Petco, where I dont go...Anymore!(img INTENSE)

[grimmjohn]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7767393#post7767393 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by AngeloM3
1st off........... the ONLY stuff i ever by from petco or petsmart is equipment (heaters, veggie clips, some foods etc...)

That's the whole point, About 2.5% of my stores weekly sales come from FW fish, SW fish, and aquatic plants..combined...tanks, heaters, food etc...make up a lot more...as a comparison, premium dog food (Hills, NC, Euk etc..) make up about 25-30% of our weekly sales...guess what the suits care more about selling.

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7767393#post7767393 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by AngeloM3

2nd unfortunatly they do have to keep sick fish there until they are FULLY dead! My brother works at a PETCO (he and other Fish Dept Reps have EXTENSIVE SW knowledge) and they get the animal rights activist picketing outside and stuff like that all the time. So to please everyone they HAVE to keep the fish until they are floating around belly up.

My brother has made plenty of suggestions... like to seperate sick fish or have QT tanks set up... but CORPORATE PETCO doesnt see that as being necessary

Just my $0.02

Another great employee. Picketers won't keep fish from dying and ferrets from living in their own ****, but your borther and his friends can.
Personally, I don't like leaving them in there to die..they look like crap and everyone asks what is wrong and points them out...If you can scoop it out with your hand it's probably too far gone. The store keeps a bottle of Finquel in the safe, I took it out and put it under the sink, keep some mixed up, supposed to be the most humane, but the freezer or a good smack get them just as dead just as quick.

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=7782333#post7782333 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by billsreef
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=885592

It hasn'y actually gone through yet..shareholders are supposed to vote really soon though..haven't seen/heard/felt any changes though...well there has been a really big push to decrease fish shrink, of cuarse I'm a few steps ahead of the game there

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=8224185#post8224185 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by MyCatsDrool
Hi there!

One of my good friends is the aquatics and reptiles dept manager at my local petco.

I guess that's what I am, Team Lead in charge of the aquatic department and all of the live animals in general...my nametag literally says "The Guru."

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=8224185#post8224185 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by MyCatsDrool

This is how corporate petco is/was before the very recent takeover.

He has oodles of fish care experience, having at once time run a business with his family on tank setup and maintenence in NYC. In fact, I trust him to baby sit my fish when I am out of town and often go to him for GOOD advice.
He is NOT allowed to medicate a sick animal.
He is NOT allowed to removed and quarentine a sick animal
He is NOT allowed to modify stock, in the store or what they are/will receive.
He is NOT allowed any control over their diet
The list goes on and on. He has to simply watch helplessly while fish die.

Someone mentioned this earlier and I started a few months ago, but I too now run copper safe in my SW system 24/7..so what if I can't sell $20 worth of inverts a week..I'm dang sure to not be selling any sick fish (): )
You can order as much coppersafe as you want from the store online supply system (OSS) for free...it comes in gallon jugs, you can also store use anything on the shelfs...though besides coppersafe the only thing I've found worth using is Maracyn if you get a cyano outbreak.
We can don't have a QT tank, though I've heard some stores do have them set up in the back...no LFSs around here QT either...between the copper and the maracyn my tanks are sterile anyway. SW fish don't really get sick in my tanks, they're either DOA, dead within 24 hours, or die at some random time after looking fine 20 minutes before hand.

