On a recent morning, New Vansterdam sat empty. A clutch of employees chatted behind a counter. Occasionally, the sound of a would-be customer rattling the locked metal gate at the entrance echoed through the quiet lobby.

Display cases intended for marijuana-infused foods and products were filled with glass bongs and pipes.

Marijuana was nowhere in sight.

You’d expect the sleek Vancouver shop, with its reclaimed wood paneling and two dozen iPads playing video clips of Washington marijuana farms, to hum with activity. Washington, after all, is one of just two states in the country where anyone 21 and older can legally buy pot.

But since Washington launched its recreational marijuana industry in July, New Vansterdam has been closed more than it’s been open. There’s not enough marijuana to fill the shelves. Some days, when state-licensed marijuana growers do have marijuana to offer, the price is so steep that New Vansterdam’s owners decline, opting instead to keep the business shuttered another day.

Six weeks into Washington’s experiment with legal recreational marijuana, the industry continues to be a volatile one with extreme pot shortages, complaints about high prices, a backlog of growers, processors and retailers awaiting state licensing and barely a trickle of specialty items like marijuana-infused edibles and concentrates.

“From a business perspective, from a customer service perspective, this is the worst case scenario you could ask for,” said one of New Vansterdam’s owners, Brian Budz, sitting in the shop’s empty lobby. “When your customers are unhappy about unscheduled closures, it’s very hard to build a reliable customer base.”

Washington’s rocky rollout stands in stark contrast to Colorado, where the state relied on its established medical marijuana industry to shape its recreational one. Washington’s medical marijuana dispensaries remain unregulated – much like Oregon’s before this year. (Oregon began regulating medical marijuana dispensaries in March.)

Washington, as a result, "started from scratch," said Brian Stroh, who owns CannaMan Farms, a state-licensed pot producer in Clark County.

Stroh said regulators with the Washington Liquor Control Board, which oversees the industry, haven't moved quickly enough to license marijuana producers to meet demand.

The state has so far issued 47 retail licenses statewide. Washington has allotted a total of 334 retail licenses. It’s licensed 170 marijuana producers; another 2,412 producer licenses are pending, according to the liquor control board. State officials say they'll continue to issue producer and retailer licenses as they complete their review of each application.

Mikhail Carpenter, a board spokesman, defended the pace of the state’s licensing process.

“This is an industry that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world,” he said. “We continue to issue these licenses. While things are tight right now, this system is designed to be very robust. We are just adding more and more producers to the system.”

But not fast enough to keep prices down, retailers said.

Budz initially expected to sell marijuana for between $17 and $24 a gram, but ended up selling it for $32 to $38. In Colorado, recreational pot is cheaper: Take Medicine Main Denver, a recreational marijuana shop. One gram of marijuana ranges from about $9 to $14, according to Weedmaps, an online guide to marijuana retailers.

By comparison, marijuana sells for between $5 to $10 on the black market in the Portland area.

Budz said he’s had growers ask as much as $15 to $20 per gram wholesale, translating into $50 a gram at the retail level.

“I can’t in good conscience charge $50 a gram for marijuana,” he said. “It’s not right.”

On a recent afternoon, only pre-rolled joints were available at Main Street Marijuana in downtown Vancouver. Ramsey Hamide, who manages the shop, hopes the arrival of outdoor marijuana, which will be harvested starting this month, stabilizes the supply.

But Jeremy Moberg, who owns CannaSol, a large-scale outdoor grow operation in north central Washington, dispelled that idea. He said his sizable harvest – 2,000 pounds – won't last long on store shelves.

“We are barely going to have enough to keep up with all the new stores that have come on,” said Moberg.

Moberg hoped to have a state license in February, but ended up getting one in June, leaving little time to get the crop in the ground. The late start meant he didn’t have cannabis to offer retailers when they opened in the first week of July.

“Prices will stay high and scarcity will rule for at least another 18 months,” he said.

For now, New Vansterdam’s schedule is so erratic that shop owners advise customers to check the store's Facebook page and Twitter to make sure it's open.

Budz and his partners are committed to sustaining the business through the early stages of the industry but wonder when things will shake out.

“It’s a business owner’s worst nightmare,” said Budz, whose normally cheerful demeanor seemed frayed by the ups and downs of being a pot entrepreneur. "It’s an untenable business model.”

-- Noelle Crombie