The CEO of the Off The Charts dispensary chain, which has one location in San Francisco, has gone viral for the wrong reasons, in a video where he’s caught blustering to his colleagues he doesn’t pay “these f*cking mom and pops” vendors who supply his stores.
One of the dirty little secrets of the legal cannabis industry in California is that many dispensaries are in bad financial straits and way behind on paying their bills. Some marijuana growers and distributors (the groups legally licensed to transport weed from farms to dispensaries) have even started a “do not sell” list of retail dispensaries who are hundreds of thousands of dollars behind on their bills, according to the industry trade publication Marijuana Business Daily.
But the owner of the dispensary chain Off the Charts, which has 17 locations in California and one in SF at Bryant and Seventh streets, may have blacklisted himself. SFGate reports that the chain’s founder and CEO Norman Yousif was caught on a now-viral video bragging about not paying his vendors.
“You know how much money we’ve saved by not paying the vendors, because they’ve been out of business, or they never collected and they never lasted?,” Yousif says in