The Number On The Label
By Jeff Eckenrode
Gary had been coming in long enough that he should have known better. He set his weathered, olive-green knapsack on the counter like it contained evidence, pulled out an empty jar, and tapped on the lid like it owed him a serious explanation.
"Twenty-two percent," he said. "Same as last time. But I want twenty-eight percent."
Berny examined the label, then Gary, and offered the gentle smile she reserved for customers she could already tell weren't going to like the next sentence. "We don't have this in a twenty-eight percent right now."
His shoulders went up around his ears. "Then order it!" He caught himself, took a breath, and resettled his shoulders like a man recovering his dignity in real time. "Higher numbers are better. That's just math."
"It's not really math," I said, from the far end of the counter, rolling a worn silver dollar slowly between two fingers without looking up. "It's marketing wearing math's clothes."
Gary looked at me like I'd insulted a close relative. “But it's a percentage. Percentages don't lie."
"The percentage doesn't lie," Berny said. "It's just not telling you the whole story. THC content is one ingredient. It's not the recipe."
"There's a whole chemical orchestra happening in there," she went on, taking a deep breath like a singer does before belting out a soaring and stirring verse. "Terpenes, other cannabinoids, how it was grown, how it was cured. THC's just the loudest instrument. But that doesn't mean it's playing the best notes!”
Gary crossed his arms, a man defending a purchasing philosophy he'd built his entire identity around. "So the twenty-two is the same as the twenty-eight?”
"I'm telling you it might be better," Berny said, tucking a loose strand of hair back before cupping the jar like a Faberge egg. "Depending on the terpene profile. Some lower-percentage strains test out feeling stronger, because of how the compounds interact. It's called the entourage effect, though I'll be honest, the science on exactly how much that matters is still being sorted out. Nobody's claiming it's settled."
"Nobody serious, anyway," I said, still rolling the coin, not even pretending to be part of the conversation anymore.
Gary looked between the two of us like we'd tag-teamed him, which, functionally, we had. He turned the jar over and read the label closely like it might have changed in the last ten seconds.
"So tell me then, Ms. Know-it-all. What am I even supposed to look at, if not the number?"
"Smell it," I said. "Trust your nose over the label. The label's testing a snapshot. Your nose is testing the thing you're about to actually smoke."
He considered the direction like it had been handed down on stone tablet from a mountain. He lifted the jar and inhaled long and slow, the same way a person tastes wine in a movie about a person tasting wine.
He sneezed.
"Bless you," Berny said, the corners of her mouth curling into a small grin.
"It's fine," Gary said, wiping his nose, all the ceremony gone out of him at once. "It just smells like weed."
"That's usually a good sign," I said.
He set the jar down, considered his own dignity for a moment, and seemed to decide it wasn't worth defending further. "Fine. I'll try the twenty-two again."
"You can keep being skeptical," I said. "I'll keep being right. We can both have hobbies."
He left with the jar, the knapsack, and the specific look of a man who'd lost an argument to a woman who never once looked up from her coin.