Did California's dispensary Google reviews like you asked. Massachusetts and Michigan are next.

Last week I did this for New Jersey and some of you asked for California, so here it is. I scraped the public Google reviews for basically every licensed dispensary in the state. 1,239 stores, around 890,000 reviews. This one was wild because of how big and spread out it is.

Almost everyone is a 4.8 or above. 91% of all reviews are five stars, so the rating itself barely separates anyone.

What people complain about, in order: price is number one by a mile, then wait times and lines, staff and service, deals and discounts, plain rudeness, returns and refunds, selection, and dead vape carts or batteries. Under that you get the usual product stuff, dry or stemmy flower, wrong or missing items, and the odd moldy or expired batch.

What people praise: almost always the staff. A budtender who actually knows their stuff carries the reviews more than the product does. Same as Jersey.

A few things that surprised me:

- California is so big that no one owns the map. The top 10 stores hold only 8% of all the reviews in the state. In New Jersey the top 10 held 30%. Out here it is wide open.

- Los Angeles is the clearest example. 364 dispensaries in one county, the most of any county in the state, and the leader still only has about 6,300 reviews. Nobody has run away with it.

- The single biggest moat in the state is Cookies San Bernardino at 14,175 reviews. That one store has more reviews than every dispensary in Ventura county combined.

- About 1 in 5 "reviews" is just a star with no text. Some stores sit on huge piles of those, which usually means they ask everyone to tap five stars at the register.

- Replying to reviews is all or nothing. Roughly half of all reviews get an owner reply, but it splits hard: a cluster of stores reply to almost everything, and most reply to basically nothing.

- You can see who has quietly gotten better or worse over the last 90 days versus their lifetime rating. A few well known names are clearly sliding (one well known SoCal chain dropped from a lifetime 4.84 down to 4.14 across its recent reviews).

Full breakdown here if you want to dig in:

https://virtualbudz.com/case-studies/ca-dispensary-review-landscape

It has the full CA review landscape: review count, star rating breakdown, recent review velocity, silent star only ratings, owner reply rates, photo reviews, county level comparisons, and the rising and sliding momentum lists.

You all voted in the last thread and California was the top ask. Michigan and Massachusetts were right behind it, so those two are next.

And if you run a dispensary in California and want to see exactly how you stack up against the stores around you, let me know.