not here.
FILE: A guest has a photo taken in front of a 16‑foot‑tall animatronic octopus at a VIP event on Thursday, June 24, 2021, at Planet 13 in Santa Ana, Calif.
Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Perhaps a pot megastore like Planet 13 would have been interesting to me in the early days of legalization, just for the sheer surprise and spectacle. But now, a decade after I visited my first legal American pot store in Washington state, it seems like the substance of this superstore experience has been stripped away almost entirely.
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Brand activations are nothing new. Every company seems to feel a need to become part of the cultural conversation today, whether it’s Lululemon trying to sell yoga pants by creating sculptures dedicated to LGBTQ+ stories or M&M’s creating a “flavor room” experience when unveiling a new candy. But these are one‑off events, not the company’s entire sales strategy like Planet 13’s approach to selling pot.
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FILE: Planet 13, which has an over‑the‑top superstore dispensary in Las Vegas, opened what was billed as the “second‑largest cannabis superstore in the world” in 2021 in Santa Ana, Calif.
Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
After all, cannabis is a consumer good, and what other products are sold inside an immersive retail experience? Costco locations are massive, but not because there are giant hot dog statues or selfie walls with “Kirkland Signature” in neon. No one needs to go to Olive Oil Land to buy olive oil or Cereal Kingdom to buy granola.
If Planet 13 is creating an “immersive shopping experience,” it’s really only immersing me in an experience that I have no interest in being in. The company has built a store that only makes sense when looking backward at pot prohibition. Yes, a pot megastore sounds incredibly strange and unique if your point of view is only informed by the deep, dark ages before legalization. But cannabis is not only legal in California, it’s commonplace. We can buy weed online and have it delivered to our front door.
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Planet 13’s smoke‑machine‑filled VW bus encapsulates its dated perspective: The company built a statue of an old weed cliche that’s no longer interesting or even relevant. The modern American stoner isn’t some surfer hotboxing in a VW somewhere along Highway 1, they’re vaping pot inside a Tesla. And — at least based on the company’s revenue figures and my own experience — they probably didn’t buy that vape pen at Planet 13.
