This was about 10 years ago.

Warning: this is a long story and involves animal cruelty

When I was in high school my parents convinced me to leave and get a job. I wanted to work with animals, but obviously had no experience so that meant retail work which meant pet shops.

Pet Shops are horrible, as I've come to learn. Boy howdy, do I have some horror stories.

Pet Shop workers are hired as retail assistants. We got paid the same as any other retail assistant despite the animal care aspect and most workers only had a rudimentary knowledge of animal care. I had more knowledge of animal care by studying it in my own time as a kid (ADHD hyperfocus is weird) than the floor manager that was directing me. We had no training at all.

The animals were 100% products in the worst way you can imagine. The worst was the fish. I have kept aquariums all my life and pretty much know the requirements of most aquarium fish. Again, none of the other staff including the store manager knew these things. every fish tank was hooked up to the same filtration system and they all shared the same water. This means that fish that liked more acidic water would be getting the same water as the fish that needed more alkaline water. Cold water fish were getting the tropical fishes heated water.

Fish deaths were common and there was no quarantine tank, so no way to medicate sick fish unless you wanted to medicate them all (again, shared water). Not that the store manager would let me waste money medicating them anyway. It was cheaper to let them die and just buy more.

They would sell goldfish to people who still thought they could live in a bowl. When I told customers that goldfish can get to the size of small guinea pig, require a filter and can live for 20 years, I would get in trouble for telling the truth about the 'product' and not just doing the sale. (Because obviously people think goldfish are easy to take care of so if you tell them they require 'this and that' some people get put off).

The puppies were kept in pens at the front of the store to lure customers. In the morning I had to arrive an hour before the shop opened and clean these pens, puppys poop a lot and the poor things were usually covered in shit by morning, so I'd bath them all. In order to clean the actual pen the rules were that I had to cram all the puppies into a tiny dog crate because they were unvaccinated and they didn't want them to catch parvo off the floor. This extra hour of shitty work was unpaid and didn't go on the roster.

We never knew where the puppies came from either. They'd buy them from anyone that just walked into the store wanting to sell their puppies. Lots of 'designer' breeds came in that I'm sure were from puppy mills. Sometimes the sellers didn't even know the crossbreed for the dog so the store manager would just make one up to sell them as.

I quit this job when the store manager told me that if I wanted to keep the job I'd have to take on more unpaid hours. This is illegal obviously, but at the time I was young and naive so I just quit instead.

Again, because I was young and naive I figured I'd get a job in a different pet shop because "They can't all be terrible, right? I just got a bad business I'm sure the next one will be fine!" Oh, you sweet summer lib.

They were all mostly the same. It shouldn't have taken three stores to convince me to find a new line of work but I guess I was young and stupid.

The last straw was the slow death of a lorikeet parrot. For those who don't know, rainbow lorikeets are one of the few parrots that eat nectar. They require special food. Not only that, the food must be fresh. Rainbow lorikeets are prone to gut infections from spoiled food. Well, the last store I worked in bought a rainbow lorikeet from some random dude who came in, but no one in the store knew how to care for it of course. I told them that it would probably die from infection if we didn't keep the cage clean and remove uneaten food after a couple of hours.

I didn't work weekends. I came back on Monday and sure enough, the store manager had told everyone to leave the same food for it all day to save money.

It ended up getting a stomach infection, I had to watch it slowly die. I offered to take it to the vet, they wouldn't let me.

Did you know some parrots have the intelligence of a three-year-old?

Yeah, I quit and found a new line of work.

Please, don't buy pets from pet stores, buy from a trusted breeder instead. (EDIT: Actually, adopting is probably more ethical as some breeders are bad too)

Anyway, I have lots of other dirt on this shitty business, AMA.