Quebec cannabis seller opens 100th store and has no intention of slowing down

The people behind Quebec's pot stores are hoping to make the shopping experience more convenient and more accessible.

On Monday, the Société québécoise du cannabis (SQDC) opened its 100th store in Richelieu and more stores are planned for the coming year.

People in Richelieu have been waiting for more than five years for a SQDC store to open in their community.

Lysette says she’s thrilled the day has finally arrived.

"Now, I'm next door so it's wonderful," she said.

The new store sells everything from its best seller dried cannabis to newer options, such as edibles, concentrated oils, and even cold drinks.

They’ve changed up the store layout and have tried to make product categories easier to understand.

Before Monday, Lysette used to travel 30 minutes to the SQDC in Saint-Bruno. Now, she can walk to buy legal weed.

Director of real estate Alexander Bove says the SQDC looks at population size and proximity to other stores when figuring out where to open new locations.

"Richelieu was identified as a market gap and so this is an area that we wanted to cover," Bove said.

Most people in Richelieu have to travel at least 20 kilometers to purchase legal cannabis. By making it more convenient to shop in its stores, the SQDC is also trying to take a chunk out of the black market, according to the Crown corporation's director of operations, Alban Troja.

"We still have a way to go, but we converted 63 per cent of the consumers from the illegal market to the legal market. So, you know, it's more than the majority," Troja said.

Profits are also going up.

The SQDC made more than $662 million in sales in the last fiscal year and had a net income of $104.1 million, up 10 per cent from the previous year.

Of those amounts, $217.3 million in taxes were collected — the majority ($154.7 million) going to the provincial government.

Its plans to expand are only growing.

"In the next two to three years, we'd like to open around ... 20 additional stores across the province of Quebec," Bove said.

"This year we have nine planned."