A lot of them have wiggled around this problem by offering “atms” at the cash register. You pay with a debit card, but it’s not a normal transaction, it’s an ATM withdrawal! I don’t understand how the money is vended to the business, but it keeps it out of the store
That's a fairly a common practice for cash only businesses, normally a different company is supplying the ATM and its cash. For example I've seen cash only ice cream shops with the same setup.
That's not what he's describing. In this case there actually is no cash or traditional ATM involved on-site. It's connected to the dispensary POS, not a physical ATM. (They often have a regular ATM like you describe also, though.)
So you do an ATM transaction, but the money goes to the dispensary somehow. I do not know how it works on the back end, but I've used it as a customer. It's lovely and can even be done over your phone.
Isn't that how a traditional ATM transaction works? You use the ATM and the money goes to the ATM owner (plus a fee). The only difference here is you get weed instead of cash.
Yes, but any ATM tells the bank that you took out $10. The bank never sees the cash and the cash doesn’t belong to the bank. Substituting goods may or may not be allowed but the bank doesn’t know about it and customers are unlikely to complain to the bank.
Signs that times are a' changing -- you can buy illegal drugs with a card now.
(Call me crazy and old-fashioned, but I don't think I'd want 50+ illegally-correlated transactions on my financial record that the government could lump into other charges...)
The Silver Platter doctrine prevents your financial institutions from handing over that data unbidden, but they can do so by request from law enforcement.
which law enforcement can get, trivially, if they're prosecuting a felony.
it's just a function of time and process, and while you can dispose of plants and bury money in your back yard, you can't undo old bank transactions. 20 years later those records may not be a thing, but last year sure will be...
sure they do. for example it's illegal to be in possession of marijuana and a firearm. the purchase of said MJ would be pretty good evidence that could lead to other warrants. That's the Hunter Biden gun charge.
It's oddly not. Only to be a user or addict with a firearm. IIRC if you just like the way weed looks in your hand that doesn't make you a user, and there's plenty of reasonable doubt you're guarding it for grandma or whoever.
Of course people are still being convicted of weed and firearm, but it gets recorded as gun law violation and nobody cares, cuz left hates guns and right hates weed, so they'll never repeal it.
The worst part is that the states are quite happy to help the feds enforce this. E.g. Hawaii has both mandatory gun registration and requires a state-issued license for medical marijuana. And if you happen to have both, well:
It should also be noted that while DEA is instructed by the executive to not go after cannabis users in states where it's legal for recreational use, there's no equivalent directive issued to ATF.
It would be great if the DEA and ATF were a bit more consistent in their enforcement. Joe Rogan smokes pot and has guns, federal agents busting down his studio door and dragging him away in handcuffs (while state ones look on and clap) would do more to move the needle on drug legalization than most anything else.
What you're saying is how people generally think the law works, but it's not how it works in practice. This is easily illustrated with possession of drug paraphernalia charges. There's two types of possession, actual and constructive - but both face the exact same charge. Constructive just means something like 'could be reasonably accessed.'
So imagine you're in a car, get pulled over, it smells of weed so the cop executes a search, and he finds a pipe in the glove compartment. You're getting arrested for PDP there 100%. Even if it genuinely wasn't yours, you stand very little chance of acquittal. Beyond a reasonable doubt doesn't mean 'is there some other viable explanation' because there literally always is. It means is it reasonably likely that one of these other explanations is what really happened.
What you're saying is how people generally think the prohibited possessor law works, but it's not how it works in practice.
It says nothing of drug possession, only gun/ammo possession by someone who uses or addicted to illegal drugs. There is plenty of reasonable doubt that constructive or actual possession of drugs is not accompanied by use, in fact this is the case for many dispensary workers.
>922 g (3) ... who is an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802));
oh fair enough about the "user" vs possession. but my point was they could possible use this info to get a warrant to surveil you to catch you using it.
They don't need that. I was served a federal search warrant after a detective wrote an anonymous officer claimed an anonymous DOG accused me of wrongdoing.
When 3rd order anonymous interspecies hearsay is sufficient for a warrant it means a warrant is just a rubber stamp.
