A woman shopping at a cannabis store in Canada was made famous on Facebook after being caught on cam stealing hundreds of dollars’ worth of tips from the tip jar. Cannabis normally brings about the spirit of giving in most people, however, that’s not the case for petty thieves like the one caught recently.

Mariana Wolff, owner of Cannabis Cottage in Penticton, British Columbia in Canada, is fed up with brazen thieves, including the latest one who went after her budtender’s hard-earned tip money. Wolff caught the act on camera and shared footage of the incident on Facebook on Tuesday, Jan. 3.

Castanet News reports that the woman grabbed the jar, stuffed it inside her coat, and held it there. In the video, it appears the store worker is trying to reason with the woman to give it back. As Cannabis Cottage locks up the majority of its inventory at all times—like many other cannabis stores in Canada—it normally isn’t the target of crime since opening in 2019. Comments for the video on YouTube were disabled.

Penticton Valley News reports that Wolff is frustrated with the way budtenders are treated, culminating in this most recent incident. Crimes in recent years have worsened to become more brazen.

“Unfortunately, this isn’t a surprise,” Wolff told Black Press. “It’s been noticeably more prevalent over the last couple of years around town.”

Wolff chose not to report the incident to police with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), but instead posted it on Facebook to let the local community do the rest. That alone should be punishment enough.

“It’s such a petty theft and [the police] already have so many that they already deal with,” Wolff said. “It would just be one more little thing on their plate so it’s easier for me to just top up the tip jar and move on.”

Wolff said her store gave the woman an opportunity to come forth and return the money to save her reputation, but the woman apparently declined. She even offered a Safeway gift card if the woman needed food to eat.

The tip jar was basically the only item that could be stolen, as everything is locked up. “The one thing that could actually be stolen was…it’s frustrating,” she added. “The girl was asked to return it after being caught in the moment and chose not to. That’s what was so irritating.”

Cash-Only Environments Lead to Theft

South of the border, the U.S.’s cash-only cannabis industries often lead to their own form of crime—from coast to coast. But usually thieves are after large amounts of cash and inventory, and usually not the tip jar. 

Crime is commonplace for dispensaries in cities like Oakland, California, or at least amid the chaos of the pandemic years. C.R.A.F.T. (Citizens Research Alliance for Therapeutics) Cannabis in Oakland in California was robbed at gunpoint and about $100,000 in product was stolen.

Crime is also a problem on the East Coast. Police have linked a rash of burglaries targeting New England cannabis dispensaries to a trio of suspects in Massachusetts, according to a report from the Portland Press Herald. Law enforcement officers say that a man from New Bedford, Massachusetts and two brothers from Boston are suspected in the string of burglaries of licensed cannabis enterprises going back to 2020.

Budtenders often depend on tip money to make ends meet, so they’re the last person you’d want to steal from.

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Buying bud at the local dispensary is a family affair—that is, if you’re one of the Smiths. Filmmaker Kevin Smith, 51, ran into his daughter, actress Harley Quinn Smith, 22, during a random visit to iLyfted cannabis dispensary in Studio City, California on Wednesday.

The Irish Examiner reports that the director and comedian was proud to run into his daughter, unplanned, at the same dispensary.

“When you’re at the weed store and you run into your kid,” Smith posted on his Instagram account. “Since Harley Quinn Smith got her own house, there have been moments when I ran into the kid by chance out in public. And tonight, after I ran into my only begotten daughter at the weed store, I was like ‘Someone raised that kid right’.”

Harley Quinn, who starred in The Cruel Summer, replied to the post by saying, “It was a surprise but also not a surprise at all.” Her reply rose to the top comment. Harley Quinn was of course named after the villain and lover of Joker in the Batman comic book series. Kevin also posted the selfie on Twitter and his other social media accounts.

Harley Quinn is currently working on a series with her father—but the details are under wraps at the moment. They discussed it during a recent interview last June. “It’s such a cool gift to be able to work with somebody you’re related to,” Harley Quinn told E! News in June. “We have pretty similar minds, so it’s kind of like you’re shooting with another version of yourself. It’s so much fun and we’re working on another thing together now which has been, in my opinion, the most fun yet, and I can’t wait for us to be able to share with the world what that is.”

“We’ve been writing together which is so much fun because that’s make pretend, right? Like I used to make pretend with her when she was a kid,” Kevin echoed. “Now she’s an adult and you rarely get to do that. But in this way we can, because it’s the same thing, you sit around going, ‘What if they did this, what if this happened, what if this happened?’ So you get to play again, which is a rare gift for a parent now.”

Smith’s career in Hollywood was boosted by a noticeably higher amount of stoner jokes, as the popular characters Jay and Silent Bob are notoriously known for selling weed outside a convenience store and for weed in general.

High Times ran into Smith on September 27, 2019, at the Herbarium in Los Angeles to promote his products in a collaboration with Caviar Gold. Like moon rocks but better, they feature powerful flower combined with an organic THC distillate and/or more, which provides for a very tasty smoke that you can grind up in a grinder like flower. The products also come in pre-rolls and in CBD/hemp varieties.

But Smith wasn’t always a heavy daily toker—or at least not until his mid-thirties.

Smith explained his smoking habits to High Times in May 2020—the most recent time he interviewed with us, which happens frequently. “I’ve been a pretty hardcore ‘wake and bake’ stoner since 2008,” Smith told High Times. “So 12 years. 12 years a stoner. I was not a stoner when I was a kid—when I made [my first] movies—which a lot of people consider stoner movies and stuff. Now I’m a pretty ardent consumer. We have our own strains of weed—Snoogans, Snoochie Boochies, and Berzerker—that Caviar Gold fuels for us. We’ve been on the cover of High Times. Big figures in the world of weed, but I didn’t earn it. I became a stoner late in life, at age 38.”

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