A far out dream...

[Rocky998]

My dreams are already so crushed you can put them in a mesh bag and use them for bio-media!

I learned fish breeding from the proverbial old man with a tiny shop. The money isn't in the fish, unless you go into the high end of the market. At least in my local market, the money is in dry goods - filters, tanks, gadgets, test kits, foods, lights - but not fish, which most stores hope will break even. If you breed fish, you need more gear. You sell the fish to the shop, and you get goods in return. They mark up your fish five or ten times, and they've already marked up the goods.
To be honest, I have had had a lot of store people suggest how I could breed a certain fish, but they usually don't know because they have no reason to. They mean well.
They just want to sell me things I might not really need, so that sure isn't limited to the fish world. Everyone tries to sell me useless objects.

It takes a lot of capital to run an aquarium store now. The outlay is really steep. A good friend is opening an aquarium section in already successful pet business, and I certainly wouldn't be able to lay out that kind of start up money. When I was 20 I thought I'd retire and be the old man giving advice in a small shop, but small shops are a thing of the past.

Still, a person can dream....

Yes I definitely agree...

 

[Crispii]

Don't mean to crush your dreams but if you show people how to breed fish you are giving yourselves competition, and supplying them with stock to profit on

*edited for typo

Looks like I'm not going to reveal my secrets to you.

 

[Colin_T]

You need to realize all the bottles of fertilizers and medications and expensive cartridge filters is what keeps your LFS in business. The shops make very little on fish, and it is even worse for their business if they give you information that means the fish survive, all LFS's have a vested interest in fish dying, if the fish don't die, they go out of business

Maybe for most stores but where I worked, we had repeat customers buying fish and tanks, not medications or filter cartridges. The customers used to bring their friends and family in to buy tanks.

It's all about good customer service. Teach people how to care for their fish and don't feed them a bunch of bs, and they will keep coming back to buy more stuff (usually fish, plants and tanks).

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Don't mean to crush your dreams but if you show people how to breed fish you are giving yourselves competition, and supplying them with stock to profit on

Most customers don't breed fish and if they do, they don't become competitors with the shop. The shop can buy in fish for pretty low prices so the only fish customers make money on are more expensive species.

Most shop owners don't normally breed fish in the shop either because it takes up too much space. They might have a pr of cichlids breed in a tank or some tetras spawn in a plant tank, but very few will breed fish on the premises.

 

[Olympia]

Someday I think it would be amazing to own an aquarium store, where not only you buy fish and supplies, but learn how to keep and even breed fish in the local area... All the tanks would have plants, wood, and rocks... I wouldnt sell small bowls or tanks... And no more of that fake decor that has so many sharp and dangerous edges... I would also want to have a large backroom for QTing fish and treating them (like a fish hospital). In the middle of the store I would have a large, kinda flat tank where people can touch different creatures and learn about them on panels with a picture and a write up about them. The store wouldnt just be a place to buy things, but also a place to learn and have fun. I also wouldnt want to sell the filters where you need cartridges, I would only sell sponge filters and other filter brands like seachem and aquaclear... It may be an unreachable dream... But hey, why not dream a little

Sounds great. I nearly did buy into our local store a few years ago. But at that time there were loads of stores opening and the shop was failing. It has been kept alive by the pond maintenance man and is now seeming to do well. Youre right about the filers. With all these in built filter systems in them like zeolite and charcoal or carbon its hard to know what to remove when treating the water as its not easy to dismantle them and take out the media generally

 

[Olympia]

By the way. I have oiked out silver and she is in a bucket with full dose treatment with airstone running very listless but still alive. I need to fix up qt tank with heater and filter asap

 

[Olympia]

Amazing place

 

[Olympia]

Sounds great. I nearly did buy into our local store a few years ago. But at that time there were loads of stores opening and the shop was failing. It has been kept alive by the pond maintenance man and is now seeming to do well. Youre right about the filers. With all these in built filter systems in them like zeolite and charcoal or carbon its hard to know what to remove when treating the water as its not easy to dismantle them and take out the media generally

Looks really impressive there . We had a massive store but it suddenly shut ut all down and got rid of all the stock and fish. And left us with no point of return for our faulty products. . Now our little store is desperately needed. Oh hindsight is a wonderfull thing....

 

[GaryE]

We had one large local store that sold terrible fish - they were always looking for cheap freshwater fish, and that took them right to the worst of the problems created by poor fishfarm practices. But their dry goods were phenomenal, and they catered to the DIY aquarist. Every time I went I bought surprising parts for making cool things in my fish set up.
They went under after moving to an out of the way location, and at least once a month since I've thought of some adjustment or mini-project their creative purchasing would have made easy. You miss such places.

Locally 90% of aquarium medications were banned without a veterinary prescription a couple of years ago, and all the shops sell is homeopathic and herbal remedies that don't work. It's a tiny part of their business.

It's tough, because they are in competition with online shopping, and if they want to hire skilled and helpful staff, we as customers undercut them with our own quest for cheap. The large chains strongarm the farms into cutting costs, and most of the online sellers sell the same bedraggled fish that causes. If a store insists on quality and buys from better sources, you pay more. The base cost of tetras bought from local fisher families in the Amazon is a few cents more than tetras raised in antibiotics on a corporate farm in Asia, and a few cents seem too much for most of us.

 

[Rocky998]

By the way. I have oiked out silver and she is in a bucket with full dose treatment with airstone running very listless but still alive. I need to fix up qt tank with heater and filter asap

Hope he/she gets better

 

[Olympia]

No no luck she got a new tank for one night only. Found dead this morning