You can modify stock and what the stoer recieves down to the fish. Yes the fish are supposed to be planogramed and you're supposed to have so many of this kind of fish and that kind of fish...but nobody is gonna call you on it...The biggest factor of me turning my store around when I took over the fish dept. was to not just walk down the row and blindly order whatever looked a little low...I went into Polaris and found what we sold and what died and what we made money on and what we didn't and actually used reason when I ordered. I called our wholesaler Seagrest Farms in Florida and got Dot (a very nice lady) to fax us their real availability list every week and I get to try out new things and if they work then I keep them and if not then I try other things..like florida flagfish, I was sure they were gonna sell when I told people that I had a relativley peacful cichlid that ate algea and only cost $2...but I was wrong...and there's so many fish on the planogram that I don't order anymore...but there's lots of nice fish that aren't on the planogram...My petco is one of two stores within 150 miles where you can get Amano shrimp, Black and purple emperor tetras, cardinal tetras, congo tetras, true siamensis flying foxes, kribs, german blue rams, frontosas, etc...
It is true that the store will get a push of fish from time to time that you have no control over, half of the time i think the petco buyer must just owe somebody a favor becuase the fish are always from some other vendor and they are usually smaller and sickly and almost always end up hurting my bottom line in shrink. The pushed fish are always on sale so they are usually gone pretty quick, but when they die it still coun't against you at full retail ...But it's easy to find room for the extra fish cuase you got so much extra room from not ordering all the crap that doesn't sell...like gold mollies...no petco in America makes money from golden mollies (or black swordtails, or small black moors)..it's not worth keeping them in the store to sell 1 out of 12 over a four week period while the rest die off...so there are some extra tanks right there to put something else in (red tuxedo platies and creamsicle mollies, double swordtails, and extra large comets, in my case, all good sellers.)

Again you can feed them anything in the freezer or on the shelf. (At the top of the "dead list (unsellable merchindise form)" there are a few lines for "store use" just take it and write down the sku, there is a budget though so be judicious) You can order also order all the flake food, frozen bloodworms, frozen krill, frozen silversides, and nori for free from the OSS and Polaris (the nori comes by the pound! Have you ever seen a pound of nori...it's the size of a large dictionary!) WIth all that store use stuff and a shelf pulled bottle of formula 1 pellets there's not much that i haven't been able to feed...of cuarse I don't order impossable to feed stuff either though..like a few of the more finiky butterflies for example.

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=8224185#post8224185 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by MyCatsDrool

However, he does work hard to educate the customers who purchase the fish. He has broken rules on occasion, and done what he felt was right.
The petco employees in the store are usually not responsible. The corporation is. Their rules are VERY strict. It makes my friend miserable most of the time. He is working on creating enough customer base and money to start a biz of his own down here.

Word...The best thing he can do is run the fish dept. like it's his own little pet store..Since I started doing that everything has been for the best. Do what I did, make yourself indispensable and you can do whatever you want, being a team lead doesn't hurt either.

It's like I mentioned earlier...the people are complaining about the corperation, when they are the one's watching it happen.
One of my employees actually called the head office to complain about the care of the guinea pigs, there was a sick one in the wellness room and apparently it's cage litter hadn't been changed in a few days. So my store got this nasty head office email and had to jump through all these hoops...becuase this employee complained becuase HER JOB hadn't been done, WTH?
She was like "I didn't mention it to ya'll cuase I thought I would get fired." And I was like, for what? Doing your job? Anyway, our store has never fired anyone, dispite our best interests.

Anyway, Cheers,
Grimmjohn

PS, I'm working on being the only petco in AR to be able to sell coral and LR, woot!

 

[billsreef]

John,

That buyout vote is only a mere formality since Devine, Meyers, et al own the controlling shares They did the same thing with the same investment groups several years back when the stock crashed big time. Interestingly the top dogs sold large blocks of shares just before the quarter report came out that triggered the stock crash.

BTW, you should consider yourself lucky with what your store and district management let you do with your fishroom. Some districts and stores are run in such a way that you would have your head handed to you for pulling items off the shelf or not following the planogram.

 

[ziggy222]

i'm not buying it.your gonna get fired if you continue saving animals .mark my words grimmjohn,you will get fired or will quit very soon.people that care about animals and fish don't last long there.go in any one of their stores and open the door under the saltwater tanks.there you will see a tidepool water filter with a biofilter in it with nothing else,no sand,no plants,no carbon,nothing else at all,and thats for all the tanks in that wall.i urge anyone to look for themselves,its not like they will arrest you for looking,they will just ask you to please close the door.but no one will even notice you looking most likely.that has been the case in all 3 of the stores i've been in the monroeville,pa,north hills.pa,and cranberry.pa.to say anything else is to lie or not know any better.also before i go,i just wanna say that wether or not they change owners has nothing to do with the animals care.it would be sold as an existing buisiness and run the same.in fact i may question the persons morals that would step in and save or buy a store that was run as such.

