Weed Money in Boulder through COVID
Marijuana sales are a major business in Colorado both medicinal and recreational. The city of Boulder currently has four main taxes in relation to marijuana. The first tax is a base tax of 3.86% for both medicinal and recreational marijuana. The second is a excise tax applied when raw product is moved from cultivation fields to a dispensary and is a 5.00% tax. The third tax is an addition 3.50% sales tax added onto recreational marijuana. The forth and final tax is from state recreational marijuana taxes of which Boulder receives a share. In total for January of 2022 the city of Boulder revived $404,754 in tax collected from marijuana sales. Looking through the history of sales in Boulder it quickly becomes apparent that business boomed during the pandemic however what is less clear is how big this boom is in reference of annual growth. So how much did the business actually boom in comparison to previous trends?
When looking through sales of marijuana in boulder over the past few years a one of the things most noticeable is the somewhat sinusoidal pattern in the monthly sales. The yearly peaks are all during summer periods with the lowest point usually being at the end of January beginning of February with other lows being in November. Less significant drops are also visible from August to September. This as one might guess largely coincides with CU Boulders academic calendar. Classes usually start early to mid January and business dies down as students focus on classes. The peak in summer is when most students are free from college with less to do and more time to relax. Come mid to late August classes once again start and sales go down. An outlier that I cannot explain in this process is the month of November which for some reason consistently has sales take a downturn.
With the basics of the markets trends discussed looking at the percent change in market sales from 2017 to 2019 the Average monthly increase for these years was 8.11%. in 2020 the average went up to 17.90%. Right off the bat this shows that something heavily improved sales.With what we know of 2020 its most probably the isolation of early COVID-19 lock-downs. Factoring in the average growth over the past few years before 2020 we see that during the major lock-downs marijuana sales grew an extra 9.79 percent. Comparatively sales before major lock-downs were also slightly higher compared to previous growth trends coming in at 9.22% growth which when factored in with previous years was 1.9% higher. by the time lock-downs were in full swing sales were up around an extra 4.9%. By the time peak yearly sales was reached 2020 experienced and about extra 10.05% increase. this momentum continued all the way through to the end of the year with average growth compared to 2019 coming out to an impressive 23.57%. Overall the year of 2020 saw the industries sales grow 17.9% when compared to 2019 and when compared to previous growth trends 2020 saw an extra 9.8% more growth on average.
As 2020 ended and COVID continued on Marijuana businesses continued to see improved sale trends with the peak in April of 2021 at an impressive 38.03% when compared to 2020. Shortly after this all time peak the market saw a reduction of up to -8.15% in October of 2021. Comparing 2021 to 2019 in terms of growth it suggests that the market is growing slower after such a boom in 2020 to early 2021. On a larger scale Marijuana sales throughout the state of Colorado saw this boost in revenue reaching a peak of 226 million in July of 2021. Since this peak in 2021 sales have slowly been coming back down similar states as before the pandemic. How the market continues going into summer of this year will be interesting to see as the peak it reaches could suggest the future of the business.
