Comparison: The Price of Actual Pot Vs. Walmart "Weed Christmas Tree"
A few months ago, Leafly contributor Chase Scheinbaum noticed that Walmart was offering a cannabis rosin press on its website for $299. So we ordered one and put it through its paces. The result? Not bad.
Now it appears that the nation’s largest retailer is continuing its rollout of cannabis-themed products.
For the holiday season, Walmart is selling “the original Weed Christmas Tree,” a seven-foot fake tree made up of cannabis leaves, for $249. It looks like this once you Photoshop ornaments and a bow onto it:
The ad copy reads like it was fueled by office party egg nog:
This Pot Leaf Christmas tree will “light up” the room and put your mind in the right head-space for holiday cheer. You’ll be able to relax and giggle at the marijuana leaves and decorate it as you please. This alternative Christmas tree is perfect for personal top shelf life at home or as a medical dispensary decoration. Green Wishes and Happy Holidhaze!
“Personal top shelf life.” Not even sure what that means.
Pound-for-Pound Comparison
The whole thing got a few of us thinking: Which is cheaper, a seven-foot Walmart Weed Christmas Tree or an actual seven-foot cannabis plant?
For an expert opinion I turned to Washington state cannabis farmer Crystal Oliver, proprietor of Washington’s Finest Cannabis. Oliver and her partner Kevin raise their crop outdoors in the sunshine near Spokane.
A seven-foot cannabis plant, she told us, would take several months to grow outdoors. “If we were to sell a seven-foot vegetative plant, we would probably ask for a couple hundred dollars,” Oliver told me.
Would that be legal?
“Yes,” she said. “We’re now able to sell plants and clones to registered medical cannabis patients, so it’s possible. But we typically sell much smaller plants to registered patients.”
The question inspired a possible new product line. “Live canna-Christmas trees…perhaps a new income stream we hadn’t considered,” she said. “Well, there’s always next year.”
The seven-foot cannabis plant price estimate, Oliver added, would be for a plant not in flower. In other words, one that’s about eight to 12 weeks away from harvest. “If the plant was in flower, it would probably yield one to three pounds of dried useable marijuana, which would be worth around $1,000 a pound wholesale and $3,000 a pound retail.”
So there you have it. An actual canna-Christmas plant ($200) is cheaper than Walmart’s imitation Weed Christmas Tree ($249). But once it’s in flower, the actual plant skyrockets in price.
With cannabis Christmas trees, as in life, timing is everything. Happy…Holidhaze.