 

[grimmjohn]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=8390205#post8390205 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by billsreef
John,

That buyout vote is only a mere formality since Devine, Meyers, et al own the controlling shares They did the same thing with the same investment groups several years back when the stock crashed big time. Interestingly the top dogs sold large blocks of shares just before the quarter report came out that triggered the stock crash.

BTW, you should consider yourself lucky with what your store and district management let you do with your fishroom. Some districts and stores are run in such a way that you would have your head handed to you for pulling items off the shelf or not following the planogram.

That's what I get for getting my news from the Petco Portal Store homepage

Yeah, I know I'm lucky, I read back through my posts from like a year ago and am amazed at all I've accomplished and how my tone has changed...but if I did it then anyone can. When I started really playing with our planogram we had one of the most hardcore district managers in the company...one visit he mentioned it, I told him I just stopped ordering what died and didn't sell, he went into Polaris, checked it out, and never said another word to me as long as the tanks were clean when he visited. And the new DM is a transplant from the furniture industry, he's a really nice guy, just doens't know about the animals. He just goes down his animal care checklist when he visits and that's the end of it..."Tanks free of algae..check, Two plants and a rock in every tank..check, Millet in the bird cages..check etc..."

yeah, I'm carefull about the store use, cuase there is a store/district budget, I only store use wardly flake, ciclid pellets, formula 1, and some maracyn if there is a cyano bloom. Doesn't come close to the amount we store use in Carefresh bedding every month. Everything else I can order over the OSS for free or really cheap with the stores monthly store use budget


The RCAC really knows her crap though and she is also very hardcore...and she has never said a word about the planogram issue...just hands out the 100s on the animal care audit () : ) ...if you order over your limits then you will get some inquiring emails from the DM and RCAC, but that's the end of it. The last time they were both here together I recently had turned the biggest center section of our plant/koi tank into an awesome planted community display tank commplete with one of my spare metal halides (hey, I look at the tanks at work more than mine at home...so that is now MY tank, it's got cardinals, emporers, corys, all the best plants we get in etc...), The DM and RCAC both thought it was beautiful, expecially when I told them that our plant sales have quadrupled since I set it up. We get complements on it every day...and I recently emailed our RCAC about me setting up a 30 cube with a skimmer and another metal halide for a SW display tank too, so that we can sell LR and corals (my SW tanks are coppered to hell ) I'm already the best SW petco in AR, and being the only invert/LR store would put me on the next level.

I haven't gotten a response yet though...hopefully it doesn't get me fired...i went back through all the fish order/fish sale numbers for every store in AR for the past 18 weeks...figured up the wholesale cost of everything every store ordered and then compared it to the sales to find the "best" petco in AR...over the past 18 weeks my total profit is only a few hundred dollars less than the top SW sales store in the state...and that store is in Fort Smith...which A) doesn't have 2 very nice reef stores within 15 minutes of them (4 within 40 minutes...the Ft. Smith store only has Just Fish, which should hardly be competition, and then it's an hour drive to the next reef store) and B) That store averages 60K a week in total sales...my store averages 32K a week (petsmart across the street, ft. smith doesn't have one)...So I hope I pointed all this out rather gently to her and she ends up giving me the OK instead of the boot.

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=8393768#post8393768 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by ziggy222
i'm not buying it.your gonna get fired if you continue saving animals .mark my words grimmjohn,you will get fired or will quit very soon.people that care about animals and fish don't last long there.go in any one of their stores and open the door under the saltwater tanks.there you will see a tidepool water filter with a biofilter in it with nothing else,no sand,no plants,no carbon,nothing else at all,and thats for all the tanks in that wall.i urge anyone to look for themselves,its not like they will arrest you for looking,they will just ask you to please close the door.but no one will even notice you looking most likely.that has been the case in all 3 of the stores i've been in the monroeville,pa,north hills.pa,and cranberry.pa.to say anything else is to lie or not know any better.also before i go,i just wanna say that wether or not they change owners has nothing to do with the animals care.it would be sold as an existing buisiness and run the same.in fact i may question the persons morals that would step in and save or buy a store that was run as such.

