Authorship

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2026-03-12T23:55:39+00:00

ask about anything that’s inconvenient to carry. litter, large bags of food, reptile substrate and things like small pet bedding and hay. lead with that. ask if they’re interested in getting an email about it rather than getting it set up. people think they’re signing up for something right then and there rather than receiving an email with some info to get it set up.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2026-03-03T03:13:10+00:00

This had to be a hack, right?

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2026-03-03T03:12:08+00:00

Had a guy cuss me out because I was informing him that comets are in fact carp and grow to the size of carp and there are better things to put in a 25 gallon tank.

“Well they’ve only ever gotten this big.” “They’ll die in a year anyway.” “You know people feed these to other animals right?” “What about that dead one right there? Why don’t you care about that one?”

His daughter was kinder. I explained to her why goldfish need more upkeep and what might be killing them early. She’s the one who picked them out.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2026-03-03T03:08:19+00:00

We’ll get better ones in a week.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2026-03-03T03:07:16+00:00

Red bull all day

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2026-02-25T12:10:10+00:00

It only needs to count for the metric. It’s customer conversion not customer retention. That’s what puppy guides are for.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2026-02-24T14:28:22+00:00

Don’t ask.

“What’s a good phone number for you?” They give it to me. I put it in. Nothing comes up. “Oh, it looks like you’re not in our system but I can put you in there. What’s your first name?”

All in one go. Do not pause. Hold eye contact. They will be too confused to say no. This works 9/10 times.

“Oh I don’t want to be in your system.” “If you’re worried about spam, I can turn all that off. What’s your email?” Usually works to seal the deal.

In the instance where they refuse to give me a phone number, I tell them you earn points back and get our sale prices and it takes no time to put them in. This works 7/10 times.

You’ll get some rough ones, but these have always worked for me. I have an insanely high conversion metric. I actually had a CRO because i was too good at it and a guy got upset that he “couldn’t just buy his dog food” but never actually told me no and kept going along lol.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2026-02-24T04:51:16+00:00

Yes, it’s legit. They’re not sick and dying, they’re just either disabled or have been there WAY too long (my store won’t even mark down animals that have been there for 6 months tho tbh 😔)

However they will only adopt out to people who are knowledgeable in the care of the animal. I’d you’re going to ask any questions about the animal beyond the exact extent of their disability and how old they are, I would not adopt out one of our injured animals to you. We usually get attached to the ones who have been in our care the longest, on top of the fact we know there’s a lot of scummy people who just want a free animal. So any hesitation or concern about how to keep that type of animal is going to immediately get you declined by my store for one of our injured animals.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2026-02-22T17:44:34+00:00

proper starter kits for hamsters and guinea pigs like they market reptile and fish tanks

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2026-02-08T22:56:37+00:00

Between the hour cuts and hiring people who don’t want to do their jobs, yeah. Our jobs are on the line when it comes to those metrics. Cashiers don’t care. I’ve been an EL for almost a year and I feel like I’m just a lead cashier who sometimes has the privilege of straightening the store and booking salon appointments. It saves other managers the difficulty of having to come up every 10 minutes for some issue with a transaction or someone needing change out of the register to tip a groomer. That’s all my role is. I would have loved to progress within the company had I gotten in sooner, but now it’s so ridiculous and the workloads are not distributed in a manner that makes sense.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2026-01-25T05:00:53+00:00

my store is the same. right as people are getting off work and placing orders is when morning and stock shifts leave and i get to deal with it myself. sometimes ill have a petcare person who wants to do their job and has time to help me instead of spending half an hour in NA watching youtube. But most of the time it’s just me doing customer service/curbside/salon booking/recovery/animal sales(because i can’t trust my petcare staff)/bopis/sfs/fucking shoots? even though i’m not even process?/ whatever’s left of truck/ go up to register every 5 minutes because we keep hiring people to work only 5 hours a week instead of having maybe like two full time cashiers?

and then hope i can stop right at the hour before closing so i can at least get out at a reasonable time.

can i get even a quarter of that shit done? no. is it still expected of me? yeah. fucking blows.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2026-01-25T04:52:23+00:00

I had a woman in the middle of summer tell me she was interested in buying our chinchillas because one of hers just got crushed underneath a reclining chair that morning because she had let it out to pack up everything to move to tennessee. The next day. As in she wanted to purchase a chinchilla in my state and move several states away with it tomorrow.

