If you want to pay through the nose for a sick animal, support puppy mills, wait around for the one cashier to wait on you, and be nagged by an overzealous employee, then this is the place for you.
The one good thing about this place is that it's always fun to go in and play with the ferrets, hamsters, birds, lizards, fish and other small animals that are right there and accessible to you. There's even a giant turtle that roams around the store free, or rather sits in the corner. So we use this place as a fun outing when we're bored. But...
I saw a lot of video evidence on tv that Petland buys their puppies from abusive, neglectful breeders who keep their dogs in deplorable conditions. They also have a reputation for selling animals that come sick and tend to die on you or cause you a lot of medical bills. All this for incredibly exorbitant prices. If you do some research you'll see there are lawsuits and a lot of complaints about them. I accidentally searched for them in Cinncinatti and a lot of them are out of business.
To be fair, Petland stores are franchise owned, according to an employee, so there's no guarantee that they all buy from disreputable breeders. But there were more than a few in the video I saw and we did get a sick hamster from them. You may well be safe getting a puppy from there, and there may only be a small number of sick animals coming from abusive breeders. But I would rather not take that chance and I certainly don't want to profit puppy mills.
We paid over $20 for a little hamster. The kid that works in there, who is always trying to sell us stuff and impart his questionable knowledge on us, tried to sell her some dry tail medicine for the hamster. He said when you put two hamsters together they get sick and die if you don't have this medicine. My girlfriend has had dozens of hamsters for years and has never had one get sick ever and has never heard of this condition. When we took the hamster home, it did get sick as he predicted but not the hamster we already had. So my suspicion is that these are sick hamsters and they know it so they tell employees to push this medicine on people. We thought he was just trying to upsell us so we didn't get it and ended up having to go back for it. He told us by the time we noticed the hamster was sick it would be too late but we got the medicine and the hamster got better.
Meanwhile, the few times we have actually bought stuff in here, we had to wait for a cashier. Then one time they charged us full price for a clearance item and we had to wait 15 minutes for somebody to refund the money. This is because of all the employees in there, only one was permitted to operate the register and/or give out refunds. There were two employees milling around after closing and yet we had to wait. The nagging employee was apologetic but what is the sense in this?
So we're pretty sure we aren't going to buy any animals from there but it is still fun sometimes to go in there and play and look at the hot girl that works in there. read more