Even a rubber-stamp warrant process serves a point, by making the police identify who they are targeting, as opposed to targeting everyone, and deciding who to charge after the fact.
Warrants aren't supposed to be hard to get. They are only supposed to stop the most blatant fishing expeditions.
Yes this seems to be increasingly common, at least on the west coast. The suboptimal part is that the buyer typically gets hit with an out-of-network ATM fee for doing this, so the consumer is paying $2-5 for processing per transaction.
That’s pretty small potatoes though compared to going to a bank yourself and making a transaction for cash you don’t normally have around. Maybe there’s an ATM down the block but that’s not the case for many people.
And those ATMs around the block from a dispensary (or even in the same buildimg) would still charge a fee for withdrawal anyway (as they are always a third-party ATM and not a bank one, so you get that big message on the screen about an extra fee for withdrawal).
Use a credit union or bank that doesn’t charge ATM fees; that’s what I do. Any CU-related ATM withdrawal is always free and I get 10 ATM withdrawals a month with fees reversed.
Yes, even exorbitant ones like on a cruise ship or casino. Free checks, too. And mutual funds with lower fees than Vanguard. But virtually no physical branches (most locations are brokerage offices only) so not ideal for depositing cash or getting a cashier's check... use something else for that.
The Neo-Bank I use in Germany (N26) works similarly. 3 or 5 fee-eaten withdrawals per month, but the always free option is supermarket registers. There’s a large network of supermarkets that are connected to the network, and I can generate a code on my phone, scan it, and it registers the negative value (e.g. -50 €), which I then get handed. Deposits work the same way (scan code, generate positive amount that you then pay), but at least for free accounts deposits incur a fee.
there is still a lot of cash on site due to the presence of an ATM though, and in the cash registers. the primary problem is that weed shops are incredibly attractive robbery targets due to being one of the few businesses in 2024 that handle large amounts of cash.
Often enough, it isn’t an actual ATM. You pay at the counter like you usually would using a card or an NFC payment method (e.g., Apple Pay), but the payment reader processes it as an ATM withdrawal transaction (hence an extra transaction fee of a few dollars). There is no physical cash involved at any point in this (at least not on the dispensary premises).
It feels like it is a state-by-state thing, yeah. I moved from WA to NYC just half a year ago, and I noticed it as well.
In WA, it felt like it was a pretty even 50/50 split (maybe with a heavier lean towards cash) between places accepting cash-only and those that accept debit as well (in addition to cash obviously). I dont remember any that accepted credit cards. All of this is a more recent situation though, as I still remember that just 6-8 years ago, pretty much every single place used to be cash-only. I also noticed some dispensaries experimenting with rather unconvential methods at different points in time too (e.g., Uncle Ike’s using a payment terminal for like a year that worked similarly to a regular debit card one, but it was using crypto as an intermediate medium on the backend to process the payment).
In NYC, it feels like everyone just accepts cards like usual, from grey-market ones to the legal ones.
However, I infinitely prefer the WA situation with cannabis over the NYC one for bajillion other reasons that are entirely unrelated to payment methods.
> the primary problem is that weed shops are incredibly attractive robbery targets due to being one of the few businesses in 2024 that handle large amounts of cash.
It's also the product that's the target much of the time - it's got no serial numbers and it's light-weight, and easy to resell.
My brother supervises at a dispensary. They are not attractive robbery targets at all. They have a lot of security. Like a bank, they expect the amount of cash would bring trouble if they were not prepared. Unlike a bank, they don't dispense much cash (just petty change) so they don't even have to leave much in the drawers, which are emptied frequently and dropped into a safe nobody there can access.
They have cash-handling processes similar to a casino, but again, they have much less than a casino or bank to take.
Employee theft is a much bigger problem than robbery, because you can imagine who works at them, but even then, it's hard to get away with.
You'd be much better off robbing a busy gas station or the like.
> Employee theft is a much bigger problem than robbery, because you can imagine who works at them
This is lazy thinking.
Any business dealing in cash and desirable inventory will have theft problems. In fact, the inventory doesn’t even have to be desirable. Consider office supply theft. It’s rampant; a cost of business to some degree. And part of the motivation is simply the righting of perceived wrongs.
