world's crappiest petstores

[brian c]

im against petco and petsmart for different reasons petsmart they only have had one pacman frog in years but only a little for that but mostly because of there crappy lizards and stuff like that and stupid people petco is pretty good but they don't have good fish and when i special order something and i show up a day late oops sorry i didn't know that was special ordered and i have almost started a fight because i told everyone who worked there that its special ordered but luck for me i had to go my buddies had to threaten to kill my betta that's when i started running man, you should seen me run

[hgual22]

The petsmart by my house is decent, but the workers know nothing about pets. There is one girl there who is very nice, always helps me and actually seems to know a lot of inof about the animals they sell there. Sadly shes a cashier, not pet care specialist. One lady who seems to be in charge of the fish knows absolutely nothing about fish and was getting mad at me for keeping by bettas in a 5 gallon tank with heaters. She said they prefer small bowls and dont need a heater. They are tropical fish. Another person told me that rats fight and prefer to live alone, when really, they can actually die of depression if kept alone. They are very social.

The petco near me seems a little better. Their enclosures seem better suited for the animals, especially the reptiles, but the employees still know nothing. I got my fire belly toads there and they seem healthy, alert and arent shy, but 2 are a bit skinny, though there were 12 other frogs in the tank. They seem to at least try to take care of the pets though.

[PubFiction]

You know if you hate petco and petsmart it actually makes sense to buy thing from them that are very cheap. For instance they likely barely make and possibly lose money when they do the $1 / gallon sale. Those are loss leaders and they are hoping that you will come in to buy a tank and pick other stuff up or start keeping a pet that will yield them more sales in the long run. If you scoop in and take the $1 / gallon items and walk out without buying anything else you certainly are not helping their bottom line.

At any rate regardless of what you think those stores are not going anywhere, there is just way too much profit in dog and cat toys and junk

[Vivariums In The Mist]

Having a retail pet store background and having worked on the pet product manufacturing end for almost 10 years (besides my hobby business), I feel like they do provide some valuable services as others have mentioned. And to be honest, they can actually drive new customers in the aquarium and reptile category to local pet stores. Think about it, they are not going to get real advice from big chain stores. Once they get hooked on these great hobbies, they will want different species, better info and such, it can in a sense help local stores and drive in new customers. Either way though, they aren't going anywhere, actually they will keep expanding.
They also get their animals and fish from good sources, it's just how each individual store takes care of them after they are received that is usually the issue.

[DigitalPunk]

The nuts and bolts of it is they have to keep the animals in a manner that makes them easy to display and easy to collect when sold. This does not always translate into proper housing conditions. My local big box pet store tries to keep their animals in good conditions, but when faced with the choice to design a proper vivarium for the animals or place them and a tank that ensures they will be easy to find the later always wins They are in the business of making money and they are good at it. I may not like how they do some things, but instead of complaining about something I know I have zero chance in changing I just take my animal purchases somwhere else and stick to buying some supplies from them.

[PubFiction]

It is reasonable for Pet Smart or Petco to keep their animals easy to display and healthy and easy to get without sacrificing their health. The problem is many stores strait up neglect the animals or put them in wrong conditions. Neglect is obviously purely a management fault with no excuse at all for it. The bad conditions is an upper management fault. These guys will drop 10s of thousands on a display in a split second if it sells more so the money aspect is not an excuse either. You see every display in a Petco or Pet Smart is not haphazardly thrown together. It is carefully crafted to contain items that the store sells and more importantly they prefer items with high profit margins. Sometimes these items and conditions are just bad. For instance many pets such as frogs can be kept in live displays that require very little maintenance. But Petco wouldn’t want to sell you that because then you wouldn’t be back next month to replace your spoiled substrate. Neither store sells much in the way of live plants so they don’t want live plants in there. They like things that sit in the store and are real easy to keep for long periods of time without going bad and cheap that way they can soak customers for high profit margins and not worry about freshness and sales volume and they definitely want you hooked on constantly coming back for food, substrate, and any consumable possible. And this leads to another problem because they use setups that are designed to spoil, and their help is often cheap, many stores end up with displays that get out of control with rot or poor conditions, or they keep it to dry to fight that disregarding the animal’s health.