Rant, With A Twist!

[joecoral]

Following the countless threads from customers abusing LFS's for selling poor stock etc, I thought I would turn the thread genre on its head and rant about a customer.

Had someone come in the the weekend, he found a single dead fish in one of our koi vats, as well as one or two which were a bit iffy looking. Bare in mind first, that the koi in question are in a vat completely isolated from all the others, on their own filter system with a big sign saying "Quarantine, Not For Sale" clearly visible on the vat.
He was shouting and swearing and raving, we were going to be reported to the police/rspca/god knows who else, our fish were disgraceful apparently.
What is the problem like this?! What else does he expect a shop to do? Every single LFS in the country, bar none, including the best of them, either lose fish or have the occasional outbreak of disease, it cannot be helped!
Do these people think shops order in ill fish just s they can sell them to the unwitting public to make a quick profit?
God help the poor man if he ever went into some P@H stores, he'd probably have a massive coronary!

AAAAAaaaaaaaaaahhhh! I hate this part of the job!

 

[degsod]

I agree with you completely, there are good aquarium stores and then there are the bad ones. Our local P@H is very good and the one in Stockport is 10/10.

I must hve been to around 50 stores in the area and I can honestly say that most of them are very good.

 

[Inchworm]

What is the problem like this?! What else does he expect a shop to do? Every single LFS in the country, bar none, including the best of them, either lose fish or have the occasional outbreak of disease, it cannot be helped!

Of course it can't. There is loss of life at every step of the collection and distribution process. It's not at all unusual to see a delivery of fish come into a store in very rough condition. Some fish are likely to die at the lfs, and some will not make it out of quarantine, even under the best of circumstances, in their new owner's tanks. This is the reality of the fishkeeping hobby.

Of course, it's only sensible for an lfs owner to see that dead and dying fish are removed from the tanks promptly. Nobody wants to see that when they go to buy fish.

Unfortunately there are PETA freaks running around who will scream at anything they can find that is less than 100% perfect, if it involves an animal of any kind. It's usually best to just ignore them, IMO.

 

[joecoral]

The man wasn't even one of those PETA freaks, he was seemingly just looking to make a scene.
Normally I'm very hot on checking the tank and go around usualy every half hour or so, but unfortunately it happened to be very busy and I hadn't had opportunity to have a look for several hours

 

[rewlyn]

no the fishs health has nothing to do with a sale, if i walked into your building and seen that, i would go back to it due to you can see that the lfs at least has the smarts to quarintine them, id buy fishh at least

 

[tenohfive]

You get muppets in every walk of life, and some people do just want an argument. If you've calmly explained the situation to him, any reasonable person would accept that.

I do firmly believe that alot of LFS' shoot themselves in the foot by not doing more tank maintenance though. I understand that at times LFS' get busy, but I've been in a number where staff have been standing around having a laugh amongst themselves whilst theres dirty tanks and dead fish floating about.

My biggest beef with LFS' is with the bad advice given out. The best place I shop at has a) top quality fish and b) the staff admit when they don't know the answer to a question, and offer to get hold of whoever works there that does know about (for instance) SA cichlids. Its rare that I ask them as 90% of my purchases are preplanned (and thus researched) but an honest answer is always better than a best guess. Especially when its tempered by the offer to find out whats needed.