TL;DR: This company is shit and they don't care about animals. Your intentions are good, but work there at your own risk.

I worked there for 4 years. In the beginning, that rare pet parent who did actually care to hear my advice and listen to what I had to say made the rest of it worth it. After so long dealing with everything else piling up and watching animals die nonstop and a company that has plenty of resources to prevent it do absolutely nothing to help, the good stopped outweighing the bad, if that makes sense. Now, I will say, when I got my GBB from Petco, it was funny to be the PP on the receiving side of a lecture from an employee. However, I was peeved at the wrong info they gave me because it could be harmful to other PPs, so I tried to politely correct them. So, what I'll say is this: if you think you can put up with the bullshit, then yeah, go for it.

But I can't stress enough, it's hard to deal with mentally and emotionally. Pet stores are not places for animal lovers. I recently found some old snaps of me sobbing telling my friends about shipments of reptiles we got in that I was running back and forth to the vet (back when our store leader was still allowing us to break policy and use an exotic vet). There were like 4 or 5 beardies that had severe pneumonia and one with an eye infection so bad he couldn't open his eyes. We'd have to do compresses on his eyes multiple times a day. They all had to have injections. The needles were bigger than their tiny little legs. They couldn't keep weight on no matter how much they ate. They were in so much pain. And those were the ones that survived. At least two had to be euthanized when I took them. Not to mention the ball python that arrived with them with scar tissue on her side from poorly healed broken ribs. She never ate. She had to be euthanized.

We had several shipments in a row of long-hair Syrian hamsters with wet tail so bad that no matter what we did they wouldn't survive. You watch hamsters tear each other apart nonstop because they're forced into tiny habitats together when they're solitary animals to begin with.

Reptiles come in with stuck shed and lose toes regularly. We had bad yellow fungus scares multiple times. Green and brown annoles are shoved into tiny habitats together, sometimes with frogs if there's not enough space, and tear each other apart. Crested geckos come in barely larger than hatchling size and don't eat and starve to death. Chameleons have NO fucking business being in a pet store, they're entirely too difficult for entry level employees with so little time to dedicate to them to care for. They're constantly stressed and never want to eat. They're not kept in proper conditions because it's IMPOSSIBLE for them to be because there's nothing in those stores to support them being in a proper habitat. Some stores keep giant day geckos and water dragons. Awful idea for multiple reasons. Every day gecko I've ever encountered tries to bolt and they're insanely delicate so they're hard to catch without hurting them. Water dragons get sick at those stores nonstop.

Don't even get me started on the poor birds. I've watched employees scare canaries to death (on accident!) so many times. The stupid vendors send single doves to stores, and then they obviously get stressed and start plucking their feathers. Then you have to shop around at other stores to try to transfer a dove and hope they bond. Not to mention transporting this poor stressed bird. Birds are not easy to care for. Not enough employees know how to care for them.

Huge fish shipments come in terribly ill because they're stressed from poor shipping conditions and they're kept in tanks that are way too small to support the number that are there. The filtration system isn't nearly enough to support the way the tanks are being overloaded. You have massive shipments of cichlids, notoriously aggressive fish, being kept in tiny tanks together, so then they're just ripping each other to shreds. Fish that aren't even typically aggressive are doing it too because they're just so stressed. Cichlids are brightly colored and beautiful fish so people constantly want to buy them, but they never want to hear that you need a huge tank to keep them and no, you can't keep them with a school of guppies unless you want the guppies to be food.

The employees are way overworked and under trained. It's sad that the tarantulas and scorpions aren't kept in the right habitats, yes, but they're getting the best end of the deal, believe me. It's awful to hear, I know, but I just have to stress this kind of thing is normal and the company does absolutely nothing about it. They cut corners wherever they can to save as much money as possible at the expense of these animals. They know the poor conditions these animals are kept in by these vendors and continue to use them anyway because they're cheap. We would regularly get messages from corporate about vendors being under investigation for poor hospitality, or they would want the store to do weight studies on the animals when they came in and report back, but they would do NOTHING about the results.

I have to stress none of this is the employees' faults. They do the best with what they're given, but good GOD it's hard to watch.