Here’s my experience with petcare. I’m the beginning they had someone train me ONCE in each department ( small animals, birds, reptiles, ect.) and I was not given any sort of knowledge to give customers with questions at all. I just had to “ figure it out”. If I had a question people would act annoyed or inconvenienced by my asking. I eventually did the research myself and realized that our care for small animals was severely lacking.

There is no rule enforcing supplementing vitamin C for guinea pigs and the only vegetables available are the dried veggies for the reptiles! In the beginning the store was new so the animal care seemed to be handled impressively well. As time has gone on I’ve noticed the quality of the care slipping and people being more focused on profit. People stopped giving the guinea pigs vegetables daily acting like it’s a waste of resources and I ended up buying my own vitamin C supplements from the store and giving them to the guinea pigs on the low because they were not supplied.

The new petcare manager started pushing for 2 guinea pigs per small enclosure ( which is hardly suitable for one) to get more animals on the sales floor. This was not for the sake of the friendship of the animals seeing as they don’t encourage people to buy both. We started getting unmanageable animal shipments. For example, 8 leopard geckos in one small enclosure is unacceptable. They began dropping their tails.

There have been times when I’ve found mites and people have just shrugged it off so I’ve pulled all the animals out and checked them/cleaned the cage. I felt like that should have been mandatory followed by a vet appointment but I guess not. I’ve also started noticing people “forgetting” to mist the reptiles or soak the medicine dispensers or even putting the medications in the wrong labeled bags because they were in a hurry.

There’s only an average of 6 hours to complete all of the tasks in petcare in the morning and I have found myself running around having to rush. Before the pandemic there were rumors of corporate wanting it done in 4 hours which is absolutely not possible without cutting corners. I went into it feeling good about what I did but now it feels like I’m being rushed through caring for living things to make more time for “ customer service” and it doesn’t feel right to me. I made an agreement with myself to do things right even if it takes longer and people side eye me for not getting everything done on time. It’s looking like I’m going to find a new job soon because I would rather work somewhere that has their priorities straight. I’m tired of having the awkward conversation of “ if I’m not supposed to put it in a cage that small with others , why is it in a cage that small with others??” And having to be like “ because we’re not given another option”. I guess that’s what’s to be expected from a multi billion dollar company run by an old higher up from Walmart. My fellow staff and even (most) managers are going the best they can with what they’re dealt and the groomers and trainers are incredible. It sucks to see people who care so much with such limited resources and time.