Nicklz dispensary was built on the nickel bag

Chances are, one of your first weed purchases was a nickel bag. For just $5, you and your friends could change the course of an afternoon by sharing a joint: painting the town red, watching a movie, cracking jokes. For Manhattan native Nicholas Koury and owner of Nicklz dispensary near Time Square, the nickel bag would change the course of his life.

Granted, Koury’s first cannabis experience wasn’t buying a nickel bag of bud. As a kid, a friend’s mother was prescribed medical cannabis, and Koury and his friend would skim a little off the top, making joints out of her stubs. But for Koury, who grew up all across the borough, from the Lower East Side all the way up to Harlem, he learned his first lesson in supply and demand.

“I started selling nickel bags of Arizona green weed,” which he admits was “bottom of the barrel.” But soon those nickels grew to dime bags of Haze, to dubs, eighths, and all manner of gram measurements. “I just kept getting deeper into the industry…I had delivery services, I did wholesale.”

“I always had a hustler spirit…at one point, selling video games in front of my building. Growing up in New York City, the nickel bag was definitely very present.”

But in the early 2000s, as Koury was making legacy inroads, cannabis arrest rates skyrocketed in New York City. After Koury served his time he wanted a change, so he poured his time into a fitness business, opening and running two gyms by the time New York decided to pass the Marihuana Regulation and Taxation Act (MRTA) in 2021. But he’d been paying attention from a distance.

“Once I became kind of mature enough to understand and to see other states doing it, I was like, ‘I want to do that’… I didn’t know how it was going to happen, but I knew it was going to happen.”

– Nick Koury, owner of Nicklz

It did. Koury submitted his application when they first became available in 2022, and was awarded one of the state’s first 36 CAURD dispensary licenses. It took over a year to find the right home for Nicklz before they opened last summer, but Koury knew what he wanted from the start.

“We manifested Times Square—I’m not even joking,” he says. “We literally said it when we filled out the application.”

Any given afternoon in Time Square reveals the kind of population smorgasbord New York City is known for: locals from Hell’s Kitchen, Broadway patrons, tourists from places as far as Argentina and Japan, and commuters from other boroughs. Nicklz, which sits at what Koury calls the nucleus of all these worlds, serves them all—provided they have the appropriate ID. Koury opened the store around a year ago in the summer of 2024, and says that his clientele reflects the spectrum of nuance of both NYC living and the cannabis community.

The decor inside also reflects this welcoming ethos. A recent renovation gives Nicklz an inviting, minimalist aesthetic, with wood-paneled walls and clean lines. One of the new features is a series of laser engravings of classic New York archetypes, “from [the] business woman to the construction worker to the punk rocker to the old lady pushing her cart.”

And like the characters that adorn his dispensary walls, Koury believes that the cannabis industry thrives when its operators bring their unique lived experiences to the table. He focuses the store’s menu to exclusively New York brands, and highlights micro-growers and independent brands whenever he can. One of his favorites at the moment is Fyre. After all, the same skills Koury applied to moving nickel bags applied to Nicklz. (And yes, the name is definitely a play on words of his own name.)

“I think that it would be ignorant for somebody to box anybody in. People are complex; people come from different experiences which shape them,” he says.

“Selling cannabis with or without a license beforehand was still operating a business,” and “now I get to sell cannabis legally. I get to help people, and I get to provide safe, knowledgeable experiences for the customer.”

Koury wants to believe that the future of Nicklz is bright, despite some bumps in the legislative road. Earlier this year, the Office of Cannabis Management issued an advisory that it may need to relocate dozens of dispensaries across NYC for their proximity to schools—and Nicklz is one of them. But he’s feeling good about it. Nicklz is still open, still serving the communities it intersects, still hustling.

“I can only control what I can control. So we’ll see what the future holds.”