People keep on blowing on about how P@H are a franchise and so some are amazing. I worked for them for several months and frankly, the whole thing is run from the top. Every store has the same policies, procedures, training, etc. Sure, some are run by particularly shoddy managers and some have poor staff but you get that with any shop or any service in the world. My bone with P@H is the awful training, the arrogance the area/district management exhibits, the lack of information on the various species that exist (most people I worked with thought that knowing that you shouldn't keep a red-tailed and rainbow shark together made them experts) . . . I have so many horror stories from working there and I had to compromise my morals so many times on instruction from the area managers and other higher authorities in the company that I had to leave.
And that's before I get annoyed at the number of dead fish in tanks and gobby sales staff.
Frankly, if a P@H store is truly amazing it will be breaking every rule in the P@H handbook. Most seem OK because people don't stick around long enough to find out the nasties.
I would "rise above them" and stop harping on about P@H but when animals are dying daily as a result of their profit-mongering, I find it hard to keep calm.
It's hard to be told that you need to sell goldfish into 10 litre tanks "or else" and that a totally un-cycled tank with a ton of new fish requires no additional water changes and that if you advise customers to do even tri-weekly water changes on a tank with ammonia problems you are stepping right out of line. I've had disciplinary proceedures brought against me for fabricated complaints that clearly never happened and yet they didn't mind that I had to essentially spell suffering and death for dozens of fish a week because store and company policy required me to sell fish into pretty dire situations. Sure, they tick all the right boxes and tell you to bring your water in for testing and don't let you make massive, obvious mistakes but I know what the supplier is like and the fact that if you refuse to sell fish out of a bay that had a sick or dead fish in (as the company says you should), you'd effectively have to close the entire aquatics section. Every shipment had dozens of sick and dying fish, every tank had sickly fish, every day dozens would die from the main bays or isolation tanks (which doubled as disease treatment and new-fish quarentine tanks). Only one treatment was permitted at my store and it seems this happens all over. A super-strength whitespot treatment was used as a cure all for everything. No fish recieved decent remedial care even when something as simple as some different food or a salt bath could cure them. Hell, I rescued some newts from there who were literally being abused. Not just "not treated very well". They were living in water that has at least 2ppm of ammonia and nitrites, they had missing limbs from being put into water that was 7-10 degrees C too warm and they had been bought into the store on a whim. This is NOT an insolated incident.
Yes, I know a lot of my bugs where with what happened at my store but from the reaction I got from upper management when I complained, this stuff happens up and down the country, even in the very best stores. I was literally told to shut up and stop moaning or leave and take my "new fangled" opinions elsewhere. I don't know how many times I heard "there are many different opinions in fishkeeping", even when I was providing scientific evidence for why I was right and all they could do was say "our experts have made our policies and they are correct". Even the training literature had a "learn this and forget everything else and please keep your opinions at home" clause.
Obviously some stores will be good, especially if the manager has the balls to ignore some of the training stuff and policies. Plus every so often you find a real fishkeeper working there who knows about all the fish (or will help you research if they don't know), who can talk to you about plants with competence, can help you set up a variety of different systems and take you step by step through any kind of cycle you want to try, who knows about the various temperature, pH and hardness needs of many species (beyond "soft water", "hard water", "tropical" and "coldwater") and generally knows their shizz. Didn't have one of those working at my store. I was the baby there and yet still knew more on fishkeeping than everyone else, possibly put together.
So, I hate P@H. I only shop there in an emergency. Pity, really, as I made some friends there and it's the closest pet shop to me.
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