National retail sales figures for July included a small segment called “miscellaneous store retailers,” in which the U.S. Department of Commerce included the no-longer-so-small cannabis dispensaries.
With sales at the nation's miscellaneous store retailers increasing by 3.5% in July from June to a record $14 billion — at a time when total retail sales lagged — the Wolf Report looked at one state and concluded that the boom was partly driven by cannabis retail sales.
California at the forefront
The report's author, Wolf Richter, used California's cannabis market, currently the world's largest, as an example, and this is what he found out.