Ziggy, in Nov I will have worked there for 1 year...I'm very familiar with the filtration system, there should be carbon in them, not that it is gonna be too bad if there's not, there is a skimmer on the SW tanks, and I've got the auto-top-off doing a 20% water change on all the tanks every few days..what more do you want?
That biowheel ensures that every fish in the tanks could die and rot and you still would probably not see an ammonia or nitrite spike, and the ATO ensures that the nitates never get over 20...


Cheers,

grimmjohn

 

[ziggy222]

i don't know what store your at but the ones listed did'nt have auto top off systems or skimmers.like i said,and i saw it myself and my girl freind worked there and showed me,the only filter was the bio-wheel.in case you have'nt been listening ,all those good things you are supposedly doing at your store are not allowed in any of the ones i've visited and are a firing offence.oh and if you are another one of the stores putting lava rock in your sw tanks,pleaseeeee stop it.there are minerals in those rocks that don't belong there.you are slowly poisoning your fish to death.they will die in about a mouth wether its in your tank or the customers,some will make it but barely.you would'nt want to be poisoned and neither would your fish.

 

[GSMguy]

ok this is worse than anything i have seen in any petco but petco is to blame.
my local mexican food joint its an el canelo. anyway they have always had a 120g saltwater fish only system about 6 months ago i went in and they had a makeshift divider in the tank with a 14 inch blue spotted grouper now i go in last week and the tank with the grouper and damsels now hasa grouper damsels and comet goldfish koi oscars and plecostomass i tried to explain that they will all die the tank looked like some one was making a live fish soup they did not understand the difference all their fish com from PETCO its not about the good stuff that happens in petco but a local aquarium store might not have let something like this happen im sure they are all dead i will never go back to see it made me sick

 

[reefman23]

I too used to be an asst. manager at Petco and all I can say is that NOT ONE of the managers at the store level EVER WANTED to even carry the fish. There is nearly no money made from the sales of fish (salt OR fresh). I think the main reason that PETCO's corp's want to continue to carry the fish is that they assume in some way that it will help sales in the aquarium and fish supply sections. Also, I dont know how these PETCO's can afford to stock the expensive fish and such that I see in these pics because you are only allowed to purchase something like 1.5x the sales from the previous week. So if you only sold $30 in saltwater fish in the previous week, corporate only allows you to buy $45 in saltwater fish from the breeder. And of course the associates are going to be much less knowlegeable than they should be. Anyone with a good aquatics background who goes into a PETCO to apply for a job is going to be automatically turned off by the sights of most of Petcos tanks. 90% of the people who work at petco are there because it is a job that gives them a paycheck. 10% work there because the really care for animals and they really like what they do.

I have to agree though that you could walk into any LFS and see some of the same things that you see at Petco. No store can afford to PROPERLY house a fish while in their care. They are only holding the fish until they can sell it to somewho who CAN house it properly. THey arent going to have a dozen 50 gallon tanks to house a dozen tangs. They are going to put half a dozen in two different tanks.

Anyways... dont buy your fish from petco, and spread the word to others as well, and hopefully some day petco will make the decision NOT to carry fish anymore... that is the best you can hoe for.

Jesse

 

[anarchtech]

I was thinking of going to the Petco in Cleveland, Tn. If a fish is $40.00 in the local stores it's $17.00 at Petco, seems like anyway. Thanks for the warning I probably won't do that now, price isn't everything.

 

[GSMguy]

you live in cleveland and you want to go to petco you onl want to go to salty critter nowhere else

 

[sharla1234]

BOYCOTT PETCO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[ziggy222]

what we ought to do is start a thread about good stores in different areas.for my area i have to say Under The Sea is absolutely the best store.Cranberry Twp.Pennsylvania.does this sound a little better than talking about petco?idk about everyone else but talking about that store gets me a lil down.i'd rather talk about the good stores cause some stores do go above and beyond.

