When Washington and Colorado became the first states to legalize marijuana in 2012, Aaron Como said 4/20 was a pretty big deal.
Fourteen years later, it’s difficult to go a few miles anywhere in Washington without spotting a dispensary just a block away, which means the holiday dedicated to cannabis has lost much of its novelty.
“Early on, it was very emotional for a lot of people, because it’s like we’re now able to do something that we’ve never been able to do before,” Como said. “Stores now are offering sales every day of the week. Before it was like 4/20 is a day to really get sales. Now it’s just every day.”
Como, a sales representative for a Washington-based cannabis company called Bodhi, was dropping off some product at Lucky Leaf in downtown Spokane on Friday so everything would be squared away Monday. He said his company has contracts with approximately 20 cannabis farms and that their brand can be found across about 275 dispensaries in Washington.
While marijuana use has become more normalized since legalization, statistics from the Washington Department of Revenue show that cannabis sales have decreased over the past five years.
In 2021, total marijuana revenue amounted to about $1.47 billion statewide. In 2025, sales for the year sat around $1.14 billion. The end of the pandemic and the lifting of the lockdown might have had something to do with the downturn in marijuana sales, but Mitchell Lowe, the general manager at Lucky Leaf, said something else is at play.
“Deals and a race to the bottom,” Lowe said. “It’s just everything’s getting cheaper.”
Lowe said this race to the bottom can be attributed not only to marijuana being cheaper to grow, but because new “Walmarts of Weed” have come to town. They have “the biggest hands in the dispensary market” and possess the purchasing power of 30 or 40 dispensaries, which means they often get better deals from pot farms and cannabis companies like Bodhi.
When Lidz (known as Zips on the West Side) burst onto the Spokane cannabis scene, the business immediately marked everything in its inventory as 40% off. Both the city’s North Side and South Hill Lidz locations declined to comment.
“The date that (Lidz) opened, our sales dropped two -thirds in a single day,” Lowe said. “We were so dead for those first two weeks, we were like, ‘We have to match whatever they’re doing, because we have no other option.”
Lucky Leaf, like many dispensaries in Spokane, were forced to make all their products 40% off to stay in competition with larger chains like Lidz. To celebrate 4/20, he said they can’t feasibly give any more of a discount, but they are offering some deals on Monday for the first 200 to 300 people that walk through their doors. These deals are things like $1 joints, $5 carts and $3 grams of oil.
“There are a lot of companies that have emerged that are selling the cheapest of the cheap,” Lowe said. “Now that those companies exist, a lot of people will gravitate to those. People are struggling right now, so we’ve been selling a lot of cheaper products in general for that reason.”
Lowe does worry about dispensaries in small towns, like Colville, that may be unable to compete with the “race to the bottom” as consumers travel to the city for cheaper prices and more variety.
Concentrations of THC have gotten higher over the years as growing marijuana has morphed from personal backyard planting and baking the buds in an oven to a more refined, scientific process where terpenes, proper lighting, nutrients and genetics are all refined in a lab environment.
Alexis Jones, the inventory lead at Cinder on Division Street, said the cannabis industry as a whole has been rolling in the direction of cheaper prices for years.
“With such heavy saturation in the market, it’s kind of inevitable that business leads that way,” she said. “I think that it’s heavily reliant on what the farms are offering the retail shop.”
Jones said they’ve been offering 40% off predominantly top and mid shelf products since March. That sale ends Monday.
They also have daily deals.
Jones noted the decrease in marijuana sales over the last few years may be due in part to a lack of disposable funds for many to spend on their vices.
“Speaking as both a consumer and somebody that works in the industry, I got to pick and choose what I’m going to spend my money on,” Jones said. “I do feel like there’s also been this kind of shift in this current generation – Gen Z, if you will; I feel like a lot of them aren’t super interested in smoking weed and drinking all the time.”
She’s noticed most of her clientele are millennials or Gen X, and that Gen Z, even though many are legally able to purchase such products, don’t pop into her shop nearly as much as the older generations.
Compared with other cities, like San Francisco where you can fill up a black trash bag full of buds after roaming around Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park for about an hour, the weed festivities in Spokane on 4/20 likely will be fairly subdued.
The link between cannabis and 4/20 stems from a group of students in 1971 at San Rafael High School north of San Francisco who would meet after school at 4:20 p.m. to smoke a joint, the Associated Press reported.
The term spread because one of the students was a friend of Phil Lesh, the bassist for the Grateful Dead. In the early 1990s, a reporter for a cannabis magazine was at a Grateful Dead show when he saw a flier that encouraged people to “meet at 4:20 on 4/20 for 4/20-ing in Marin County.” The rest is history.
“It’s a phenomenon,” one of the students, Steve Capper, who became a chief executive at a financing company in San Francisco, told the Associated Press in 2023. “Most things die within a couple years, but this just goes on and on. It’s not like someday somebody’s going to say, ‘OK, Cannabis New Year’s is on June 23rd now.’”
