Working In A Pet Store

[guppymonkey]

I know a lot of people on here hate pet store employees and say that they don't know anything about fish and I was wondering how many of us have actually worked in a pet store. I have been working at a store for a couple years now and I have to say that I am EXTREMELY sympathetic to other pet store employees. Unless you work at a pet store you really have no idea how hard it is. For some reason a lot of people refuse to read about how to take care of their fish and instead just buy a tank and throw some stuff in it and thats it. Its pretty rare to have a customer that asks questions about fish that they are not familar with or if they are overstocked. At my store our policy is to try to make sure that people don't go home with inappropriate fish, either size or temperment-wise for their tank. When I ask people about their tank (what size it is, how long it has been established and what kinds of fish they have in there) I usually get one of two responses: Its about this big (waving their hands to indicate a tank somewhere between 2 and 50 gallons) and that it has some bright fish and a sucker fish. Then they say that they want something with color (which makes no sense to me since all fish have color on them of some sort). These people then invariably then point out every fish that has a bad reputation (oscars, tiger barbs, buenos aires tetras for example) and then want to keep them with goldfish and angelfish and get offended when I tell them that its not going to work out too well and that I can't guarantee that if they buy those fish they will make it through the night and won't replace them if they die. All customers aren't like this but a very very large percentage of customers are (and not just in my store I see it in every pet store that I check out and I go into every pet store I see).

After having that happen a few dozen times it gets very very frustrating as an employee and as a person who hates to see animals (especially my little fish!) mistreated. I can totally understand these pet store employees that just go along with whatever the customer wants, its a lot easier than having the customer start an argument because they have always done something a certain way. I am not condoning the behavior or saying that some pet store employees are not dumb about fish. I am just saying I can definately understand where they are coming from!

 

[Talz]

In my experiance pet store employes are usally not all that helpfull. Example: One time I was asking this lady about honey Gouramis and her reply was this: Points to the tank "they are those ones in there". I was asking about what type of water they needed, how they would do in a community setup etc I hear alot of people get this crap from pet store people. I still understand what your saying though but its hard for me to realate as I havent ever worked in a pet store