Before retiring I felt a similar situation. As very small (one man shop) licensed contractor, (I) we had all the overhead, licenses from every local big enough to have a stop sign, and liability insurance. The little and not so little guys didn't have any overhead except keeping gas in their truck, they didn't know what or how to even figure what their overhead was. They were always beating our prices. The state licensing bureau didn't give a shit and just gave us (licensed contractors) lip service whenever we'd complain that these guys outside of the "law" were eating our lunch. The customers no matter what were always going for the lowest price. The dispensaries have a similar place as did general contractors with this analogy, they'd whore out all the sub contractors giving them bids. Lying to everyone trying to wring the lowest possible price out of everyone, fucking all but themselves during the process.
The state just kept taking our licensing money. The only way this doesn't parallel completely that situation is MJ has a different cachet. There's lots of people who have always made money off the back or indirectly from MJ. Those number in the thousands, and now that numbers increasing. If these municipalities and other assholes making money off the "rules" side aren't careful and mostly aren't, if they get too greedy which I have no doubt where they fall regarding that. They'll heap all these sin taxes and fees on MJ until everyone says fuck it and goes back to doing it outside of their little regs. Then it will be right back where it's been, with one subtle difference, way more smokers, dabers; users. Econ 101, excess demand raises prices, excess capacity or availability lowers prices. Who's going to have the lower overhead?
Let's take a tip from the oil cartel pricing moves, Saudi lowered prices till lots of big companies, with high overhead went broke. (Another obstacle to that logic was the advent of electric vehicles and fracking methods that increased the availabile supply of domestic oil, and there's no counterpart to that in the MJ quotient.) Then OPEC is starting to raise pricing afterwards.
How about some MJ co-ops or a professional "union"? (International Brotherhood of Marijuana Growers; IBMG)
PS I know this counters some of my emotion based statements and position in my first posting, but in following my own logic, I'm changing that position.
