Cannabis retail gets no respect: not from regulators who have tended to force it into “green zones”, nor from investors who have mostly poured money into cultivation and brands. But that’s starting to change, at least among investors who are now noticing a lot of white space on some states’ WeedMaps pages, and who have seen a lot of their supply-side bets struggle.

The three most important factors in retail success, says the old bromide, are “location, location and location.” That starts, in US and Canadian cannabis, with the state or province a retailer has licenses in. A study Global Go Analytics conducted last year showed that the average revenue-per-store in US states in 2022 varied enormously based on two somewhat related factors: the age of the market and the number of stores open.

New Jersey just started its adult-use roll-out in April ’22; during the eight remaining months of the year an average of 25 stores served a population of 9.3 million (less than 3 stores per million people) and generated an astronomical $23.7 million each. But a market’s age isn’t everything as it would be in most retail sub-sectors: Stores that managed to get open in Illinois after its January ’20 adult-use launch benefited from the state’s glacial pace of licensing to average $13.7 million in ’22.