Pretty pointless post IMO, shops vary and sellers vary. No guarantee that private sellers dont have any problems at all in their tanks, whether you are capable of spotting them or not.
People gripe about their LFS all the time and it really hacks me off because I bet not a single one of those people would get off their a$$ and write a letter to head office or manager saying what a good experience they had. You just... expect people to be perfect and shops to be perfect but it can be disheartening to get naff all appreciation for it.
Personally. I like the saying "if you cant say anything positive, dont say anything at all".
I know how much of a lift it gives me when customers really appreciate my efforts! I dont have to be helpful or go out of the way! Next week im driving out of my way to look over a customers tank because they have had ongoing problem after problm after problem and he asked nicely and I agreed. I dont expect anything for it, i'm doing it because I care. If i couldnt get a small item in for a customer, i have on occasion bought it off a friend or sold fish out of my own tanks at home to help out good customers. I like my job and i like bing able to help and i like being appreciated! The best thing for me is when people write a letter to head office praising my help, that way it is read by head office, the owner, the senior partner, the junior partner, the manager and then me. Then everyone appreciates me and i get to feel like im doing something worthwhile with my life.
As for fish health... fish die in shops all the time. It happens. Every shop. If a shop says they didnt take out a single dead fish in a day then they are either lying or its rotting in their tanks. Systems are designed to be really sterile environments, nobody likes systems, its an awful way of doing it, but if you want more than 5 tanks, it isnt feasible to water change and have the turnover and maintain tanks individually.
Fish are imported all the time from different countries, not just the countries you know the species to come from, the majority of your more common south american cichlids and tetras like neons, cardinals, rams etc actually come from countries like Singapore, south america is nothing short of a nightmare for buying fish from. But when fish are coming in from america, singapore, hong kong, thailand, uk, europe etc and within that you have a huge variety of species all with different requirements.
How do you make the systems suitable for all species with different requirements? Answer is... you dont! You make the system as sterile and neutral as possible and learn by experience which species you can and cant stock. Unfortunately this does mean you sometimes end up losing fish by trial and error. Most shops run huge banks of UVs, not just the small UV clarifier you can buy for your fish tank but lots of huge UVs running at more than twice whats necessary on most tanks to kill all bugs.
All the fish imported have different immunities, they have come into contact with diseases, parasites and pathogens that arent in this country, and yet have never come into contact with those in the tapwater here in the UK, meaning that sometimes they just dont do well, through no ones fault.
Once a fish is treated, you cant treat it right away so yes, you might see fish looking ropey and like they arent being treated but they might well be between treatments. Another problem is to treat a system, the huge bank of UVs has to be turned off and suddenly the fish are being treated (= stress) and arent protected from said new pathogens/diseases/whatever and so treating to cure one problem potentially causes another.
Then you have to think, different fish react to different medications, so systems with loaches/eels/knifefish etc cant be treated the same as systems with tetras or livebearers. An so many other considerations as to which medications to use. Chloramin T is great for treating livebearers but causes a dangerous reaction when mixed with salt so then the shop has to consider and weigh up the risk of running low levels of salt on the livebearer system (which means you then have to consider species on the system) however it does make a huge difference for a fact when running low levels of salt, i also know a lot of the breeders in singapore are running with a really low level of salt.
Black mollies are a real PITA to work with more than any other colour of molly. They are an incredibly weak variation of the species and very prone to problems. Livebearers often come in with parasites etc usually killed by the initial treatment and fixed, but black mollies tend to have a lot more ongoing problems. I wont even deal with them any more. No telling how inbred or line bred or just plain over bred livebearers are but to get them to some of these ridiculous garish colours they are now, my guess would be very! And black being what appears to be a recessive colour or at least very hard to breed true (as with most jet black species of a lot of animals, eg black syrian hamsters are very difficult to breed pure black and stay black without browning out and black moor goldfish too) i would expect them to be the most heavily bred to try and keep the colour true.
To help keep the systems as sterile as possible and as presentable to the public as possible, the tanks have to be easy to scrub clean 2-3 times a week at least, this means no tanks with lots of decor in. Real plants on systems is a bad idea as the disintigrate (no nutrients for them at all!). Tanks have to be presentable so most tanks have the same colour gravel to keep it neat, so this means that the fish may not ever colour up as good as they would in someones tank. Too much bogwood on a system would drop the pH too much as too much ocean rock etc would raise it. This generally means its npretty much impossible to have systems ideal for every fish, its just worknig with what you have!
The upkeep of systems can be awful, you think your 1? 2? 3? 10? tanks are hard work!? Water changes, gravel cleaning once or twice weekly, algae wiping 2-3 times weekly, deep clean with a blade to get the calcified algae once a week, dismantalling taps and returns to clear them every week, cleaning the weirs and strainers every week, dismantaling the inlet and outlet pipes for every tank every month or so, cleaning all the light trays every week, wiping the glass at least once a day (more on weekends when people seem unable to control their children and stop them licking tanks and pressing sticky greasy faces against the glass), medicating systems, water testing and many more things all needing to be recorded and written down too.
And customers always think they are the most important thing about an aquatic shop when generally... there are far more pressing jobs than one individual customer who takes forever and hums and hahs and cant decide and then whinges and doesnt listen to advise.
Everyone gripes and moans and feels all self righteous about things like this and yet no one knows the full story or what it is actually like trying to deal with all these millions of problems that add up to one huge headache.
Hopefully that gives you something to mull over!
