What Happens When Demand Shifts After Natural Disasters?
What happens in Puerto Rico when a hurricane comes through and demand shifts or increases?
When Hurricane Maria happened, everything closed down. Nothing was open, that island was shut down until about December. The hurricane happened in September and the island really didn't open again until December. So at that point, everyone's running on generators, no one's going to work, no one's getting a paycheck. No one has power in their home and everyone's miserable.
It's 90 degrees, 90% humidity, there's swarms of mosquitoes everywhere. You can't even turn on a fan because you don't have gas for your generator because there is no gas. What happens when you're utterly miserable and you can't do anything? Oh, and by the way, Puerto Rico bans the sale of alcohol after hurricanes.
We opened up two days after the hurricane, we had two dispensaries open. Our grow was still growing and I'm not going to say it was easy. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. But we were open and we were open for one reason. It was because there were people out there on that island that were counting on us to get their medicine. It wasn't about the money, it wasn't about just being able to sell cannabis or anything like that.
Most of our patients are just that - they're patients. They're people suffering from debilitative diseases, massive pain, horrible issues that they cannot get through without it. Cannabis is the only thing that's they found to help them. We've built hardcore relationships with all of our patients, I'm a huge fan of building up relationships with my clientele in every one of my businesses.
Our product is a legitimate medicine for patients and we know them on a first name basis, because they come in all the time. We know their kids, we know their pet's names, we know everything going on in their lives because we talk to them every time they come in. We honestly care when those people tell us “I haven’t been able to sleep for three days because the pain in my legs is radiating and I just cry every night”, and this is a grown man telling us this. You want to get him the one thing that you know gives him relief. That's why we opened, for our clients. That's why we struggled and we got everyone there, so we could be there every day that we could possibly be open.
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Cheers!
.: Adam
CEO