INSIDE: DEAR ABBY, HOROSCOPE, PUZZLES & FEATURES
C1
B USINESS
THE BULLETIN • SUNDAY, MARCH 14, 2021
bendbulletin.com/business
CANNABIS RETAILERS IN BEND FACE
STIFF COMPETITION
Ryan Brennecke/The Bulletin
Kevin Hogan, left, president and co-founder of Oregrown, stands Wednesday at the Bend location with Hunter Neubauer, chairman and co-founder of Oregrown, by a variety of products that
have new sustainable packaging or will help reduce waste .
BY SUZANNE ROIG
The Bulletin
E
ven with robust cannabis sales
that were boosted by the pan-
demic, Deschutes County’s 45
cannabis retailers find them-
selves competing for customers.
Stores try to set themselves apart by
establishing personalities, locations,
product variety and creating varied cus-
tomer experiences. And in some cases,
by selling logo wear and sustainably
grown and packaged products.
“We love to meet customers who shop
at other stores. Consumers can shop
anywhere anytime and spend their time
where they like to be,” said Jeremy Kwit,
Substance cannabis store owner. “Our
mission is to create a retail environment
that is viscerally different than other re-
tail business.”
Oregon is unique among the legal
states for not placing a cap on the num-
ber of stores in a geographic area, creat-
ing a concentration of stores in some ar-
eas. In Oregon, like Colorado, local cities
and counties can decide if they will allow
cannabis stores. In Deschutes County,
Redmond does not allow cannabis retail-
ers, Jefferson County has six and Crook
County doesn’t allow cannabis at all.
Hunter Neubauer, chairman and co-founder of Oregrown, holds a product with sustainable
packaging at the Bend location on Wednesday.
With each retailer needing to earn
about $2.5 million in sales a year to make
ends meet, there is intense pressure that
could eventually lead to consolidation,
said Beau Whitney, a Portland canna-
bis economist. In Bend, there are sev-
eral retailers with multiple locations and
several that have been sold to outside
owners.
In Oregon, there are about 4 million
people who purchased about $1.1 billion
in sales of cannabis last year in the legal
recreational cannabis sphere. Last year,
the 753 active retailer licenses issued by
the Oregon Liquor Control Commission
statewide. Last year sales were a record
$1.1 billion, Whitney said.
Location plays a key role in the success
of a cannabis retailer, said Tom Adams, of
Adams Cannabis Research in California.
It’s particularly important for cannabis re-
tailers because most of the week’s worth of
business is done on Fridays and Saturdays.
“Location becomes everything,” Ad-
ams said. “If you want to be a survivor,
you have to look at your location. Are
you on the home-bound direction for
the commuters? Is your signage visible
from the street?”
Oregrown, one of several long-stand-
ing cannabis companies founded in
Bend, has decided to set itself apart from
the pack by promoting its sustainable
packaging and farming practices on its
84-acre farm in Tumalo that is located
on former goat cheese farm built on a
pumice mine.
The retailer piv oted to sustainable
packaging when Hunter Neubauer, co-
founder and chairman of the board of
directors, saw one of his store’s packages
tossed on a hiking trail in Portland.
See Cannabis / C8
Five investment books you should really read
O
ne question I dread
hearing is, “What books
are you reading right
now?” Or similar versions of
the same.
That’s because I always
answer honestly, usually in
a sheepish tone, by saying,
“Nothing. I don’t like reading
books.”
Which is true. I am finally at
an age where I can admit pub-
licly that I’m too lazy to read.
FACTS ON
N
FINANCE
By William Valentine
These days, I prefer to get my
information osmotically in-
fused into my brain with as lit-
tle effort as possible. That usu-
ally involves the spoken voice.
Audio books? Love ’em. Pod-
casts? But of course. Hardcov-
ered tomes? No thanks.
Fortunately, there was a time
when I read a lot of books —
including a lot on investing. I
thought I’d share five of my fa-
vorites with you.
“A Random Walk Down Wall
Street,” by Burton Malkiel
This book was first pub-
lished in 1973 and has stood
the test of time. It was required
reading in Finance 101 in col-
lege. Malkiel, a professor at
Princeton, postulates that the
prices of stocks reflect all pub-
licly available information
about them. As such, unless
you possess material infor-
mation that no one else has
(known as “insider” informa-
tion — which is illegal to trade
on), you have an equal chance
of outperforming and under-
performing the average return
of the market. The fact is, de-
spite what you’ve been led to
believe, no one has the ability
to predictively beat the mar-
ket by picking stocks. That is a
truism.
“Fooled by Randomness,”
by Nassim Taleb
Many people know Taleb
for a term he coined — black
swan — and the book he wrote
with the same name. But be-
fore he was writing about the
impact of the highly improb-
able, Taleb penned “Fooled
by Randomness.” This book
examines the fallibility of the
human mind when it comes to
investing. He explains how our
brains are wired to make sense
out of random information. In
the quest for market-beating
investments, we assign mean-
ing and import to data that are
only randomly related.
See Valentine / C8