I rolled into The Mint Cannabis Tempe at 1:47 a.m. on a Wednesday and the parking lot had eleven cars in it. Eleven, including a guy eating a tray of pad thai through the open driver’s side window of a Civic. The Mint at 5210 South Priest Drive is the only major Phoenix-area dispensary that flips the OPEN sign on at midnight, leaves it on through 3 a.m., and is still pouring foot traffic at sunrise. The 24/7 hours are the entire pitch, and they hold up.
I am scoring this visit a 4.7 out of 5. The hours are the differentiator, the menu runs deep on flower and concentrate, the drive-thru moves quickly even at peak, and the named budtender I worked with knew the room cold. The single complaint I have, and it is the same complaint that surfaces on the Leafly review thread, is that walk-in counter prices on a few flower SKUs run higher than what you can lock in by ordering online or pre-ordering through the Mint app. Worth knowing before you stand in line.
The 1 a.m. visit and the budtender named River
I parked, walked past the drive-thru window where two cars were already in line, and pushed through the front door at 1:51 a.m. The lobby ID checker took three seconds with my Arizona driver’s license, the inner door clicked open, and I stepped into a sales floor that was, to put it plainly, packed. Not packed like a Saturday afternoon at the Strip in Vegas, but packed like a Tuesday lunch rush at a busy Chipotle. Six budtenders working the counter. Five customers ahead of me. A line that moved.
The room itself is brighter than most Arizona dispensaries I have been in. Mint runs the lighting hot, the LED panels are bright white instead of the vaporwave purple that has become a tired industry default, and the result is that you can actually see the labels on the glass-front coolers from twelve feet away. The Mint Dispensary branded coolers run the back wall and the side wall in a continuous L, packed with edibles, concentrates, and pre-rolls. A wall-mounted screen above the coolers asked DID YOU GET YOUR FREE WEED TODAY? ASK ME HOW. I made a note to ask.
My budtender’s name was River. I checked the Leafly review thread on the way over and saw a recent review that called her out by name, which is the only reason I asked for her. The review I read described her as professional and product-knowledgeable, and that was the read I got too. She walked me through the daily-deal sheet first, which is laid out as a single laminated card you can take to the counter, pointed me at the Connected flower running on a Wednesday-only price break, and answered a question I had about a Pressure live resin cart with a specific terp profile, batch ID, and recommended pairing without checking a tablet. The whole interaction took about nine minutes from greeting to handoff. She also told me about the patient rewards system, which is the answer to the FREE WEED screen.
While I was at the counter a guy in a security uniform walked in, ordered an eighth of pre-roll shake and was out in under three minutes. Behind him a woman in scrubs ordered a tin of Camino gummies and a 510 battery, then asked the budtender at the next station whether the in-house kitchen was open. He told her yes, the kitchen was running an overnight menu, infused or non-infused, place the order at the counter and pick up at the kitchen window. She added a non-infused breakfast burrito to her order. That happened at 2:07 a.m. and I would not have believed it without standing five feet away.
Why 24-hour hours actually matter in Phoenix
The closest Phoenix-area dispensary that stays open past midnight is closing at 2 a.m. The next-closest is closing at midnight. The Mint Tempe is the only one running through the entire overnight cycle and the only one with a working drive-thru window between roughly 9 p.m. and 9 a.m., which is a gap most Arizona shops do not cover at all. Arizona’s regulator only requires medical and recreational dispensaries to operate inside a licensed envelope, and the state does not cap operating hours, which means 24/7 is legally fine. The Mint just chose to do the work.
The practical use cases for this are not abstract. A bartender ending a shift at 3 a.m. in Tempe or Scottsdale has nowhere else to legally pick up. A graveyard-shift nurse at an East Valley hospital has nowhere else to legally pick up. A traveler landing on a redeye at PHX at 1 a.m. has nowhere else to legally pick up. I am not going to dress this up: most cannabis customers are not flying through Sky Harbor at 1 a.m., but the people who are have one option, and the people who finish service jobs after the bars close also have one option, and that one option is this dispensary at 5210 South Priest Drive with a drive-thru window and a lit OPEN sign. The competitive moat is real.
The menu, the deals, and what the kitchen is doing
Mint Tempe’s menu is one of the deepest I have walked in Arizona. Flower runs the full price ladder, from $20 popcorn ounces on the daily-deal sheet up through $60 eighths of Connected, AlienLabs, and 22Red on the top shelf. Concentrate is where the menu actually flexes: rosin, live resin, badder, sauce, and diamonds across multiple in-state extractors and a handful of California imports. The Pressure live resin carts I bought were $40 for a half gram, which is in the mid-tier of the AZ market and below what the same cart goes for at most Phoenix shops on a non-deal day. The full live menu is on Leafly and on the Mint app, and both update in close to real time.
