First Friday Posting – My Final Word on Oregon

The following chart plots the month-on-month sales change for Washington Retail stores from Sept. to Oct. as a function of the latitude of the location of the store.  A 2nd-degree polynomial fit was made to the data (for someone that runs a business under the name “Straight Line Analytics”, you’d think I might use linear fits more often …. just another window into the confusion that permeates my being).

The more to the left you go, the further south the store is (there’s that confusion again).  The further to the right you go, the further north the store is.  Canada pretty much starts at the 49th parallel, but I expect them to be buying land down here fast now that their nation has embraced legal cannabis, and they will soon be in so much better shape financially than America (how about having a national holiday on April 20th? … gotta love the Trudeaus).

Oregon skulks around 45.5 – 46.0 degrees of latitude and below to the left of the chart..

I have taken the liberty of adding some reference city locations at the approximate right-left orientation that corresponds to where they are on the latitude scale, and a orange-yellow circle that calls out the area of prime interest on the graph.

Beyond beating a dead “mighty duck” or “beaver” with a stick, suffice to say that Oregon initiating a tax-free market for State-legal Cannabis has impacted the business volume of stores within easy travel distance of Oregon.

I will leave it to my readers to interpret that beyond what has already been said.

Anyone feel like a road-trip to Oregon?  We’d likely benefit from having a designated driver.  I now have a list of 30 stores in the area that are, apparently, worth checking out.

I’m planning to publish something fun on strain names soon, and then something more serious about the state of proficiency/accuracy/repeatability/reliability in cannabis testing in the I-502 marketplace.

Followers of CTP may remember some of my earlier rants about how bad the state of the art in lab testing seemed to be early in the days of testing  (before about April of 2015).  This time, I will be focusing on testing that has been conducted since I first voiced those rants, with the intention of seeing whether or not things have improved at all.

If not, I may start labelling some of my charts with lab names.  I won’t make judgement calls, nor will I defame/libel people or institutions.  But I may associate corporate entities with interesting data patterns … and I may comment a bit upon those data patterns.

As part of that work, I also intend to evaluate growers/processors to see if I can detect any patterns of “shopping for results” across labs.  If I find anything there, I may name names, as well.  Maybe not … it is probably best to ask people what they were thinking and doing before calling them on it.  Particularly if I ever want them to be clients.  Then again, DO I want them as clients?  I’ll have to chew on that over the next week or two.

Please let me know what you’d like to see in future postings, and what you do or do not like about the ones I’ve put out so far.

Thanks …. have a wonderful weekend.

Rest Hawks!

Jim