 

[Rewd]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=8389814#post8389814 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by grimmjohn
That's the whole point, About 2.5% of my stores weekly sales come from FW fish, SW fish, and aquatic plants..combined...tanks, heaters, food etc...make up a lot more...as a comparison, premium dog food (Hills, NC, Euk etc..) make up about 25-30% of our weekly sales...guess what the suits care more about selling.


Another great employee. Picketers won't keep fish from dying and ferrets from living in their own ****, but your borther and his friends can.
Personally, I don't like leaving them in there to die..they look like crap and everyone asks what is wrong and points them out...If you can scoop it out with your hand it's probably too far gone. The store keeps a bottle of Finquel in the safe, I took it out and put it under the sink, keep some mixed up, supposed to be the most humane, but the freezer or a good smack get them just as dead just as quick.


It hasn'y actually gone through yet..shareholders are supposed to vote really soon though..haven't seen/heard/felt any changes though...well there has been a really big push to decrease fish shrink, of cuarse I'm a few steps ahead of the game there



I guess that's what I am, Team Lead in charge of the aquatic department and all of the live animals in general...my nametag literally says "The Guru."


Someone mentioned this earlier and I started a few months ago, but I too now run copper safe in my SW system 24/7..so what if I can't sell $20 worth of inverts a week..I'm dang sure to not be selling any sick fish (): )
You can order as much coppersafe as you want from the store online supply system (OSS) for free...it comes in gallon jugs, you can also store use anything on the shelfs...though besides coppersafe the only thing I've found worth using is Maracyn if you get a cyano outbreak.
We can don't have a QT tank, though I've heard some stores do have them set up in the back...no LFSs around here QT either...between the copper and the maracyn my tanks are sterile anyway. SW fish don't really get sick in my tanks, they're either DOA, dead within 24 hours, or die at some random time after looking fine 20 minutes before hand.

You can modify stock and what the stoer recieves down to the fish. Yes the fish are supposed to be planogramed and you're supposed to have so many of this kind of fish and that kind of fish...but nobody is gonna call you on it...The biggest factor of me turning my store around when I took over the fish dept. was to not just walk down the row and blindly order whatever looked a little low...I went into Polaris and found what we sold and what died and what we made money on and what we didn't and actually used reason when I ordered. I called our wholesaler Seagrest Farms in Florida and got Dot (a very nice lady) to fax us their real availability list every week and I get to try out new things and if they work then I keep them and if not then I try other things..like florida flagfish, I was sure they were gonna sell when I told people that I had a relativley peacful cichlid that ate algea and only cost $2...but I was wrong...and there's so many fish on the planogram that I don't order anymore...but there's lots of nice fish that aren't on the planogram...My petco is one of two stores within 150 miles where you can get Amano shrimp, Black and purple emperor tetras, cardinal tetras, congo tetras, true siamensis flying foxes, kribs, german blue rams, frontosas, etc...
It is true that the store will get a push of fish from time to time that you have no control over, half of the time i think the petco buyer must just owe somebody a favor becuase the fish are always from some other vendor and they are usually smaller and sickly and almost always end up hurting my bottom line in shrink. The pushed fish are always on sale so they are usually gone pretty quick, but when they die it still coun't against you at full retail ...But it's easy to find room for the extra fish cuase you got so much extra room from not ordering all the crap that doesn't sell...like gold mollies...no petco in America makes money from golden mollies (or black swordtails, or small black moors)..it's not worth keeping them in the store to sell 1 out of 12 over a four week period while the rest die off...so there are some extra tanks right there to put something else in (red tuxedo platies and creamsicle mollies, double swordtails, and extra large comets, in my case, all good sellers.)

Again you can feed them anything in the freezer or on the shelf. (At the top of the "dead list (unsellable merchindise form)" there are a few lines for "store use" just take it and write down the sku, there is a budget though so be judicious) You can order also order all the flake food, frozen bloodworms, frozen krill, frozen silversides, and nori for free from the OSS and Polaris (the nori comes by the pound! Have you ever seen a pound of nori...it's the size of a large dictionary!) WIth all that store use stuff and a shelf pulled bottle of formula 1 pellets there's not much that i haven't been able to feed...of cuarse I don't order impossable to feed stuff either though..like a few of the more finiky butterflies for example.


