I worked at this location for 3 years. A majority of that time was spent in the specialty or pet care department (fish, birds, small animals and reptiles) When I started, the environment itself was awesome, and when I say environment I mean the management system, staff and how the store was run etc. Right in the middle it began to steadily go downhill. As a employee it was not fun, but customers do not notice these kinds of things or understand them thankfully.
However I can say PetSmart is overall a good company. They do care about their animals. I was taught a fair bit of knowledge, but a majority of the information I would tell customers came from my own personal research from books, reputable breeders and certain sites on the internet. I can honestly say employees at that location are legit knowleagable and are not making things up to sell something. PetSmart is not PJs, they are not about the sale, and I was told many times that refusing a sale is encouraged if you do not like the feeling you are getting about a customer. We were encouraged to actually properly care for the animals and educate clients properly, and if they wanted to buy that animal fine, but there was no such thing as "tell me about this animal in 5 minutes or less".
The only thing was, there was never enough staff on. All it took was a noob customer to come in and if there was only one employee on, they are stuck with this idiot customer, while other customers start piling up who may already know what they want. Also at night, being alone is very frustrating. It wasn't uncommon to be alone for 5 hours, and while it had its quiet moments, I had to close my section down - feeding some animals, replenishing water, cleaning the cricket bins and then there was the back of the store where petcare employees are also responsible for: the adoptable cats - cleaning out their cages, cleaning out litter, replenishing food and water, sweeping up and taking out the garbage, then what is called New Arrivals - all of the new animals stay here when they come from the breeders for a certain amount of time, so any feeding and cleaning is done there and then it was to Isolation - where ill or stressed animals stay. They receive medication, some are feed etc. This whole closing process can take over 2 hours when you are the only person in your department on shift. By the way, all sick animals are removed on the sales floor, taken to the vet immediately, given meds and treated appropriately in a quiet environment.
All of the animals sold, except fish do come from local canadian breeders and seperately. Reptiles come from one breeder, small birds and small animals come from another ie. PetSmart does not mass purchase a bunch of exotics from one place.
As a response to Dan W.: it is very possible for a pet store to have empty tanks! Pet stores do not breed all of their fish in the store and in fact it is very difficult to breed fish captively, hormones are often necessary. PetSmart doesn't carry hormones to encourage breeding for fish, and especially in winter, the supplier will often not come because it is extremely cold outside, and properly heating a truck with thousands of fish can be a bit tricky, so why come all that way and have 75% of the stock dead? Not worth it. Also I do remember when fish system was down and their tanks were empty. That system is accountable for over 5000 gallons, dont know how fish smart you are, but thats alot! If the system is down, that means fish aren't getting oxygen, their tanks are not filtrated and there is no heat, so that means rapid amounts of fish dying within a few hours.
If you would go to any PetSmart, I would reccomend this one. There is an employee there who has a bachelor of science and 13 years of fish experience. I understand you are not happy because you had to search all over for an employee, but because fish are the top selling item and there were none to sell, it was likely that the employee was doing something else more important than standing around waiting to tell you that the system had broken down. If you see empty tanks, its common sense to realize there are none for sale! either the store hasn't gotten a shipment yet, the shipment was not a good one, so they couldnt sell any fish, or Gee, maybe the fact that the whole department was silent due to the fact that the enitire system was off would clue someone in.
Oh and I don't work for PetSmart anymore, so save yourself the embarassment of going into this store and bitching at a manager because someone over the internet made you feel like a dipshit. read more