TraceleafAdmin
The price layer

A few dollars of hardware, $61.11 at the till

A 2g disposable leaves a Guangdong factory for roughly the price of a coffee and sells in the United States for the price of a meal. Traceleaf records the observed price at five points along that chain, factory → landed → wholesale → gray-retail → licensed-retail, so the question of who captures the spread has an answer with a number and a record behind it. 936 price observations across 12 months and 12 states.

Where the spread goes
One 2g disposable, median observed price at each step of the chain. $2.01 at the factory gate becomes $61.11 on a licensed shelf, a spread of $59.11 split unevenly between five hands.
bar = p10-p90 of observationstick = medianshaded span = money added at that handoffbracket under the bands = factory-to-shelf multiple
What one 2g disposable costs at each of the five points where it changes hands.
Each mark: Each bar is one step: its p10-p90, with the median ticked.
How to read: One shared dollar axis, so the factory bar really is that small. The block between two bars is the money added at that handoff, as a share of the $59.11 spread, not a margin on cost.
50% of the whole spread is added at one handoff: gray retail to licensed retail, +$29.69. Crossing the Pacific (factory gate to landed (cif)) adds 2%. Almost all of the value is added after the goods are already in the country.
Source: Published web record; Customs filing; Retail menu listing
Upstream observations, $1 to $15
Factory gate, landed cost and wholesale, binned on one axis.
Every price we recorded before the unit reaches a shop.
Each mark: Each bar is a price slice; its height is how many observations landed in it.
How to read: Each row is scaled to its own tallest bar. The pale block is p10-p90, the dark rule the median.
FactoryLandedWholesale
The dearest upstream price on file is $15.15, which is 25% of one licensed shelf price. Upstream observations carry no state.
Source: Published web record; Customs filing
Retail observations, $20 to $80
Gray and licensed shelf prices on the same axis, where the comparison is meaningful.
Every shelf price we recorded, split by whether the shop holds a licence.
Each mark: Each bar is a price slice; its height is how many observations landed in it.
How to read: Both rows share one dollar axis, so the distance between the two medians is the real saving.
Gray retailLicensed retail
33 of 288 gray observations (11%) sit at or above the cheapest tenth of licensed prices ($44.31). A low price alone does not place a unit in either market.
Source: Published web record; Retail menu listing

Two panels, not one: upstream prices live between $1 and $15 and retail between $20 and $80, so one shared axis flattens the upstream rows against the left edge. The ladder above is where the two scales meet.

Price movement by step, indexed to 100
Every step starts at 100 in Nov 25. A $2 factory price and a $60 shelf price cannot share a linear axis, and a second y-axis would invent a comparison the data does not support, so the dollars are in the panel below instead.
Whether each step got dearer or cheaper over the twelve months on file.
Each mark: Each line is one step, indexed to its own Nov 25 price.
How to read: Indexed, not dollars: 110 is 10% dearer than Nov 25, 90 is 10% cheaper. One line above another says nothing about which step costs more. The dollars are in the panel below.
FactoryLandedWholesaleGray retailLicensed retail
And in actual dollars

Where each step sits today inside its own twelve-month range. One row per step, each on its own scale: the small circle is Nov 25, the filled one is Oct 26.

Licensed retail moved furthest at +15.5%, landed least at +2.8%, and no step ends more than 16% from where it started. Each point is that month's mean.
Source: Published web record; Customs filing; Retail menu listing
How much a buyer saves by leaving the licensed market, by state
Median licensed-retail price minus median gray-retail price, per state. Sorted widest first. Click a bar for the state record.
What a buyer saves per unit by leaving the licensed market, state by state.
Each mark: Each bar is one state; its length is the saving.
How to read: A difference of two medians: a state with few observations swings further than its real market does. Every state on file is shown.
Widest in MI at $38.15, narrowest in NM at $18.52. No state on file saves less than $18.52, so the incentive is not a local anomaly.
Source: Retail menu listing; Published web record

What the price layer answers

Five questions buyers actually ask, each answered from the observations above, or, in the last case, declined.

  1. 1
    What is the real China-to-US markup, and which hand takes the most?

    A unit with a median factory-gate price of $2.01 reaches a licensed shelf at $61.11, 30.4×, a spread of $59.11. The largest single capture is the gray retail → licensed retail handoff at +$29.69 (50% of the whole spread). The smallest is factory gate → landed (cif) at +$1.06 (2%). Crossing the Pacific adds almost nothing to the price. Nearly all of the value is added after the goods are already in the country.

  2. 2
    How much cheaper is a gray unit than a licensed one?

    Median gray retail is $31.42 against $61.11 licensed, a $29.69 gap, so the gray unit sells for 51% of the licensed price. Both bands overlap: the gray p90 of $44.77 sits above the licensed p10 of $44.31, so a cheap price alone does not identify a gray unit.

  3. 3
    How much does the same unit vary state to state?

    Licensed-retail medians range $11.49 across the 12 states with observations. The gray-to-licensed gap is widest in MI at $38.15 and narrowest in NM at $18.52, a $19.63 difference in how much a buyer saves by going outside the licensed market.

  4. 4
    Are the factories in a price war?

    Not in this window. Mean factory-gate price moved -10.0% between Nov 25 and Oct 26, so upstream prices firmed. Gray retail moved -2.9% over the same months. Cost rising while street price falls is the compression signature a price war would produce downstream, not upstream; one twelve-month window is too short to call it.

  5. 5
    What happens to all of this if the federal hemp exemption closes?

    This is the question buyers ask and the one the dataset cannot answer. Every observation here predates any such change, so there is no post-ban price in this data and no honest way to interpolate one. A structural break is not a trend. What the price layer does give you is the baseline to measure the shock against: the $11.69 wholesale median, the $31.42 gray-retail median and the $59.11 spread, per state and per month, recorded before the event. Scenario modelling belongs in the sizing report, labelled as a scenario.

Medians, percentiles and gaps on this page are computed from the 936 observations in the price table at render time. Nothing on this page is a typed-in figure. Method and source cadence: methodology.