What Accessory Sales Reveal About Cannabis Retail's Future

October 25, 2026

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Walk into most dispensaries and you'll find the grinders and rolling papers crammed onto a low shelf near the register, an afterthought wedged between the loyalty program signup and the exit. Meanwhile the flower cases get the lighting, the signage, the budtender's full pitch. That arrangement isn't an accident -- it reflects what most operators actually believe about their own stores, which is that cannabis sells cannabis and everything else is just filler.

Brett Harris disagrees, and he's got a decade of point-of-sale data to back it up. Harris founded LuvBuds, a national accessories distributor, out of a guest bedroom in February 2015, building the business on consignment deals before it grew into a supplier relied on by retailers across multiple states. He's spent that entire stretch watching what moves off dispensary shelves and what doesn't, and his read is blunt: most operators are leaving real money sitting in plain sight.

The numbers make his case for him. Accessories average somewhere around 1.5% of total dispensary sales, compared to roughly 10% of revenue in conventional retail categories where complementary products get genuine merchandising attention. That's not a rounding error -- it's a gap wide enough to represent one of the more obvious strategic blind spots left in cannabis retail today.

The Overlooked Revenue Stream Hiding in Plain Sight

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Harris puts a precise number on the problem: accessories typically land between 1.5% and 2% of total dispensary sales. Compare that to conventional retail, where complementary non-core products -- think the batteries and phone cases sold next to electronics, or the snacks and drinks positioned near a grocery checkout -- routinely approach 10% of revenue. Cannabis retail hasn't come close to that benchmark, and Harris argues the reason isn't product demand. It's attention. Dispensary operators pour their energy into flower selection, pricing strategy, and brand partnerships, then treat grinders and pipes as an obligatory add-on rather than a category worth managing on its own terms.

Why Grinders and Basic Pipes Still Outsell Flashy Gear

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Scroll through LuvBuds' 2026 year-to-date internal sales figures and the pattern holds steady: grinders, cones, batteries, and inexpensive glass pipes remain the most dependable sellers in the entire accessories category. These are products customers already understand. Nobody needs a budtender to explain what a grinder does or why they might want one, which means the purchase decision happens fast and without the hesitation that slows down sales of unfamiliar or higher-priced gear.

Harris's argument isn't that innovation doesn't matter -- new designs and added features genuinely help move product -- it's that most shoppers won't pay a significant premium without a clear reason to. Flower consumers still need grinders. A basic glass pipe still does the job it's always done, and plenty of customers are perfectly happy buying the simple version. The distinction he draws here matters: value isn't the same thing as cheap. A retailer chasing volume by defaulting to the lowest price point on every shelf is solving a different problem than a retailer trying to protect margin, and conflating the two leads to weaker numbers on both counts. Well-run accessory programs can post average margins above 55%, with select products clearing 70% or more -- figures that make the category look a lot less like an afterthought and a lot more like a lever operators aren't pulling hard enough.

What the Broader Sales Data Says About Where Dollars Are Moving

Pre-rolls grew 10.7% year-over-year in the 12 months ending September 2026, far outpacing the total cannabis market's 1.5% growth, highlighting pre-rolls as a standout category driving industry expansion.

Zoom out to the broader market and the case for accessories gets more urgent. Headset's point-of-sale data puts total US cannabis sales at $24.6 billion across the 16 state markets it tracks, for the 12 months ending September 2026 -- up just 1.5% year over year. That's a mature market grinding out modest growth, not the double-digit expansion cannabis retail saw in its earlier years. Within that flat picture, pre-rolls stand out as the fastest-growing major flower category, up 10.7% year over year, and that growth rides directly alongside demand for cones, rolling accessories, and storage products.

Online sales tell a similar story, though with less precision. Grips Intelligence estimates online cannabis accessories sales landed somewhere between $150 million and $182 million in 2025, with 2026 growth projections ranging anywhere from 5% to 50% depending on how loosely the category gets defined. Worth noting: those figures come from aggregated e-commerce tracking across 90 to 100-plus retailers, not government reporting or audited financials, so they're directional signals rather than hard numbers to build a forecast around.

Still, the pattern is consistent enough to matter. When overall market growth slows to low single digits and flower pricing stays under pressure, margin-rich categories like accessories become a more attractive place for operators to look for upside. What a dispensary can legally stock and sell alongside flower still varies by state, so any expansion into new accessory lines is worth checking against local regulations before committing shelf space or budget.

Building a Merchandising Strategy That Actually Works

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Closing that gap between 1.5% and 10% starts with treating accessories as their own retail discipline rather than overflow inventory near the register. That means building a real assortment across price points -- entry-level items for customers who just want something functional, and higher-margin options for customers willing to spend more once given a reason to. Defaulting everything to the cheapest available option might feel like a safe bet, but it caps margin without necessarily moving more units.

Staff training matters more here than operators tend to assume. Harris points to well-merchandised stores where accessory sales triple, and staff engagement is consistently the variable driving that jump. A budtender who suggests a grinder alongside a flower purchase, or mentions a storage container when someone's buying in bulk, is doing the job a good retail associate does in any other category -- just one most dispensary training programs skip entirely.

Placement does the rest of the work. High-margin accessories buried behind the counter or tucked onto a bottom shelf aren't going to sell themselves, no matter how good the product is. Putting them at eye level, near complementary flower products, or in a dedicated display gives customers a reason to notice them in the first place. And none of this works without tracking accessory sales as a distinct line item -- not folded into total basket size, but measured on its own so operators can actually see what the category is contributing in revenue and margin, rather than guessing.

Nobody's suggesting accessories will ever rival flower as the core of a dispensary's business, and they shouldn't be sold on that premise. But the margin math is hard to argue with, especially for operators operating under 280E, where the inability to deduct standard business expenses federally makes every high-margin category worth more than it would be in an ordinary retail business. Leaving accessories at 1.5% of sales when the category can support 5% or better isn't a minor inefficiency -- it's a recurring cost that shows up on every balance sheet, every quarter.

The operators closing that gap are the ones applying the same discipline to merchandising that they already apply to flower curation: real assortment planning, trained staff, deliberate placement, and separate tracking so the category's contribution doesn't get lost in the total basket number. That's the difference between capturing an extra 3 to 8 points of revenue share and watching it walk out the door with customers who never got offered a grinder.

With overall market growth sitting at 1.5% and flower pricing under continued pressure, there's not much room left for dispensaries to grow by simply selling more of the same product at the same margins. The operators who figure that out first -- and start treating the accessories wall with the same seriousness as the flower case -- are the ones who'll have an easier time defending their margins as the market keeps maturing around them.