Research /Research
One Store Is a Quarter of the Bronx
19 dispensaries for 1.4 million people — the thinnest licensing in New York City by a factor of four. The stores that exist are doing fine. There just aren't any.
The Bronx has 19 licensed dispensaries.
Manhattan has 95. Brooklyn has 83. Queens has 72. Staten Island, with a third of the Bronx's population, has 14.
Those nineteen stores sold $31,580,375 between January 1 and September 15 — 6.5% of New York City's legal cannabis, from a borough holding 16% of its people.
| Population | Stores | Per 100,000 | Per resident | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manhattan | 1,664,862 | 95 | 5.71 | $132.92 |
| Brooklyn | 2,653,963 | 83 | 3.13 | $43.08 |
| Queens | 2,358,182 | 72 | 3.05 | $39.24 |
| Staten Island | 501,290 | 14 | 2.79 | $52.59 |
| Bronx | 1,406,332 | 19 | 1.35 | $22.46 |
A Manhattan resident has four and a quarter times the dispensary access a Bronx resident does. The Bronx spends $22.46 per head on legal cannabis — the lowest in New York City by a distance.
The obvious reading is that the Bronx doesn't buy much weed. The data says something else entirely.
The stores that exist are doing well
| Revenue per store | Median store | Under $1M | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manhattan | $2,329,363 | $1,827,751 | 27 of 95 (28%) |
| Staten Island | $1,883,109 | $1,176,869 | 6 of 14 (43%) |
| Bronx | $1,662,125 | $1,133,893 | 7 of 19 (37%) |
| Brooklyn | $1,377,647 | $934,235 | 44 of 83 (53%) |
| Queens | $1,285,321 | $914,810 | 40 of 72 (56%) |
The average Bronx dispensary out-earns the average Brooklyn dispensary by 21% and the average Queens dispensary by 29%.
Only 37% of Bronx stores are under a million dollars — better than Brooklyn's 53% and Queens' 56%. Its median store beats both.
This is not a borough that doesn't want cannabis. It's a borough where 1.4 million people are being served by nineteen shops, and those nineteen shops are consequently busy.
Which produces the most concentrated market in New York City
| Biggest store | Top 3 | Top 5 | Top 10 | HHI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bronx | 26.2% | 48.9% | 60.5% | 81.0% | 1,150 |
| Staten Island | 20.4% | 49.6% | 68.8% | 91.2% | 1,160 |
| Brooklyn | 14.1% | 23.9% | 29.3% | 41.0% | 365 |
| Queens | 6.7% | 18.4% | 28.0% | 41.9% | 281 |
| Manhattan | 6.9% | 12.7% | 18.3% | 30.5% | 192 |
| # | Dispensary | Sales | Share | Avg price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | My Sesh | $8,304,341 | 26.2% | $34.75 |
| 2 | Bleu Leaf Dispensary | $3,644,679 | 11.5% | $27.09 |
| 3 | Frass Box | $3,529,968 | 11.2% | $31.60 |
| 4 | Hibernica – Bronx | $2,066,388 | 6.5% | $42.57 |
| 5 | Smoking Scholars | $1,596,873 | 5.0% | $31.02 |
| 6 | CONBUD Yankee Stadium | $1,418,438 | 4.5% | $24.31 |
| 7 | Herbwell Cannabis – Bronx | $1,404,831 | 4.4% | $32.89 |
| 8 | Verilife – Bronx | $1,305,012 | 4.1% | $52.48 |
| 9 | Say Less | $1,232,196 | 3.9% | $36.92 |
| 10 | My Bud 420 | $1,133,893 | 3.6% | $33.10 |
My Sesh alone is 26.2% of the borough — $8,304,341, more than a quarter of every legal cannabis dollar spent in the Bronx. The top three take nearly half. The top ten take 81%.
An HHI of 1,150 puts the Bronx at the threshold antitrust regulators call moderately concentrated. Manhattan's is 192.
None of that is the operators' doing. You cannot have a competitive retail market with nineteen storefronts and 1.4 million customers.
The Bronx is a flower borough, and it isn't close
| Category | % of dollars | % of units | Avg price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flower | 47.1% | 29.8% | $50.16 |
| Pre-rolls | 19.3% | 33.0% | $18.58 |
| Vaporizers | 19.1% | 12.7% | $47.91 |
| Edibles | 9.0% | 12.9% | $22.08 |
| Concentrates | 2.3% | 1.6% | $45.14 |
| Beverages | 1.0% | 5.8% | $5.69 |
Nearly half of every dollar spent in the Bronx goes to flower — 47.1%, against Manhattan's 24.3%. By units it's 29.8%, again the highest in the city.
And vapes, which lead Manhattan at 30.2% of dollars, are only 19.1% here — the lowest share in New York City. Edibles at 9.0% are second-lowest.