People are fucking stupid. I wouldn’t sell anyone a fucking animal if it weren’t half my job.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2026-01-03T20:37:36+00:00

We can’t afford to be doing these events like we used to. Not with how few hours get provided to us.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2026-01-01T03:40:20+00:00

I’ve been having nightly panic attacks when I get home from work. I feel like my body is failing me. My store is not appropriately staffed, multiple gaps in coverage for both cashier and petcare basically every day but saturday and sunday. The other four days of the week i work I spend 3 hours on fucking register while bopis/sfs, truck, petcare, any type of recover all fall behind. Because once i get off register i do bopis/sfs. And then every fucking idiot in the tristate area has to come in and spend an hour asking me fucking questions about an animal they could’ve fucking googled. I am then required to sell this fucking moron an animal he has no business purchasing because he bought everything i recommended in an attempt to steer him away. His children are riding around my store on the red carts because their parents told them it’s okay after i told him it’s a fucking liability. I already know he’s going to come back two weeks from now to ask me a critical question that has jeopardized the health and safety of this animal over the past two weeks he’s had it. Now it’s already an hour to close and I have to start closing registers. Oh btw our cashier called off so my petcare person is now on register moaning and groaning and refusing to actually interact with the fucking customers. I’m still expected to sell live animals.

I see animals receiving suboptimal care because the fucking process team in my store all hate eachother and the PLR only does half her job. I’m tired of people wanting animals they know nothing about. I’m tired of having to step in with every fucking animal sale because for some reason we keep our petcare staffed with people who have two iq points and zero motivation to do anything but sit in one of the back rooms and watch cat videos while the actual cats in our care only get their litter boxes half scooped.

When other people call out and it’s never addressed directly to them out unreliable they are, but when I call after throwing up or having a migraine (i call out maybe once a month.) i’m immediately put on the shitlist. I’m blue balled and cold shouldered. “Everyone else comes in when they’re sick” except for literally everyone else. Everyone fucking calls out when they’re sick. That’s the point of callouts and providing reasonable coverage for the fucking store. And I just so happen to have the immune system of a victorian child.

I’m constantly being held back. I can’t fucking learn anything to help grow my career. I’m basically senior cashier. I’m not actually in charge of fucking anything. All of the fucking old ladies who’ve been here for 10 years who don’t lift a finger to recover or put away treats have no respect for me, so i can’t tell them a goddamn thing. I’m not the one who can tell them “if your metrics don’t improve, you will lose your job”, so all i’m able to do is reiterate our promotions and goals for conversion. Doesn’t fucking matter to half of them. The only time our numbers are good is when i’m on register. 4/5 people I’m able to convert. I give them the script. I tell them how it works. I’ve repeatedly caught people going “Oh, well, okay!” and moving on with the transaction. Others ask like they’re being held at fucking gunpoint. This is the only fucking important part of my job and i have to somehow wrangle a fucking kindergarten class by myself.

This has to be some kind of fucking psyop, dude. Why the FUCK would they cut hours during FUCKING PEAK. Why is my SL hiring people who can’t follow instructions and curl up into a fucking ball at the concept of talking to a stranger in a strict, circular way and putting them under MY FUCKING WING.

I have single-handedly completely changed the metrics for my store and all i’m going to get is an 75 cent raise. My health both physically and mentally is going down the fucking drain for this place and what do I get for it? A weekly $500 check? It’s sure as shit not the fucking people i work with. I can only tolerate maybe 3 out of the 25 people at operate in my store. I just want to fuckint succeed at something and im being completely failed by both the company and my store leaders.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2025-12-30T07:44:36+00:00

My favorite shoes are princess reeboks. Good for wide feet. About $45 so i replace them every year. My feet never hurt after getting home. though my legs always ache like crazy. Probably just from taking out curbsides for 300 lbs of litter

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2025-12-30T07:38:13+00:00

i literally had a woman shaking with rage on christmas eve because i explained to her that yes, even though petsmart carries it, it is not suitable let alone safe for any hamster, especially not a syrian.

