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BREAKING THE STIGMA

RACISM, THE OPIOID ENDEMIC, LIES, AND INVITING GRANDMA TO THE DISPENSARY

Authoritative and highly actionable advice on selling marijuana.

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A debut guide offers counsel to cannabis retailers.

“The stigma of cannabis is one of the biggest barriers we face as retailers,” writes Berry, a former Fortune 500 executive who now operates a cannabis business consultancy. This informative book begins with the author’s sobering admission that she got interested in medical marijuana when she witnessed opioid addiction in her own family. In the opening chapter, Berry broadly defines the stigma of cannabis by enumerating four “big lies” (“Black Men are Dangerous”; “Cannabis is Dangerous”; “Opioids are Safe”; and “Addiction is the Addict’s Fault”), which, she explains, are interconnected. These lies are contrasted with “Big Truths” about marijuana, including its medical, economic, and societal benefits, detailed very effectively by the author in the next chapter. Having addressed the negative perceptions and positive impacts of cannabis, Berry turns her attention to the retail side in the book’s remaining chapters. She covers customer relationships, leadership, branding, service, merchandising, omnichannel, marketing, and store operations; in short, it’s a comprehensive menu of what any retailer needs to know, with a specific focus on selling marijuana. The author applies her considerable experience working with leading traditional retailers to an area that has special challenges. Justifiably, Berry emphasizes the consumer experience as the key aspect of retailing: “A delightful customer experience generates the most important competitive advantage you can have in this industry: customer loyalty.” Her rundown of typical customers—well beyond the “stoner” stereotype—should be extremely valuable to every cannabis retailer. One of the author’s useful and creative ideas, for example, is to give customers a “cannabis usage journal” that “provides a structured format for users to record their experiences with different cannabis strains and products.” Other material is commonly found in basic retailing books; clearly, Berry’s intent is to touch on all of these areas without getting too deeply in the weeds. Still, there is just enough clearly written content in each chapter, augmented by numerous instructional sidebars and a few well-placed stories, to provide a solid platform for retail operations. For those interested in starting or improving a cannabis retail business, this work fits the bill.

Authoritative and highly actionable advice on selling marijuana.

Pub Date: March 21, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-5445-2892-2

Page Count: 260

Publisher: Zepplyn Publishing

Review Posted Online: June 3, 2022

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  • New York Times Bestseller

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ABUNDANCE

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

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Helping liberals get out of their own way.

Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.

Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.

Pub Date: March 18, 2025

ISBN: 9781668023488

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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