Authoritative and highly actionable advice on selling marijuana.
A debut guide offers counsel to cannabis retailers.
“The stigma of cannabis is one of the biggest barriers we face as retailers,” writes Berry, a former Fortune 500 executive who now operates a cannabis business consultancy. This informative book begins with the author’s sobering admission that she got interested in medical marijuana when she witnessed opioid addiction in her own family. In the opening chapter, Berry broadly defines the stigma of cannabis by enumerating four “big lies” (“Black Men are Dangerous”; “Cannabis is Dangerous”; “Opioids are Safe”; and “Addiction is the Addict’s Fault”), which, she explains, are interconnected. These lies are contrasted with “Big Truths” about marijuana, including its medical, economic, and societal benefits, detailed very effectively by the author in the next chapter. Having addressed the negative perceptions and positive impacts of cannabis, Berry turns her attention to the retail side in the book’s remaining chapters. She covers customer relationships, leadership, branding, service, merchandising, omnichannel, marketing, and store operations; in short, it’s a comprehensive menu of what any retailer needs to know, with a specific focus on selling marijuana. The author applies her considerable experience working with leading traditional retailers to an area that has special challenges. Justifiably, Berry emphasizes the consumer experience as the key aspect of retailing: “A delightful customer experience generates the most important competitive advantage you can have in this industry: customer loyalty.” Her rundown of typical customers—well beyond the “stoner” stereotype—should be extremely valuable to every cannabis retailer. One of the author’s useful and creative ideas, for example, is to give customers a “cannabis usage journal” that “provides a structured format for users to record their experiences with different cannabis strains and products.” Other material is commonly found in basic retailing books; clearly, Berry’s intent is to touch on all of these areas without getting too deeply in the weeds. Still, there is just enough clearly written content in each chapter, augmented by numerous instructional sidebars and a few well-placed stories, to provide a solid platform for retail operations. For those interested in starting or improving a cannabis retail business, this work fits the bill.
Authoritative and highly actionable advice on selling marijuana.Pub Date: March 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5445-2892-2
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Zepplyn Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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