Planet 13 has become a renowned cannabis store in California. Buying weed from Planet 13 often feels like a dream as the entire overwhelming process deviates from the old-school method of buying weed. Based solely on the square footage, a customer has to traverse just to get rung up at this sprawling cannabis superstore located in Orange County. It can be safely said that buying pot here is a time-consuming process.
Many years ago, buying weed meant walking from the car straight to the pot dealer’s car or maybe walking into their house. The scenario changed when California first legalized marijuana, as most consumers felt those simple transactions would easily be equivalent to direct exchanges of money for products at retail dispensaries. Planet 13, one of the largest cannabis dispensaries, chose to differ as buying weed here requires customers to navigate through long queues, similar to Disneyland.
The Planet 13 Experience: A Cannabis Superstore Adventure
The check-in at a front desk is like most legal weed stores in California, but at Planet 13, customers are required to show their ID to an employee who is sitting beneath a 50-foot wooden awning. Then, the customer is taken aboard a VW bus equipped with a smoke machine for unknown reasons. Customers enjoy space-themed displays, a Super Mario Kart video game station, a giant octopus statue sitting under dozens of umbrellas hanging from the ceiling, and 20 different glass cases of cannabis products. After navigating through all of that, they can finally walk up to a register and buy some pot.
The octopus statue or any other feature inside this building does not elevate any cannabis-buying experience. According to the Los Angeles Times 2021 review, these are clever marketing tricks. Pot shops are legally restricted from advertising on the internet, but Planet 13 came up with an idea to let customers do the marketing by taking selfies in front of the VW bus. After three years, the rules on cannabis advertising have been relaxed, but Planet 13’s megastore refuses to change its concept.
Lester Black’s visit to Planet 13’s Santa Ana superstore with his wife was a unique experience. He felt the staff were confused by some of the store’s amenities. The Volkswagen bus did not catch his attention for a selfie and just when he started playing at the Mario Kart game station, he was called by a sales associate and was asked to check out.
Challenges for Cannabis Consumers at Planet 13
Despite wasting his time on unnecessary activities, Lester Black feels Planet 13 lives up to its superstore concept, considering the sheer number of products it sells. For some unexplained 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 trinkets and baubles, requiring customers to walk nearly every row just to try to find out what is actually being sold.
Lester Black and his wife are both experienced stoners, and with age, they have started enjoying cannabis that has lower amounts of THC and contains at least some CBD. They prefer to buy outdoor-grown cannabis because it’s far better for the environment and comes loaded with flavor. After wasting 10 minutes walking from case to case, he failed to find a single strain of pot that had any CBD in it. Asking the salesperson for help was also disappointing as she did not know about outdoor pots.
Finding low-strength pot or sun-grown cannabis is hard at most of California’s retail stores, but it is expected that one of California’s most renowned and largest retail stores would have room for some lower-strength weed. Planet 13 has supersized the worst aspects of legal weed. The unspecified percentages at the store are like an unrealized admission that the company simply does not understand the cannabis plant it is trying to sell.
