My discovery of places not to go.

[commanderdoom21]

A safe place to puchase fish is at Petsmart, at a clean Local Pet Shop, and at a clean Local Fish Store.

A bad place to by fish is wal mart of special discount stores similar to it.

Anyone agree?

 

[commanderdoom21]

oh woops. I meant to post this somewhere else.

 

[MAM]

that seems to be the general consensus around here. unfortunately, most non specialty retail chain stores mean well, but they just don't have the means to hire people who actually know something about the proper care of fish. your chances of bringing home diseases to your tank are much higher with stores that don't specialize in pet or especially in fish care such as most retail chain stores.
always take a good look at the water and the fish of the tank in any fish store before you buy, because sometimes, even the best places have some bad tanks that go unnoticed at times.

 

[OscarCichlid]

well i dunno my wal mart is pretty good. I bought a paradise gourami there and it was very healthy for a long time. Until i bought a pl*co at my lfs. It had ich and i didnt know it and before the treatment could work he died. I have also bought dwarf gouramis and fancy tail guppies at wal mart and they are still healthy.

 

[commanderdoom21]

well i dunno my wal mart is pretty good. I bought a paradise gourami there and it was very healthy for a long time. Until i bought a pl*co at my lfs. It had ich and i didnt know it and before the treatment could work he died. I have also bought dwarf gouramis and fancy tail guppies at wal mart and they are still healthy.

My local Wal Mart SUCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!! The fish died after about 30 minutes after I bought them. Also, I should have known not to buy from a place who had tons of dead fish in their tanks.

 

[Mogo]

Personally, I only buy my fish from reputable LFS's. Wouldn't even consider buying a fish from a Superpet or Petsmart or whatever. Walmart is completely out of the question.

 

[lizard]

I think a lot depends on your local Wal-Mart/PetCo/PetsMart/etc. I would not buy fish from any of the above-mentioned stores in my area. Some people on this board have mentioned that the same stores in their areas have excellent looking tanks and fish. Depends on the manager/workers, I guess.

Personally, I don't like Wal-Mart and try to support them as little as possible (a difficult thing when one is a poor college student). I'd much rather support the LFS. Coincidentally, my LFS is the only place that I've found so far that has healthy fish and good looking tanks. I do still buy a lot of my fish supplies at Wal-Mart or similar places, mostly because of the money issue (I'm a college student, remember?), but also because Wal-Mart is three miles away from me and the LFS is almost an hour and a half away.

I'm off to get ready for a concert...

Pamela
aka Lizard