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Comment by mattmaroon | Hacker News Reader

My brother supervises at a dispensary. They are not attractive robbery targets at all. They have a lot of security. Like a bank, they expect the amount of cash would bring trouble if they were not prepared. Unlike a bank, they don't dispense much cash (just petty change) so they don't even have to leave much in the drawers, which are emptied frequently and dropped into a safe nobody there can access.

They have cash-handling processes similar to a casino, but again, they have much less than a casino or bank to take.

Employee theft is a much bigger problem than robbery, because you can imagine who works at them, but even then, it's hard to get away with.

You'd be much better off robbing a busy gas station or the like.

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> Employee theft is a much bigger problem than robbery, because you can imagine who works at them

This is lazy thinking.

Any business dealing in cash and desirable inventory will have theft problems. In fact, the inventory doesn’t even have to be desirable. Consider office supply theft. It’s rampant; a cost of business to some degree. And part of the motivation is simply the righting of perceived wrongs.

Employees will always take from their employers, in every industry and at every class level. In industries where there are no “things” to take, the employees simply take back their time.

That dig at employees of dispensaries is really low

I've known directors to steal from companies so the stereotype doesn't really jive.

> you can imagine who works at them

This is disgracefully elitist. White collar crime hurts more people.

I see why you would say that, but you probably have not met very many people who work at a dispensary, I have. My brother got promoted to supervisor in a month for the simple reason that he is the only person who could wait until after work to get high.

He’s told me quite a bit of what goes on there, and I am sure different dispensaries are different, but in any state where it is relatively recently legalized and there aren’t that many, it’s just the biggest stoners working there. You would have to be kind of special to decide to steal things with that much security around, they always get caught

I as a customer an hour ago had a long conversation with a friend I made behind the counter.

Some software engineers do partake of the weed. So yeah I’ve met them.

Tattoos, piercings? They’re just people.

Getting high isn’t a sign of larceny

I didn’t say it was. I just said employee theft is a bigger problem than robbery.

> you can imagine who works at them

You might want to be more careful then. This empty space is a well known rhetorical device used to allude that you're making a negative judgement about people.

What it meant was, if you work at a place with all the cash controls of a casino, you have to be stoned to steal petty cash from them. You’re going to get caught, and you’re going to get a felony over a small amount of money. Nobody sober does that.

It was not meant as “all stoners are thieves” but as “you’d have to be high to think that’s a good idea”. And since nearly everyone who works at a dispensary is high all day every day, it happens, a lot more than armed robbery which almost never does.

This is like a tour of logical fallacies. How about some data?

I don’t think there is much data to be had, at least public. But I can tell you in the 5 years my brother has been there, they have had zero armed robbery attempts, and several employee theft attempts. And a quick Google about whether dispensaries get robbed frequently will show you people from the industry saying the same thing.

But no, no data, only anecdotes. Still, I feel like only somebody who has never been in a dispensary would think they are attractive robbery target. I’ve been in them and maybe 10 states, and they are all pretty tight Security, because they know they have a lot of cash and people would like to steal it.

Which is why if you want to steal from dispensaries, just work in security, like your brother. Who's to say he's not stealing, and simply not bragging to you about it?

I said he’s a supervisor, not in security. He’s not an idiot. He’d be caught very quickly. Cash controls are such that everyone is.

I don’t know if every state is like mine, but here they have to do complete inventory every night. You can steal but they’ll know it happened by the end of the day and then start checking the footage. It happens.

Thank god he was smart enough to avoid becoming a security guard, the natural path to thievery.

But he is high every single moment at work by your reasoning, yes?

I’m not sure you even read the comment you were replying to. Click “parent” a few times and you’ll see “My brother got promoted to supervisor in a month for the simple reason that he is the only person who could wait until after work to get high.”

I'm not sure you read your own words to try and see why everyone seems to not understand what it was you keep saying you meant.

"And since nearly everyone who works at a dispensary is high all day every day,"

Be careful in dealing in generalities and infinitives.by your own logic, your brother is simply an exception that proves a rule.

Your own words have worked harder against you than anything that any of these replies stated.

yeah and you missed the irony mocking that very comment

Golden rule of customer service is you can not demand service while simultaneously degrading the people who provide it to you.

The federal illegality of the weed business (and downstream effects of that illegality on working/business conditions) affects who works there, and that includes white collar employees (also investors, etc.)

Definitely. There are a lot of strange quirks to working at one.

For instance, Fannie and Freddie don’t recognize your income, so getting a mortgage is difficult.

The pay isn’t that great either, but they get a discount, and for a lot of people weed is one of their bigger expenses.

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