Colorado: High Growth Rate (For The Highest State)

The obvious joke about Colorado — and the one we admittedly alluded to in our own headline — is that store front businesses are about keeping the customers happy by keeping them high. As the first state to allow for the recreational use and sale of marijuana, it seems the natural direction to take our store front tracker about the Centennial State.

And while legal pot certainly hasn’t hurt Colorado any, the truth of the matter is the growth story in the state had been well underway long before the legislature first said yes to marijuana. And that growth seems to be chugging along and beating expectations.

By The Store Front Numbers

Colorado showed heady growth through the second quarter of 2015, with 5.2 percent gains leaving both the greater region at 4 percent and the United States at large at 3.1 percent in the dust.

The trend has been in place, really, for several years, with numbers from the state consistently coming in with growth that tops its benchmarks. There are a number of key stats that show that several cylinders that are tied to overall growth are firing quite nicely. In fact, the labor picture in some numbers just released this past week show that general measures of the labor force remain sanguine. The Department of Labor reported that the state’s percentage of underutilized workers at the end of the year stood at 7.9 percent, quite a bit lower than the national average of 10 percent.