Meat Grinder: The Cost of High Turnover in Low Margin Retail

In this industry, turnover isn’t just a problem—it’s the norm. The industry has become a meat grinder for retail workers, trimmers, and managers alike. Some shops lose entire teams in under a year. Others don’t even get a full pay period before the new hire ghosts.

Welcome to the world of 60–100% turnover, Budtenders are expected to be part pharmacist, part sommelier, part security guard—In this industry, if you’re competent, you’re cursed.

How Bad Is It?

Turnover rates in the retail sector (especially budtenders and trimmers) often exceed 60% annually, and in some cases, it spikes past 100%. That means you’re turning over an entire team in a year, sometimes more than once. Compare that to the average U.S. retail turnover rate of 30–40%, and you get the picture—this industry bleeds people.

In cultivation and manufacturing roles, it’s a bit better, but still unstable. High turnover is reported among harvest crews, packaging teams, and especially entry-level extractors.

The Real Cost of Wearing Too Many Hats

Know how to use Excel? Congrats, you’re now also doing the inventory reports. Familiar with QuickBooks? You just became the bookkeeper. Got a halfway decent email signature? You're in charge of HR. This is the reality for a lot of employees in lean operations: if you’re good, you get everything dumped on your plate.

It’s not even that owners are being malicious—it’s just that margins are razor-thin, and there’s often not enough steady work to justify a dedicated HR manager, data analyst, or IT department. So the burden falls on whoever happens to be capable.

Why It Happens:

• Most shops run lean. You don’t need a full-time compliance person or admin… until you do.

• People with digital skills are rare. If you know how to manage a CRM, do payroll, or build a Google Sheet—you're gold.

• Owners are often out of their depth. Legacy operators might be great at cultivation or customer relationships, but ask them to navigate a POS system or state reporting software and suddenly you’re the expert.

The Rise of the Gatekeeper

This creates a dangerous side effect: gatekeeping. The person who set up the system becomes the only one who understands it, and whether intentional or not, that person becomes indispensable—until they burn out, quit, or get let go.

And when that happens, the business suffers.

Suddenly, no one knows how to pull sales reports, update pricing, or fix the inventory sync between BioTrack and Cova. I've seen shops where the “tech guy” leaves and they literally can’t open the safe, because he also set up the alarm system and never documented it.

Symptoms of Gatekeeping Culture:

• One person knows the login to six different tools—and no one else does.

• Workflows are "tribal knowledge" instead of SOPs.

• Owners are afraid to challenge their staff because they don’t understand the system themselves.

• Staff with knowledge hoard it to protect their value rather than train others.

“Hard to Cook a Meal on a Sinking Ship”

In most industries, mentorship is the ladder. You climb because someone shows you the way. Here? That ladder is often broken, or worse—never built. You’ve got managers so overloaded they don’t even have time to eat lunch, let alone mentor a new hire on how to properly store extracts or explain terpene profiles.

Training isn’t a system—it’s a shrug and a trial by fire.

The Core Problem: No Bandwidth for Quality

You’ve got a manager running point on scheduling, cash handling, compliance, inventory audits, and HR—often in the same shift. Now add the pressure of new product drops, last-minute promos from vendors, and a customer who’s mad the loyalty points didn’t load.

When exactly are they supposed to sit down and coach the new budtender on customer service, or review the way a trimmer grades popcorn buds vs full nug? It’s not just a lack of time—it’s a lack of air.

We keep talking about quality—better flower, better service, better margins. But you can’t build better if your leaders are constantly in survival mode.

Improvements

The industry doesn't have a silver bullet for turnover—but a few companies have started to figure it out. The ones that have curbed churn didn’t do it with trendy slogans or beanbag chairs. They did it by taking a long, uncomfortable look in the mirror, then rebuilding from the ground up.

Here’s what some of them did—and what it took:

1. Curio Wellness (Maryland)

Turnover Reduction: Dropped budtender churn from ~65% to under 25% in two years.
How:

• Launched an internal training academy with a real certification process, Created a tiered wage system tied to skillsets—not just time on the clock, Rolled out monthly 1-on-1 check-ins between managers and team members.
  Takeaway: They treated dispensary work like a career path, not a temp gig.

2. Sunnyside (Cresco Labs)

Turnover Reduction: Improved front-line retention by ~30% within 18 months.
How:

• Installed digital scheduling tools to give workers more control over hours, Created a national budtender recognition program with rewards and career development tracking, Allowed cross-training between roles—budtenders could learn packaging or inventory and shift laterally.
  Takeaway: Flexibility and recognition go a long way, especially when the work is repetitive.

3. Binske (Colorado)

Turnover Reduction: Saw a 40% drop in operational staff churn after building internal documentation.
How:

• Standardized all procedures—trimming, packaging, inventory—into video SOPs, Made onboarding plug-and-play, so new hires didn’t have to rely on tribal knowledge, Put QA and training into dedicated roles, not as a “side task” for managers.
  Takeaway: They removed gatekeeping by making knowledge shareable.

4. Trulieve (Florida)

Turnover Reduction: Publicly claimed improvement after facing major backlash over poor working conditions.
How:

• Revamped their safety and HR protocols after the Lorna McMurrey tragedy, Pushed for more formalized labor structures and internal complaint resolution.
  Takeaway: Sometimes, it takes a public reckoning to force leadership to care.

Bottom Line

Turnover isn’t a mystery—it’s the product of bad systems and burned-out people. This isn’t about “kids not wanting to work.” It’s about an industry that scaled fast but didn’t build the infrastructure to support its workforce. Because the truth is—bad product can costs you a sale. Bad culture costs you your whole damn business.