The Headset Report analyzes turnover rates for budtenders in the US and Canada

Cannabis data collection company Headset released its latest report on July 13, covering budtender/employee turnover rates at cannabis dispensaries.

Headset calls cannabis budtenders the “heart and soul of the industry” because they are essentially ambassadors for the plant and the industry. “Because of their extreme importance, recruiting, onboarding and managing budtenders is one of the most important tasks in any cannabis retail operation,” writes Headset in his introduction. “One of the biggest challenges in managing budtenders, or employees, in any organization is employee turnover. Attrition is often inevitable and always costly, so it’s important to streamline the hiring and management process wherever possible. In this report, we examine budtender sales in the US and Canada to understand what is and is not normal in terms of budtender sales.”

The report analyzes information collected between June 2021 and May 2022 with a search in Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon and Washington State, as well as the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Ontario, and British Columbia Saskatchewan.

In both the US and Canada, the split between senior employees and new employees is almost the same. In the US, 40.6% are employees hired more than 12 months ago, with 59.4% considered new hires. In Canada, the split between 12-month employees and new hires is 40.1% and 59.9%, respectively.

The percentages start to differ when looking at the percentages of staff staying at cannabis dispensaries versus those leaving before the 12-month mark. In the US, 45.4% stayed on after a year but 54.6% left, and in Canada 43.6% stayed on while 56.4% quit.

Additional data shows that ~16% of workers in both the US and Canada continued to work at their jobs, but only ~24% chose to leave. The percentage of new hires who choose to stay or leave is much higher – 29.3% and 30.1% in the US and 27.3% and 32.5% in Canada.

There are many reasons that could cause budtenders to quit their jobs and in most cases the data is similar across the markets used for the analysis. “Retailers in Illinois, for example, appear to do better than average at retaining more experienced employees for more than a year, with 55% of employees having been hired more than a year ago,” the report states. “Conversely, retailers in Colorado and Oregon typically have far lower retention, both with more than a third of budtenders beginning and ending employment in the past 12 months. In Canada, Alberta is a bit of a mystery, as retailers tend to have slightly better retention among new employees but have lost a larger number of permanent employees than other Canadian provinces.”

The report also shares that 23% of new hires in the US and 24% in Canada quit before their first 30 days of employment, likely due to an “efficient and effective new hire onboarding process.”

Those who do well in sales are more likely to continue working. “The better the budtender performs, the more likely they are to keep working,” concludes Headset. “It could simply be because it feels good to do a job well and so it’s natural to want to keep going. However, budtend is still a tip-driven position in many markets, and being a top performer could also mean that an employee brings home more total income than his or her peers.”

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