You think your petco is bad, well at mine you are guaranteed a sick fish if it is not already dead in their tank. The coral are all shriveled up. The conditions they keep them in its awful.
It's not really their fault, not the people in the store anyway... I've done a lot of retail management in my life while going to school, then when I dropped out to care for my sick dad, then going back to school, etc. Anyway, I was an ASM at Best Buy, and got laid off at the end of 2008 (yay, recession), and the first thing that came along, which took six months, was a GM position at Petco. I was there for about a year and a half, and it was one of the worst companies I've ever worked for. The people were great, and my staff worked their hearts out, especially when it came to animal care, including fish. But there was zero support. There were never enough hours allocated to begin with, and they were constantly being cut. Equipment upgrades and additions were a non-starter. Store-use budget was something like $300 a month (for the whole store), which is nothing. I remember working 80 hour weeks, going a month at a time without a day off (while making a whopping $45k, as a GM) just to keep the place going, and make sure that the animals and fish were cared for. I even used to pay out of my own pocket, after a "generous" 10% employee discount, to buy supplements, extra carbon, crap like that, just to keep the systems from crashing.
I don't know what's changed in the past decade, they do seem to be doing a little better now, but not by much, as far as I can tell. But I'm sure a lot of the employees at the store, especially the aquatics specialists, try their very best, and really do care. Only so much they can do though.
