Petsmart?

[MarkL1561]

It's midnight, I don't feel like writing pages and pages of information. I'm just saying the point of retail is to make money. To do this they keep the stores on tight budgets that give the pet care managers nothing left to work with. In our store we don't have working temp/humidity strips and sick animals are never taken to the vet. Also we were out of night bulbs for our reptiles and were told that we couldn't get any so I had to buy them myself.

[JPR]

Yep, I've had the same issues. The company really doesn't care about the animals at all. It really bothers me but its the only pet store/employer around me. It'll be nice to finally get my degree and get out of retail.

I disagree. I have seen my local petsmart dish out many hundreds of dollars in vet bills to try to save a bearded dragon with yellow fungus.

Even from a cold, calculating, retail point of view, losing product and reputation is a lose-lose situation.

[MarkL1561]

I'm sure it depends on the store. I'm not saying they're horrible, just not up to par with privately owned shops is all. There's no passion in large chains.

[Lizardlicks]

I wonder if it come down less from corporate and more from regional or store management? Say, if corporate is coming down on the person running things on budget for stuff like, I dunno, losses or some such, and the manager(s) decides to make it up by slashing other areas, including budget for extra care costs. Out of curiosity, for anyone working at these stores, have you tried going over the heads of your immediate bosses to see what would happen? If you did, was the reply still from a regional manager or were you able to get in contact with a corporate rep and air your grievances?

[anicatgirl]

It's midnight, I don't feel like writing pages and pages of information. I'm just saying the point of retail is to make money. To do this they keep the stores on tight budgets that give the pet care managers nothing left to work with. In our store we don't have working temp/humidity strips and sick animals are never taken to the vet. Also we were out of night bulbs for our reptiles and were told that we couldn't get any so I had to buy them myself.

This is ridiculous....... I understand that not all places are alike, but that any are like this is still a travesty and makes me sad and angry...

[Joe balls]

I disagree. I have seen my local petsmart dish out many hundreds of dollars in vet bills to try to save a bearded dragon with yellow fungus.

Even from a cold, calculating, retail point of view, losing product and reputation is a lose-lose situation.

If it's a Lose lose they will chose the bottom line over the animal, your not dealing with a person with compassion,it's a company and the very few outstanding people they employ that are sharing a differant view here unfortunately are the exception and not the majority.

[Eric Alan]

I'm sure it depends on the store. I'm not saying they're horrible, just not up to par with privately owned shops is all. There's no passion in large chains.

Privately owned has zero to do with it. Petco is privately owned. PetSmart started as privately owned and is going through a sale right now to become privately owned again. There are plenty of smaller mom & pop shops that have their share of problems too.

When you get down to the root cause, this has almost nothing to do with the name above their front door and everything to do with the people working inside the building. Quit trying to blame "the man" when you, and others, have shown that "a man" with passion can make all the difference in the world. It's not like employees need to break policy to take good care of the animals in their store - they just need to care enough to be good at their job. Is that asking too much?

[JPR]

If it's a Lose lose they will chose the bottom line over the animal, your not dealing with a person with compassion,it's a company and the very few outstanding people they employ that are sharing a differant view here unfortunately are the exception and not the majority.

Did you even read the rest of that post? Bottom line = spending hundreds of dollars on one animal that can be sold for 70 dollars is not cost effective. And yet...

Actually, when I think about it, I would say the vast majority of people wouldn't pay hundreds of dollars for a beardie. Even if it's their own pet.

[DVirginiana]

I think the biggest thing they could do to improve the animals' care is just taking the time to make sure the employees know how to care for them. When we adopted my BP, I could tell the woman doing the adopting really cared and wanted her to go to a good home (she still asks about her whenever we go in there) but several things she said made it clear she didn't know a lot about snakes. Apparently she keeps fish though, and I've actually seen her basically tell someone 'no' when they wanted to buy a fish and put it in the wrong sort of environment. I think someone like that would take care of snakes/lizards/frogs well too if they had the knowledge to do so.

[Daigga]

As far as improvement in conditions go? I think petsmart specifically needs a bigger reptile display. The entire thing is pretty much a 4 foot wide by 6 foot tall display, with the snakes and chameleons on the top squeezed into tiny enclosures that are only a little bigger than a 5 gallon tank, usually with 2 or 3 animals sandwiched in. It's an endcap display converted to a caging system. It's not like they couldn't do bigger, the small mammal and bird sections are both more than twice the size of the live reptile section even though the total numbers of animals in each section is about the same. It isn't a huge change, and a store could use a large singular reptile display to a stunning advantage.

Imagine an elaborate reptile enclosure the size of the bird endcap, which is just a single cage? Some pretty tropical setup with some brightly colored chameleon or python would grab my attention without a doubt. Heck, even if you took one the size of the double small animal ends, a desert setup for beardies on top and a tropical setup for the water dragons on bottom? More room for the reptiles that could use it, and a stunning display to draw in attention and sales, win-win.

As far as husbandry errors go, it's really on the people on the floor to want to correct them. Me dad used to say "You can't teach want-to", and I think it applies in this situation.