The daily deals are the part that punches above the rest of the market. Wednesday I saw a Connected flower deal, a Camino gummy buy-one-get-one, a 30 percent off concentrate window between midnight and 6 a.m. that is exclusive to the overnight crowd, and a vendor day discount on Jeeter pre-rolls. The 30 percent off concentrate overnight window is the line item I would mark with a highlighter. If you are the kind of customer who is up at 3 a.m. anyway, that deal alone justifies the trip.
The kitchen is the other thing that nobody else in Arizona is doing at this scale. Mint opened the first cannabis kitchen at a dispensary in 2018, added the drive-thru in 2020, launched online service in 2021, and ran a shuttle service starting in 2022, which is the run of industry firsts that the brand built its Most Innovative Medical Cannabis Dispensary recognition on. The kitchen makes infused and non-infused food: pizza, burgers, breakfast burritos, salads, wings, and a rotating special. Cafe meals are made to order and have to be placed inside the dispensary, not at the drive-thru, but the food window stays open well into the overnight on weekends. The menu is short, the prices are not predatory, and you can eat a real meal sitting in the lobby waiting for a friend to finish their order. Almost no other dispensary in the country does this.
What I picked up
I bought one Pressure live resin cart in Grape Gas at $40, one tin of Camino Sparkling Pear gummies at $20 on a buy-one-get-one (so $20 for two tins), and a Jeeter Baby Cannon pre-roll at $9 on the vendor-day deal. Total at the counter was $69 plus tax. I opted out of the Mint app discount stack because I wanted the walk-in price for an honest read.
The Grape Gas cart pulled clean on the first hit and did not clog through the half-gram. Terps read closer to the strain than the average cart at this price point, which is a low bar but a meaningful one. Onset hit at about three minutes, plateau at twelve, and the high held for closer to 80 minutes than 60. Lab numbers on the back of the cart printed at 81 percent THC plus 4 percent measurable terp content, which lines up with what I tasted. The Camino gummies hit predictably for the brand, 5 mg per piece, onset at 35 minutes, no morning fog the next day. Standard Camino performance, no surprises, fair price on the buy-one-get-one. The Jeeter pre-roll did what a Jeeter pre-roll does, which is to say it burned even and smelled like the strain on the label.
Drive-thru, shuttle, and the small operational stuff
The drive-thru window is on the south side of the building. The line moves quickly because Mint runs the drive-thru with its own dedicated budtender, which means you are not splitting attention with the inside crowd. I watched two cars cycle through in under four minutes between them while I was waiting on my own order inside. Cash, debit, and Mint app payment are all accepted at the window. The kitchen and drive-thru both operate between roughly 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. on the standard schedule, with the dispensary itself open the full 24 hours, so an overnight pickup means walking inside.
The shuttle is the one I cannot personally test because I drove. Mint runs a free shuttle service for patients in the immediate East Valley, route and booking through the Mint app, and the budtenders I asked confirmed it is running daily. If you do not drive, do not have an Uber budget, and live within the East Valley shuttle radius, this is a meaningfully different proposition than any other dispensary in the state.
Pros and cons
The honest read after the visit:
Pros
- Open 24/7, the only major Phoenix-area dispensary that runs the full overnight
- Drive-thru window cuts pickup time to under five minutes during off-peak hours
- Daily deals stack hard, including a 30 percent overnight concentrate discount
- In-house kitchen serves real food, infused or non-infused, until late
- Free patient shuttle covers most of the East Valley
Cons
- Walk-in counter pricing on a few flower SKUs runs higher than the online or app price
- The cafe menu requires placing the order inside, not at the drive-thru
- Lighting on the sales floor is bright enough to feel like a 7-Eleven rather than a lounge, which is a feature for some and a bug for others
Best for, skip if
The Mint Cannabis Tempe is best for the late-shift worker, the redeye traveler, the East Valley resident who wants a drive-thru pickup or a shuttle ride, the concentrate buyer hunting overnight discount windows, and the patient who actually wants a meal with their flower run. It is the only Phoenix-area shop that covers all of those use cases at once. Skip it if you want a low-key boutique vibe at a lounge pace, you only ever shop at noon on a Sunday, you cannot stand fluorescent retail lighting, or you live closer to a different shop with comparable prices and you are not chasing the 24-hour angle. For everyone else in metro Phoenix, this is the new floor for what a full-service dispensary should look like.
If JARS-style transparent menu and prep-friendly weeknight stock is closer to what you want, check the comparison JARS Metrocenter Phoenix review. For the broader Arizona shop list, the Arizona dispensary hub covers the full Phoenix and Tucson roster.