Word...The best thing he can do is run the fish dept. like it's his own little pet store..Since I started doing that everything has been for the best. Do what I did, make yourself indispensable and you can do whatever you want, being a team lead doesn't hurt either.

It's like I mentioned earlier...the people are complaining about the corperation, when they are the one's watching it happen.
One of my employees actually called the head office to complain about the care of the guinea pigs, there was a sick one in the wellness room and apparently it's cage litter hadn't been changed in a few days. So my store got this nasty head office email and had to jump through all these hoops...becuase this employee complained becuase HER JOB hadn't been done, WTH?
She was like "I didn't mention it to ya'll cuase I thought I would get fired." And I was like, for what? Doing your job? Anyway, our store has never fired anyone, dispite our best interests.

Anyway, Cheers,
Grimmjohn

PS, I'm working on being the only petco in AR to be able to sell coral and LR, woot!

John,

I'm in the same boat as you. Just about everything you describe about your Petco is how mine is. It's NOT the corperation at all, it's the people who work in the bad stores that give this company a bad name. And there are a lot of them. Lucky for us we both seem to work in a place where the people are decent. I love my coworkers--we're all animal nuts and our manager is the most anal retentive person under the sun when it comes to the animal care and in a business like this that's the ONLY way to be otherwise the animals suffer. The criteria the RCAC's and district managers follow for their animal care audits is very strict. My store gets 99's and 100's on almost every visit.

I read Petco employees complain all the time about not being able to feed their fish anything good or medicate them. I don't understand any of this. I have an entire shelf on the bottom of our frozen food freezer for my "stash" of food that's JUST for our SW fish. I "store use" everything and anything and I very their diets up all the time. And for meds I always have a supply of various antibiotics and industrial strength melafix on hand at all times all ordered off the "portal" supply system. The only exception to that is Quick Cure. Apparently Petco doesn't use that to treat Ich but we got special permission from our RCAC to store use it since it's the only stuff I trust.

Lucky for me when I took over our fish department it was after the former specialist who had been there for 9 years (since the store opened) had moved up to a managment position. I had nothing to clean up as it was a great place to get fish prior (one of the only stores in my area I would shop at). Although I don't really need her expertise on fish themselves, I do have the incredible benefit of her 9 years of experience on how to run a department like that. It's extremely helpful.

On the flip side, we have a store that's about 10 minutes from us that just opened. Been going thru all sorts of problems since day 1. Poor management, lack of hours, incredibly lazy employees, etc etc. Of course the fish have suffered big time. Their current fish specialist is cleaning things up a bit but he still has his issues. He worries more about their display tanks then the actual fish for sale, refuses to "store use" any food except the crappy Wardley's brand flakes the store orders because he's worried about shrink (what happened to animals first?).. etc. It's a real mess.

 

[grimmjohn]

Hehe, "Shrink,"what's worse...a pack of frozen food that we paid $.50 wholesale for, or a SW fish that we paid $12 for?
Sounds like the store they opened up recently in Rogers, Arkansas...look in Polaris at their SW numbers after they first opened...it was very bad...but they've really picked it up recently and haven't lost much.

Glad to hear that your store is doing well and you're enjoying your job () : )
(9 years!! Dear God, I love my store and all, but wow)

I've actually taken some time off cuase grad school and my masters thesis is taking precedence over working 40 hours a week (I was opening the store at 7AM, going to class, then closing the store at 10, then working most of the day Sat., ordering fish and animals on Sunday, then working 5 or 6 hours at a dedicated reef store on Sunday as well.) So hopefully everything is still going well. Tommorrow will be the first week I haven't ordered the fish in a long time.
I may or may not be back next semester, depends on my schedule. I've also got some internships in the works at either the audubon society, Arkansas Game and Fish, or US F&W for more money and a future...if I had the opportunity to become managment in the area any time soon then it would be a different story, but I don't.
My 1 year anniversery would have been in 4 days, guess I'm still an employee, but I'm gonna stay off the schedule indeffinetly. and if they let me go they let me go.

