The initial wonder of Google Street View — where you could virtually traverse streets all over the world with 360-degree views from your tablet — has since been replaced with the somewhat-new Google Business View, which seamlessly takes you from the street and into the businesses.
Business View is a pretty powerful tool — one that has people window-shopping on London’s Oxford Street from their laptops and checking out “The Colbert Report” set from their iPhones.
And now Google Business View is venturing into Colorado’s legal pot stores.
If you’re virtually cruising down Denver’s historic Welton Street on Google Street View, you won’t likely notice the storefront of the Denver Kush Club. But if you click on the door — suddenly you’re walking into the shop and noticing its colorful, Hunter S. Thompson-inspired art choices and you’re seeing the wall of clothing and checking out the glass for sale and admiring the many jars of marijuana available for purchase to anyone 21 and older.
Have a look around. The jars of marijuana are there in their Technicolor, un-blurred glory. It’s a compelling view — and that’s the reason Denver Kush Club manager Ryan Garvey first contacted Google about getting the shop online.
“My friend who owns Long Trail Glass at 8th and Santa Fe first told me about it,” said Garvey. “He was at the Kush Club and showed me his shop on Google Business View, and it looked amazing! He told me that it’s a pretty easy process, they give you a list of approved photographers, and I immediately knew we wanted to do this.”
Long Trail Glass and the Kush Club have a reciprocal agreement for their customers: Show a receipt from one shop at the other and get a 20 percent discount. Garvey was especially psyched about the Business View because of the Denver Kush Club’s location in Five Points.
“The Kush Club is in Five Points, and I have a ton of friends who will not go to Five Points unless they’re going to (rock club) Cervantes,” Garvey said. “But the shop is giving the area a new, fresh face. Five Points doesn’t have the best track record of crime and stuff like that. So my number one value-building with this is: You don’t have to go to Five Points to see what the shop looks like.
“Sure, when you come here you’ll hear the music and meet the staff and smell the flower, and it’s amazing. But if we can show people all that on the computer, whether it’s to people in Oklahoma or Cherry Creek, they’ll see the shop and see the artwork and notice that this is a totally different vibe from other shops and what they were expecting — it’s huge. And then they’ll come here to check us out, and once we get people through the door and they interact with our staff and smoke our flower, we’ll retain them as customers for life.”
The Kush Club is the first Denver pot shop on Business View, according to the photographer who shot it for Garvey. But it won’t likely be the last.
