Enter the Secret Phone Booth Door to Planet 13’s DAZED! Consumption Lounge

Planet 13 unveiled plans last week for the on-site consumption lounge that will open at its Las Vegas SuperStore by April 20, 2024, providing a look through the secret phone booth door that leads to what the company envisions as an eclectic, colorful space.

The DAZED! consumption lounge, 3,000 square feet of mixed-use food, consumption and entertainment space, will feature canna-cocktails, bong chandeliers, an interactive pinball machine and rentable VIP booths with flatscreen TVs.

Guests will enter through a phone booth door and become immersed in art and illusions. The tasting menu includes various cannabis offerings, including flower, concentrates, vapes and edibles, all of which can also be purchased at Planet 13’s adjacent dispensary for customers to take home.

“What we wanted to create was an experiential, eclectic, really cool vibe for what our take is on a consumption lounge, and we wanted to create an experience,” David Farris, VP of sales and marketing for Planet 13, tells Cannabis Business Times. “Right off the bat, when you walk in, the front entry is a telephone booth with a secret entrance. You push the telephone open, [and] you walk into the consumption lounge. We offer elegant tableside service with somebody who is very knowledgeable and can walk you through any type of consumption experience that you want. We have a bar that’s located in the back with a mixologist who will be doing canna-cocktails and a different variety of signature drinks. We’ll also be serving the traditional categories: flower, prerolls, vapes, concentrates—really everything you can think of with a curated menu.”

Each wall of the consumption lounge will be decorated a little bit differently to offer a unique, photogenic spot for every guest, and decorative pieces, such as signed celebrity memorabilia and high-end artwork, will be housed behind glass in cubbies.

Photo courtesy of Planet 13

Non-infused food will be available for purchase, and the Planet 13 team hopes to one day host live music and brand takeovers at the lounge, Farris says.

“We envision people smoking a joint, having a cannabis cocktail, and just wanting to have some food in front of them and enjoy their night,” he says.

Guests will be prohibited from bringing outside cannabis products into the consumption lounge, and Farris says dosage is something all guests should keep in mind when visiting.

“A hot topic around the industry and through the regulators is just making sure we’re watching for overconsumption,” he says. “The server that will be at that table [will be] able to spot any indication that maybe somebody is too inebriated to order more product, or make sure that people are having the best possible experience. We see a lot of first-time consumers or consumers that haven’t tried cannabis in a very long time on the dispensary side, so I think being cognizant of that, even in the consumption lounge, is something that we’re definitely going to be hyper-focused on.”

The Nevada Cannabis Compliance Board (CCB) granted Planet 13 its consumption lounge license in June. Consumption lounges have been a long time coming to Nevada; CCB officials approved regulations to govern the facilities in June 2022, roughly a year after former Gov. Steve Sisolak signed legislation to allow them to operate in the state.

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Farris says one of the challenges for Planet 13 in opening one of the first consumption lounges in the state is trying to work through the regulations and establish standard operating procedures for such a new type of establishment.

“We see a lot of systems for dispensaries for POS stations and making sure that that’s as clean and as simple an experience as possible,” he says. “On the consumption lounge side, that’s not a big industry yet within the space. So, there are definitely some manual processes and some things that we’re going to have to work through, but that’s just a part of being the first to do it.”

However, the Planet 13 team is familiar with blazing new trails in the industry; as Farris says, “We’ve become synonymous with really taking cannabis to new heights.”

“When we take that approach and we are trying to be the biggest, the best, I think it comes along with that pressure and making sure that we create a really cool consumption lounge,” he says. “We were the first to get approved within our jurisdiction. I think we were the first to showcase renderings and really talk about our project and what our plan is and how we want to tackle this unique business model. I think for us, this is exhilarating, exciting, something that we’ve talked about for a long time, and it’s something that we’re ready to build and open it so our customers can really enjoy themselves.”

While the team is keeping the details of its grand opening celebration to itself for now, the consumption lounge is expected to open prior to 4/20 next year to allow some space between opening day and the industry’s biggest holiday.

“We’re really becoming what we dreamed about and becoming this entertainment complex with a multiuse facility,” Farris says. “If you can dream it, we have it. … With all these different spaces that we have and different experiences we can create, we have more capability to create big events and concerts and additional reasons for people to want to hang out here and choose this as their Friday night or Saturday night. We want to make sure that we’re also looking towards our local consumer, which is a big foundation of our business, and making sure that they want to constantly come to the consumption lounge and visit here frequently. I think what we’re most excited about is just marrying all these different business concepts together, and we definitely didn’t want to be a consumption lounge in a strip mall and be boring and standard. We’re really excited to be able to really go out of the box, and we think that everybody’s going to absolutely love it.”