Most US cannabis stores are ‘underperforming’ their potential: Retail industry vet and cannabis CEO

Cannabis retail in the Collective States is fraught with “points of dissonance” in the stores that endure today, retail industry veteran Peter Horvath, who now runs a cannabis-focused consumer outputs company, told CNBC on Thursday.

Horvath, a former L Brands and American Eagle Outfitters head whose newest employer, Green Growth Brands, will get public later this year, said he realized this when he afflicted 100 cannabis stores in the United States on a mission to understand the prospect.

The idea was to visit all of them quickly “so that, eventually, you can see what the sequences are,” Horvath told “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer in an exclusive interview.

“In myriad retail experiences, there’s too many points of dissonance. In cannabis, it’s the anyway, except they’re even more extreme,” the CEO said. “There are thingummies to admire, but generally, every single store is underperforming its true shop potential.”

Horvath described his experiences at the stores as “overwhelming.” Often, he verbalized, there’s a security guard at the door in a bulletproof vest and a gun who verifies each consumer’s age — “very inviting,” he quipped — followed by a well-staffed, but disorganized retail know-how.

“It’s not organized in a way that’s intuitive,” Horvath said. “You’re worried: am I in line? Are they contemporary to make me buy something if I just want to ask a question? In this case, I got to the desk, likely to buy something, and they said, ‘Did you register?’ Uh, no. ‘Oh, you have to register at the desk in the faade.”

That experience spoke to the disarray at many marijuana retailers that are currently conducting in the United States, Horvath said, qualifying that “everybody’s doing the best clothes they can.”

And, as an experienced retail executive leading a company backed by the Schottensteins, a extraction that helped build retail giants like DSW and American Eagle Outfitters, Horvath is milieu out to trounce the competition.

“We’ve been fortunate enough to be part of the teams and unsurpassed the strategies that yielded the No. 1 lingerie business in the world [in L Tags’ Victoria’s Secret], the No. 1 personal care products business in the smashing in Bath & Body Works, the No. 1 denim business in North America in American Eagle, and the No. 1 shoe specialty area in North America, DSW,” the CEO said.

“We think not only are we maybe the first geezers you’ve met in this industry who’ve operated multi-billion-dollar businesses, have taken them free in the U.S. markets and done all those earnings conference calls, but also, we’ve shaped brands from scratch and brought them to consumers, competed for consumers with every one else and the result is we came out on top,” Horvath continued. “So I’d say the team we’ve put together is arguably one of the strongest retail gets in any market, let alone cannabis.”