What I think is really horrible about this, is that when the pet store is displaying their animals like this, they're mis-educating their customers (particularly those with little experience in keeping herps) that it's OK to take them home and provide them the very same accomodations. New snake owners might take their pets home and think that it's perfectly fine for their animals to have flakey shedding, or shed that's stuck to their new lizard's toes is acceptable. After all, that's how they were at the pet store.
And you can't expect the store clerk to say to the customer, "Now, you do realize that you should treat the animals better than we do. In fact, we treat them rather poorly, but that's understandable since we have so many! You should never see your snake shedding as poorly as ours shed, and you shouldn't let weeks worth of feces pile up in the tanks like we do. Now, enjoy your new pet."
That's not going to happen, and unless the pet owner puts him or herself in the animal's uh... shoes, then they might not treat the animals any better than they were treated at the store. That's a shame, and stores like this propogate such atrocities.
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