Flower up, vapes and edibles down. The Bronx buys the oldest, simplest, cheapest format in the category, and it buys a lot of it.
It is also the cheapest borough in New York City, on every measure:
- $31.76 per item overall — against Staten Island's $39.15, a 23% gap
- $18.58 pre-rolls — the cheapest in the city, $4.65 under Manhattan's
- $22.08 edibles, $45.14 concentrates, $47.91 vapes — lowest of the five boroughs in all three
One more: the Bronx has the highest beverage share by units in New York City at 5.8%, at the lowest price, $5.69. Cheap drinks move here.
A value shelf
| Brand | Sales | Share | Avg price |
|---|---|---|---|
| ayrloom | $1,183,746 | 4.04% | $19.44 |
| Leal | $1,103,790 | 3.77% | $24.17 |
| Dank. by definition. | $1,088,174 | 3.72% | $45.75 |
| Revert Cannabis | $864,249 | 2.95% | $32.07 |
| matter. (PharmaCann) | $754,072 | 2.57% | $66.34 |
| Jaunty | $667,486 | 2.28% | $33.46 |
| Find (Curaleaf) | $645,310 | 2.20% | $63.66 |
ayrloom sells for $19.44 in the Bronx — its cheapest price anywhere in New York City, against $20.89 in Brooklyn, $23.35 in Queens, $25.87 in Manhattan and $31.63 on Staten Island. The same brand costs 63% more on Staten Island than it does here.
Leal is the Bronx's number two brand at 3.77% and appears in no other borough's top ten. At $24.17 an item it is a value play, in the value borough.
Revert Cannabis, ranked fourth here at 2.95%, is similarly Bronx-specific.
Compare that to Manhattan, where two of the top five brands clear $60 an item. Only 504 brands recorded a sale in the Bronx — the thinnest shelf in the city, against Manhattan's 772.
How the Bronx behaves
Rain costs the Bronx 3.4 points — the second-least sensitive borough after Staten Island, and less than Manhattan's 6.0 or Queens' 5.3. On July 18's flash flooding, while Manhattan fell 17.0% and Queens 16.2%, the Bronx came in at +0.3%. It was the only borough the July floods missed entirely.
Snow is a different matter. Sunday January 25 brought the Bronx to $20,101 against an expected $88,518 — down 77.3%, the steepest response of any borough to that storm. February 23 was −66.9%.
The Knicks cost it 1.91 points on game nights against its ordinary evenings.
4/20 did $188,014, up 88.9% — the smallest proportional 4/20 spike in New York City, which fits a borough where the everyday customer is already price-driven and doesn't need a holiday to shop.
And the Bronx has the most weekday-weighted Friday in the city outside Staten Island: 18.1% of the week lands on Friday, with Thursday at 14.9%, second only to Manhattan's 15.3%.
What to take from it
If you're siting a store: this is the clearest opportunity in New York City, and it isn't close. 1.35 dispensaries per 100,000 residents. An average store already out-earning Brooklyn's and Queens's. A market where one operator holds 26% because there's nobody else. Demand demonstrably present, shelf space demonstrably absent.
If you're a policymaker: the Bronx has the fewest dispensaries per resident and the lowest legal spend per resident in New York City. Those two facts are related, and the direction of causation is visible in the revenue-per-store column. Under-licensing doesn't suppress demand — it routes it somewhere the state doesn't tax.
If you're a brand: the Bronx is where your value SKU lives. ayrloom prices 63% below its Staten Island level here. Leal built a number-two position on a $24 price point. Flower is 47% of the money. Nothing about the premium playbook that works in Manhattan works here.
If you operate in the Bronx: your competitive risk isn't the other eighteen stores. It's the twentieth, thirtieth and fortieth license.
Sales figures are estimated retail sell-through from third-party analytics covering all 19 licensed Bronx dispensaries, $31,580,375, January 1 – September 15, 2026 — 258 complete trading days; the final day of the export is a partial pull and is excluded. The Bronx series plus those of the other four boroughs sum exactly to the 283-store, $486,121,158 citywide total, which is the reconciliation check used to validate the split. Daily comparisons use a day-of-week-adjusted expectation built from a centered rolling trend. HHI is the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index computed on store-level revenue shares within each borough. Population is the US Census Bureau Vintage 2025 estimate for July 1, 2025 (1,406,332), as published by NYC Department of City Planning. Dollar totals are estimates and differ modestly from New York State's reported figures; shares, ratios and within-borough comparisons are immune to that scaling and are the firmest numbers here.
Sources: NYC Department of City Planning population estimates, July 2026 release · NWS New York significant weather events archive
New York 420 Week · Issue 11 · September 2026
Words by Greg Silverstein · @NewYork420week · @sourcatjack
