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Las Vegas drive-thru dispensaries bring convenience and customer service

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Curaleaf on Las Vegas Boulevard
Photo: Christopher DeVargas

A few weeks back, just before the mask requirement ended, we ran out of edibles at 10 p.m. on a Friday night. My girlfriend and I didn’t particularly care to put on shoes, mask up and go talk to a budtender, so we went to the website of our closest dispensary—Curaleaf, on Las Vegas Boulevard just south of Oakey—filled up a cart with what we wanted and used the dispensary’s drive-up window to pick up our product. We ordered, drove to the dispensary and had our exit bag full of swag in less than 20 minutes—and I never changed out of my slippers.

Drive-thru dispensary windows were approved in Clark County in September 2020, and in the City of Las Vegas roughly six months after that. (Downtown’s NuWu Cannabis Marketplace, owing to its location on tribal land, introduced a drive-thru in summer 2020.) Nevada’s legal cannabis industry, which is nothing if not nimble-footed in the face of ever-changing regulations, has been steadily introducing drive-thru windows at dispensaries across the Valley; they can be found at the northwest location of Thrive and at Boulder City’s Wallflower, among other spots.

But Downtown’s Curaleaf, my local, had a leg up: it occupies a former fast food building that already had a drive-thru window. Curaleaf simply converted it to their needs by adding a lengthy shade to the driveway and creating a QR code that brings up the menu.

“We want to give our customers every option to buy, in the most convenient way possible for them,” says Curaleaf’s Regional VP Jim Smith. That includes not only picking up online orders at the drive-thru but pulling into one of the curbside pickup spots at the front of the store and having an order walked out to you, or having the product delivered straight to your home.

But the drive-thru is a cannabis retail innovation with a classic, uniquely American appeal. Smith says Curaleaf’s drive-thru—which, like the dispensary itself, stays open until 3 a.m., long after curbside and delivery service has ended— is enjoying a very positive reception. “[We’re looking] at expanding to 24 hours a day, quite honestly, based off of the success that we’ve seen,” he says.

We’ve been talking about pre-orders, coming from people who have already spoken with a budtender in the past and know exactly what they want. How does Curaleaf handle customers who pull into the drive-thru without knowing what they want, and hem and haw their way through the menu like someone bogarting the window at a Taco Bell?

“If you look at that drive-thru, there’s expandability,” says Smith, calling attention to the misted, fully illuminated shade structure covering the lane. “As it gets busy, we have the opportunity to have budtenders out there talking to customers directly, and placing their orders from the drive-thru line.”

Curaleaf’s drive-thru, and those at other Valley dispensaries, are evidence of how quickly this retail industry has evolved and continues to evolve. And should the day come, hopefully soon, when cannabis is legalized at the federal level, Curaleaf’s drive-thru window, like the rest of the shop, will be ready to take your debit card or mobile pay app.

“We’re constantly looking the regs, and how banking laws will change,” Smith says. “It is absolutely built-in.”

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