Employees will always take from their employers, in every industry and at every class level. In industries where there are no “things” to take, the employees simply take back their time.
I see why you would say that, but you probably have not met very many people who work at a dispensary, I have. My brother got promoted to supervisor in a month for the simple reason that he is the only person who could wait until after work to get high.
He’s told me quite a bit of what goes on there, and I am sure different dispensaries are different, but in any state where it is relatively recently legalized and there aren’t that many, it’s just the biggest stoners working there. You would have to be kind of special to decide to steal things with that much security around, they always get caught
You might want to be more careful then. This empty space is a well known rhetorical device used to allude that you're making a negative judgement about people.
What it meant was, if you work at a place with all the cash controls of a casino, you have to be stoned to steal petty cash from them. You’re going to get caught, and you’re going to get a felony over a small amount of money. Nobody sober does that.
It was not meant as “all stoners are thieves” but as “you’d have to be high to think that’s a good idea”. And since nearly everyone who works at a dispensary is high all day every day, it happens, a lot more than armed robbery which almost never does.
I don’t think there is much data to be had, at least public. But I can tell you in the 5 years my brother has been there, they have had zero armed robbery attempts, and several employee theft attempts. And a quick Google about whether dispensaries get robbed frequently will show you people from the industry saying the same thing.
But no, no data, only anecdotes. Still, I feel like only somebody who has never been in a dispensary would think they are attractive robbery target. I’ve been in them and maybe 10 states, and they are all pretty tight Security, because they know they have a lot of cash and people would like to steal it.
Why? Society doesn’t owe you acceptance for your personal choices. For the vast majority of people, smoking marijuana is an anti-social choice that makes them a less productive member of society. Why should anyone have something other than a negative opinion of such a choice?
"You judged someone on a separate occasion, so you can't object to judging people now" would be tu quoque. What I actually did was point out the internal contradiction in your stated position.
I've said a total of four sentences on the matter, none of which hinted at its importance or lack thereof to me, so it's interesting that you've come to that conclusion. Either way, my internal motivations are a non sequitur. You are continuing to take a self-contradictory position by stating that a certain behavior, namely judgment, is not "ok", which constitutes a judgment. You have offered no defense of doing so. Should I conclude that you simply believe that oxymoronic positions can in fact be correct?
No it's not. Judging people is extremely important in order to enforce social conformity and norms. It's how we as social animals maintain civilization.
Which is why if you want to steal from dispensaries, just work in security, like your brother. Who's to say he's not stealing, and simply not bragging to you about it?
I said he’s a supervisor, not in security. He’s not an idiot. He’d be caught very quickly. Cash controls are such that everyone is.
I don’t know if every state is like mine, but here they have to do complete inventory every night. You can steal but they’ll know it happened by the end of the day and then start checking the footage. It happens.
I’m not sure you even read the comment you were replying to. Click “parent” a few times and you’ll see “My brother got promoted to supervisor in a month for the simple reason that he is the only person who could wait until after work to get high.”
The federal illegality of the weed business (and downstream effects of that illegality on working/business conditions) affects who works there, and that includes white collar employees (also investors, etc.)
I think the ATM isn't actually dispensing cash. You're doing an ATM transaction for a certain amount of money, but what you're actually getting is weed.
It's not just "You can buy with cash, and we conveniently have an ATM available to get cash if you didn't go to your bank."
It's not just "You can buy with cash, and we conveniently have an ATM available to get cash if you didn't go to your bank."
I have heard from a very reliable source that the ATMs in most weed shops on the Eastside of Seattle dispense cash because you're going to be required to pay with cash at the counter. There are allegedly a few exceptions, but the majority of shops accept only cash and the ATM dispenses bills.
Nope, it's just a regular ATM operated by a 3rd party company. You get cash from it then give them the cash. The store will also often reimburse for the ATM fee.
Business 2 owns the building and the atm, renting it to business 1, the dispensary. B1 pays the cash as rent to b2 who puts it into the ATM again. A SWAG but it's common enough in other business setups to alter costs as I understand it.