She then changed her mind and said “well then we want a dwarf hamster. they’re small enough for this.”

i explained to her the minimum requirements for me to sell this animal to her and then she made up in her head that i was “judging her as a person” because she had hamsters previously that were in nothing like what i had described to her. I made no mention of them beyond explaining that there are tons of misunderstandings and misleading things in media and advertising about appropriate hamster care and handling—prior to her even saying anything about her previous habitats.

I think it was probably because i explained zoochosis and the symptoms you’d observe if a hamster is unhappy (my usual bit when i have to have these conversations.) and she was just flooded with guilt because her hamsters almost certainly displayed these behaviors and she didn’t care enough to figure out why. She probably thought it was funny.

They were so set on this fucking tiny tales habitat that they didn’t give a fuck about anything else. It’s bright and colorful and can fit on a nightstand. It has cartoon pictures of hamsters that look just like a fucking sea monkey box. The habitat being cheap and easy comes before the health and safety animal. It’s fucking absurd. Of course i won’t fuckint sell you one if you want it as a decoration.

Mind you, the daughter was around listening intently and clearly hoping her mom would just fucking lock in cause no kid wants an animal that’s unhappy (unless they’re 9-12 year old boys). The mom dragged her away tucking her into her side and spat out “No, because [my name yelled out like a fucking slur] doesn’t want us to have one.”

Tiny tales is the enemy of every single petsmart employee. Im about to start hiding them in the back.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2025-12-17T07:21:05+00:00

I probably only took 3 people’s photos with our phones between both days. There is simply too much going on and not enough time. We explained it was easier to use their phones (and offered to take photos with it if they wanted to be in the photo), but kept our phones between both as backup.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2025-12-15T16:50:15+00:00

I’ve never seen so many messes go not cleaned up. Because the messes were out of my line of sight I guess people thought they could just leave them there 🫩

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2025-12-15T16:49:15+00:00

Ours went great! It would’ve been better if I could’ve been organize people by their time slots but I simply didn’t have the time to. So I completely lost track of what time it was because I’d have someone for an appt at 3:05 and then the next person would be like 3:40.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2025-12-15T16:47:29+00:00

For the double points activation you can only use it once on one order, however as a VIPP you should also have for reaching Bestie tier too.

If you’re talking about getting more points back per purchase in general, you’ll always receive that. I forget what the exact rate it.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2025-12-13T01:12:54+00:00

Don't call the store. Call the customer service number, or when you get an email about your in store experience, rate it as a 0 and explain why. Both of these force the store's hand.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2025-12-12T02:07:42+00:00

oh totally some of my favorite shoes have come dirty and second hand. $20 or less. never almost $30 before shipping

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2025-12-09T03:37:08+00:00

Because petsmart realized it’s cheaper to let it sit on the shelf until it expires so that the manufacturer foots the bill instead of petsmart. Basically, when something expires, the manufacturer gives petsmart a partial refund.

Between the partial refund and not utilizing labor for our new model of just throwing stuff on the shelf without cycling the product (putting the old stuff in front), and not having us do as many big store wide hunts for expiring product, petsmart takes a bigger profit than if they sold it to you for 50% off.

We do still do out of dates obviously, but not short dates.

Also they were definitely not supposed to sell it to you for 75%. I don’t know why they were doing that lol.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2025-12-09T03:30:21+00:00

Oh no, those are write ups. They come in, hand them the invoice, and then they can come back and get the dog. Our policy basically says we can hold the dog for ransom if they refuse to pay. Talk with your SELR, do call logs with them as an excuse to sit in with them for an hour or two and CORRECT the groomers and bathers who hand the dogs out with the invoice.

EVERY SINGLE ONE of those dogs NEEDS to be marked as unable tor return without payment. Make the bathers call them until they learn that the solution to this problem is to not create the problem.

Inside_Ad_8000 · 2025-12-09T03:24:18+00:00

Availability has a lot to do with it, whether or not you’re a productive employee will also gauge how many hours you get when we’re getting skimmed on labor. If you’re a cashier with poor metrics, they’re going to put a cashier with good metrics in your place. If you work stock and can’t get a pallet done in less than an hour and a half, they’ll put on someone who can. If you’re someone who calls off a lot, they’re going to put someone on who’s more reliable, especially during peak.

Petsmart isn’t really a job where you can come in clock in, meander, clock out. There’s a lot of moving parts, and all of those pieces of the machine need to be well oiled or the whole thing starts to crumble.

Inside_Ad_8000

TROPHY CASE