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One month after the exhaust from NASCAR stock cars has dissipated, a different kind of smoke will soon begin wafting from the environs around Grant Park.
The annual Lollapalooza music festival is returning Thursday for four days of music, celebration and, if recent history is any guide, robust sales for nearby Chicago cannabis stores. Now in its third year of legal recreational cannabis sales, Lollapalooza has become a green letter day for the nascent industry.
“It’s definitely our biggest weekend of the year at any of our Illinois stores for the amount of consumers that we saw, and the new consumers that we got to introduce to recreational cannabis,” said Jason Erkes, a spokesman for Chicago-based Cresco Labs, which owns the Sunnyside dispensary closest to Grant Park.
Launched in 1991, Lollapalooza made Chicago its permanent home in 2005, becoming a major tourism draw for the city, attracting hundreds of thousands of festivalgoers and infusing millions into the local economy. Canceled in 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Lollapalooza returned in 2021 with a new twist — recreational marijuana was legal for the first time in the music festival’s 30-year history.
Since then, cannabis companies have been leveraging the event with special promotions, turning Lollapalooza into a sales bonanza for nearby dispensaries.
Last summer, the Sunnyside dispensary on North Clark Street in River North served over 4,000 customers during Lollapalooza, and Erkes expects to top that number this year. To streamline the process, Sunnyside is opening an expanded outdoor staging area on the street in front of the store, where consumers can order off an express festival menu and then make the mile trek to the north entrance of the festival.
To juice up early sales, the first 200 Sunnyside customers Thursday will get a $30 vape pen for $1 with any purchase. Cannabis companies are not allowed to give away doobies as freebies under state law, Erkes said.
The Verilife dispensary on West Superior Street in River North doubled its regular store traffic during Lollapalooza last year, boosted by both a parked bus serving as a pop-up smoking lounge and free shuttle service to the festival, according to company spokeswoman Melissa Buckley. The smoking bus will be back this summer, but the “cannabus” shuttle service will not.
The decommissioned Greyhound bus, which was converted into a mobile marijuana lounge, was smokier than Willie Nelson’s tour bus last summer, with more than 2,000 customers lighting up during Lollapalooza, Buckley said Wednesday. The smoking bus will once again be parked outside the dispensary throughout the festival.
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Last year, Verilife also provided two shuttle buses running every 20 minutes between Grant Park and its store, transporting about 700 customers to the festival. But traffic rendered them less effective than planned, with many customers finding it quicker to walk the 1.5 miles to Lollapalooza, Buckley said.
“There was just a lot of traffic,” Buckley said. “So this year, we decided to put a little bit more into doing a party right outside of our location instead of busing people back and forth.”
While Lollapalooza features a number of alcohol sponsors, from Bud Light to Bacardi, cannabis is not an official part of the festivities. Consumption of marijuana products at Lollapalooza, long an integral part of outdoor music festivals, remains murky at best. All Chicago parks prohibit smoking of any kind, including vaping, according to the Lollapalooza website.
C3 Presents, which produces Lollapalooza, did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
Cannabis stores in the city and suburbs are nonetheless off-site beneficiaries of the festival.
“We see the ripple effect at a few of our stores,” Buckley said. “We have a location in Rosemont that you pass when you’re coming from the airport into the city, so that location sees a lift as well.”
Verilife is owned by PharmaCann, a private Chicago-based cannabis company that launched in 2014 and has an eight-state footprint, including eight dispensaries in Illinois.
Founded in 2013, Cresco Labs is in 10 states with 14 production facilities and 68 dispensaries, which operate under the Sunnyside banner. In Illinois, Cresco has 10 retail dispensaries — the maximum allowed by the state — and manufacturing facilities in Joliet, Kankakee and Lincoln.
On Monday, Cresco announced it was terminating its proposed $2 billion cannabis megamerger with New York-based Columbia Care due to evolving market conditions that include falling stock prices, tightening credit and flattening industry sales.
Illinois legalized recreational marijuana in January 2020, and ranks third in the nation behind California and Michigan in total sales, with revenue driven in part by the highest retail prices in the country, according to cannabis research firm Headset.
Last year, recreational cannabis sales topped $1.55 billion, up 12.6%. But the pace has slowed this year, with recreational sales at $784 million through the first six months, a 4.5% year-over-year increase, according to state data.
Illinois has 138 licensed recreational cannabis dispensaries.