AURORA | Since opening Aurora’s first pot shop near the Southlands Mall and E-470 a few months ago, Euflora owner Jamie Perino says business has been smoking hot.
“We have sold 80 percent of our flower and 205 edibles on a daily basis in the first three months,” she said since the store opened last October. “It’s been fabulous. we are doing way more businesses than we expected.”
Aurora’s Finance Director Jason Batchelor said the city collected $31,000 in sales tax in December from November sales of the city’s five operating pot shops.
That’s more than double what the city collected when stores first opened in October.
“That compares to $12,500 of sales tax remitted in November (October sales) when we had 2 stores partially open,” he said.
Those retail sales were based on the standard city sales tax rate of 3.75 percent. Batchelor said he expects revenues to largely increase when a special sales tax for recreational marijuana takes effect later this year.
That tax, which was approved by local voters in November, went into effect in January and includes an additional 2 percent sales tax on the city’s recreational marijuana products, and a 5 percent excise tax on wholesale marijuana.
Aurora has five other stores that are open in addition to Euflora. They are Sweet Leaf, Terrapin Care, Starbuds, Mountain States Group, and Medicine Man.
Governments are increasingly dependent on gambling, diseases, fines, fees, rising taxes, stimulus, mandatory insurance, marijuana, and other non-productive leaching. This is how an industrial nation is turned to a third world nation.