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Why is a bag of weed always $10 (man)?
11–20 of 82 posts
Re: Why is a bag of weed always $10 (man)?
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, in the text he says the $10 refer to 1 gramme.
Is cannabis routinely cut, as hard drugs are? I can't imagine it would be terribly hard to find similarly-burning vegetation to dilute the amount of product in a fixed-weight bag at a level undetectable to the average buyer.
No, that's one of its advantages. It's pretty much impossible to "cut" it.
This is what a cannabis bud looks like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macro_cannabis_bud.jpg
You can't just throw some similarly looking vegetation in there without the buyer noticing. You could throw in low-grade hemp, but that's just as hard to grow, so it's of no benefit to the dealer.
One thing you can do is to not dry it. The moisture will add a bit of weight, but probably not more than 5-10% more, depending.
Re: Why is a bag of weed always $10 (man)?
#13The answer is actually in the question. The questioner is accustomed to paying $10 for one gram. There was a time when the traditional "dime bag" was 1/10th ounce, or nearly three grams. The $10 price point has "stuck," but the grocery shrink ray strikes all products. Remember when a $1 candy bar was twice today's size?
When I was a kid in the mid-70's a "lid" cost $25. A lid was a pound of weed. Both the quality and cost shot up in the next decade.
Disclaimer: I don't smoke pot, so this is second hand smoke, so to speak. But, there were so many hippies around where I grew up that I literally thought patchouli was what people smelled like when then hadn't bathed in a week.
Re: Why is a bag of weed always $10 (man)?
#14The answer is actually in the question. The questioner is accustomed to paying $10 for one gram. There was a time when the traditional "dime bag" was 1/10th ounce, or nearly three grams. The $10 price point has "stuck," but the grocery shrink ray strikes all products. Remember when a $1 candy bar was twice today's size?
Your age is showing. There was a time when a dime bag was 1/4th of an ounce. And I'm sure somebody even older than me is going to chime in with a recollection of an even more outrageous price.
Yeah, I'm not a consumer, but I always thought that the "dime" in dime bag referred to the price, not the amount of weed.
Re: Why is a bag of weed always $10 (man)?
#15If the price of weed goes up, industrious users and profit motivated sellers will begin producing (more) weed. Supply goes up, price goes down giving weed price stability. Weed sales, other than the illegality, operate in a free market without regulations and red tape. This allows producers to enter the market with relatively low barriers.
In Canada at least, as long as you are discrete nearly anyone can start growing weed with very little concern about the illegality.
This is the way a market is supposed to work. In most markets today we have mountains of regulations and red tape keeping the little guy out of the market and leaving production up to the largest, most politically connected corporations.
If weed is legalized and regulated watch for the price to go up as more and more production costs are added via regulation and red tape.
Personally I don't find this mysterious at all. IMO, the price stability of weed is simply a function of supply and demand operating in a free market where producers can easily enter the market.
Re: Why is a bag of weed always $10 (man)?
#16The answer is actually in the question. The questioner is accustomed to paying $10 for one gram. There was a time when the traditional "dime bag" was 1/10th ounce, or nearly three grams. The $10 price point has "stuck," but the grocery shrink ray strikes all products. Remember when a $1 candy bar was twice today's size?
I remember when a candy bar was 1/2 today's size. Everywhere you go it's "supersized this" and "supersized that". Even snickers bars are 2" longer, 1/2" thicker, and 1/2" wider than they used to be.
I think you are mistaken. Perhaps you're thinking of the "king size" version which costs more?
Re: Why is a bag of weed always $10 (man)?
#17Good question. The answer to that should be related to the answer to why things change in price. Reasons for a smaller dollar amount: inflation, cheaper production, too few buyers, too many sellers (thus more competition) Reasons for a bigger dollar amount: more expensive production, too many buyers, too few sellers (thus less competition) I'm no economist but I suppose the reason should be a combination of the above…
Actually, inflation would raise prices. Given the figures cited in the article, $10 in 1980 should give something like $20-25 now based on the US CPI. Thats precisely why it's interesting - the real (vs nominal) price has actually fallen since 1980.
And then you're right, basic supply and demand theory would suggest that supply growth has outpaced demand growth over the same period (and by a rate about the same as the inflation rate to keep nominal prices constant). But why? loosening regulation/enforcement is mostly on the demand side, I would say. It's probably getting easier to grow higher quality pot (more information readily accessible, better equipment, mobility, economies of scale, etc). The overall market likely behaves perfectly competitively (its a commodity, no single dealer could charge more per unit of 'high' without losing business). So, perfect competition with supply growth = lower real prices.
Re: Why is a bag of weed always $10 (man)?
#18Did any of you actually read the text? The Economist's answer is hilarious.
Re: Why is a bag of weed always $10 (man)?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is cannabis routinely cut, as hard drugs are? I can't imagine it would be terribly hard to find similarly-burning vegetation to dilute the amount of product in a fixed-weight bag at a level undetectable to the average buyer.
No, that's one of its advantages. It's pretty much impossible to "cut" it. This is what a cannabis bud looks like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Macro_cannabis_bud.jpg You can't just throw some similarly looking vegetation in there without the buyer noticing. You could throw in low-grade hemp, but that's just as hard to grow, so it's of no benefit to the dealer. One thing you can do is to not dry it. The moisture…
This is sort of built into the quality scaling tho. Properly dried (not too dry, not too wet) fetches a higher price than what the difference in weight for lower quality offers.
Re: Why is a bag of weed always $10 (man)?
#20$10 is how much a bag costs, how much a bag contains is the variable I would think. Kind of the opposite of gasoline.
The article doesn't talk about how much a bag costs. It talks about the price per gramme staying at $10.