Cheers,

grimmjohn

 

[MAreefer1]

wow, I have alot of reading to do. I havnt been keeping up with the thread lately

 

[sndwave80]

I worked at a Petco in Wisconsin for nearly 9years. From what I have read users: Reef Shadow, Fake name, and Ficklefins understand what goes on in the type of stores. Many of the employees that are employed have a high turn around rate. During my time there my only Fresh water/ Salt-water information was what I received in training. The information was well put together, but very basic fish husbandry and product identification. I would pick up new information from other customer that would come in.
I didn’t get most of my knowledge until I starting reading many of the books on my own time. Which Petco has a program where they allow the employee to borrow many of the books and return them. This only works if you run into an employee who wants to know and understand more. When you think of the store on your area it may have 15 tanks running all on one filter system. I ask the same questions about the tank sizes and the aquatic life that is in them. The tanks are not that large due to space and the fish are not to be there for long periods of time. I did/do encourage customers to come in on delivery days and purchase them while they are still their original bags. This is less stress on the animal.
In my location several others and I had an active voice on concerns with in our store. And yes it take several weeks to months to see change. But things did change. The best an individual can do is voice these concerns to the general manager and point out the advice you may have or the advice of the employee who’s trying to make change.
The person who started this thread may have had good intention on pointing out flaws in a system or just add to growing problem in the pet industry. But did you inform that employee of your concerns about their answers? I would think, No. So in turn you have just added to the problem nothing more. There was a thread that said Petco should just kill animals if they look ill. That is an unlikely solution as it breaks many state laws that these types of businesses have to follow. Not to mention PETA strongly frowns on this type of action.
This could go on for some time but when it comes down to it. You as individuals need to help those in your area. We now have a Petco, Pet Smart and three local fish shops. I don’t pretend to know it all but I am sure to give my input when needed or assist another customer who is in need. I enjoy my 120g salt-water tank and our local Salt Water Club. Our club voices concerns and helps to educate other staff and people in our area. You should use your knowledge to do the same. This is about the life we intend to keep, not pointing fingers.

 

[syrinx]

Its not uncommon for a high volume pet store not to do much in the way of water changes. What you tend to forget is they are doing constant partial changes with each fish they sell. You see the fish go home in bags of water that have to be replaced. One of my systems would lose 20% of its volume on a busy day!

 

[Rewd]

syrinx, I don't know about any LFS you go to but the Petco I work at ever last one of our freshwater systems runs on a constant 24/7 freshwater drip.

Not to mention at the push of a button a 20% water change can be performed on the entire system automatically. It really helps with keeping nitrates down in horrible overcrowded tanks.

 

[mistermikev]

Wow we got some people stirred up in here! Just thought I'd point out that as responsible and knowlegeable reefkeepers every one of you should go to petco. that's right, go there.
go there and politely and patiently talk to an employee and subtly drop some hints about what they are doing wrong. If you just walk away and don't return... several parents who's child whatched nemo will partonize the shiznit out of them and end up killing livestock. Just a thought.

 

[johnnybravo234]

You need a raise GTI2.0t

 

[pepsimax]

I used to work at a petco! I was a Team Lead, Fish Manager and Reptile Manager. It was very hard to just keep the system running. Powerheads going out all the time lights going out. But it is doable they never used to give me any money for the dep. So i would just take stuff and write it off. Lights, powerheads , food everything. I even took the dividers out of the tanks to make them bigger just cut the silicone for the dividers I did this for the reptiles to. I even made a reef tank. Not supose to but what are they going to do fire me o well. thats what I was thinking. I made a reef tank with 6 lights blue and white, re plumbed the system to run off the big sump with mutiple returns for good water flo, live rock and corals even put a skimmer on it. But as soon as I left they crashed the hole saltwater system about a month later had to ship everything to a new store. They even crashed the FW system all they carry now is guppies, and gold fish the lights dont even work it the hole system. They even crashed the plant tank and it only has one pump. I cry every time I go in there and see what they have done.