Music lovers in Berkeley can now buy Stairway to Heaven and a way to get them there all in one shopping trip. Amoeba Music, the most iconic music store chain in America, just got a marijuana license.
The decision to apply for the license to sell the herb comes as the troubled record store sees a slump in sales. The digital age hasn’t been kind to the independent music chain that opened in 1990. While their Hollywood location is doing fairly well, with a reported $20 million in annual revenue, their other locations in California are looking for retail opportunities to pick up the slack.
Who’s Got the Herb?
For now, the new license is only for their Berkeley, California store. The plan is to convert their ‘jam room’ into a dispensary with its own separate entrance. This is the second location to cash-in on the green rush. In 2014, the San Francisco location opened a medical marijuana recommendation and education center named Green Evaluations.
An employee of the famous music store, Debby Goldsberry, took to Facebook to announce that they were awarded the permit on September 21. She expressed the Amoeba family’s enthusiasm for the opportunity to sell cannabis, posting, “We were awarded the Berkeley dispensary permit tonight!! I am beyond excited. Marc Weinstein and Dave Prinz (the founders of Amoeba Music), Amber E. Senter, Mary Jane Patton, and I, plus everyone else on the Berkeley Compassionate Care Center team, are so thankful. We are planning the most epic dispensary ever at the Amoeba location on Telegraph. The dispensary will go where the jazz room is now. My mind is kind of blown right now! #soexcited”
In the comments section of Goldsberry’s post, she also said that they will be giving away 2 percent of all medicines to low income members and a website with information and applications will be up and running shortly.
“When I first came to Berkeley, back in the early 90’s, I would sit at our Cannabis Action Network booth on Telegraph Ave dreaming of having a marijuana storefront there,” Goldsberry recalled on her social media, “Down the street, Amoeba was having the same vision. It took us nearly 25 years to pull it off, but we did it!”
According to Billboard.com, the shop on the famous Telegraph Avenue has been in a downward spiral financially, earning only half of the revenue it did in 2008 and having to cut its staff from 90 to 35 people. The addition of the dispensary is an investment in California’s green rush that could have that store location ‘grab that cash with both hands and make a stash’.
