You're absolutely right about the market being way smaller than people are predicting, especially in more remote places like Fairbanks. Only 100k people, a big chunk of them military and military-adjacent. Even if 50% of the population are users and all of those buy solely from retail stores, that's still only a customer base of 50k people. With 33 growers in the FBX north star borough, that's roughly only 1500 smokers per grower. Not exactly sustainable numbers. 

tl;dr- lots of these businesses are going to fail.