The thing that I'm always curious about is that these chains are businesses, they're in it to make money (just like any other pet store). But the fact that they loose so many of their fish before they sell them makes you think that if they invested in a better system they would make much more profit.
Am I the only one that sees this as a viable option for these chains?
Speaking as an employee who has worked at several small, private LFS's in multiple locations over the years, I can honestly say with the advent of transshipping and wholesalers providing fish from overseas for pennies on the dollar to local, hobbyist-bred fish, the fish themselves are NOT the high ticket item they used to be. MUCH more money is made on supplies than on fish, these days. Now, only a few very expensive, hard to breed or wild-caught only fish really earn a store a sizeable profit (and these are the fish that the "big boxes" don't usually ever get.) Wholesalers make money on fish, most stores don't.
Take an average fish, say a common "rainbow platy", a fish that usually retails for roughly $1.99 USD. The wholesaler may order 1,000 of them and pay about 3 cents each--30 bucks. Say it's a particularly bad shipment and only half of them survive shipping, so they've essentially paid 6 cents a fish.
They turn around and sell these fish to stores--both LFS and "big box" stores--at about $.65 each. That's over 10 times markup. They only need to sell about *45* of their surviving 500 platies to make back their investment, and if they sell them all in that single week (nearly guaranteed) they'll make
$295 on that one BAD order of platies alone. Because the fish move so fast from a wholesaler, they have relatively few costs associated with feeding any individual fish, they very rarely medicate common/inexpensive fish, etc. If more survive, they will make even more money on the order--and wholesalers do NOT adjust their prices to retailers based on the survival rate. A rainbow platy will cost that store $.65 if 50% of that week's shipment survived to the wholesalers, or if it was a 90% survival rate week for them.
The average LFS may buy 10 of one color variety of platy any given week, so their rainbow platies that week are going to cost them $6.50. Local shipping by truck is less risky than overseas shipping, so they may lose 2 of the 10 within the first 24 hours. So they've paid, essentially, $.82 a fish.
Customers *expect* rainbow platies to sell for $1.99 and will generally refuse to buy them if they're signifigantly more expensive, so that is where the store will almost surely price them. From their $.82/fish cost, this turns into roughly a 2.5x markup. If they sell all their rainbow platies with no more casualties, they'll have made a grand whopping
$9.36. Add in the fact that it takes stores much longer to move fish--it may take 3 weeks to sell all those rainbow platies--and that a good store will medicate them if they get sick, feed them their entire stay, etc, and the profit drops even lower.
So honestly it's not worth the thousands of dollars it would cost to upgrade a system just to increase survival rate a bit, for a LFS OR a "big box" store. The money is much better invested in more and more varied dry goods, which are generally bought directly from manufacturers, marked up much less from the soruce to the retailers, and don't die or consume resources to maintain.
I will add one comment on the frequency of dead fish in a "big box" vs. LFS--generally, all the big box stores, and even Walmart, etc, have all their tanks on 1-4 main filtration systems that handle a large number of tanks each, while a lot of LFS's, especially the older ones that were built in the era of the undergravel filter, have each tank on a seperate filter. With wholesalers and transshippers, disease in incoming fish is a LOT more rampant than it was when LFS's mostly bought from hobbyists. So if we get one species that comes in with ich or dropsy, we may lose 2/3 of the individuals of 3 species of fish (the average number per a single tank), and while that hurts financially, it's not a death sentance. We also can treat that single tank, not sell from it, and hope for some recovery. When one species of fish gets into a "big box" chain tank, it can easily and quickly infect that ENTIRE pump system and spread to a good 20 or 30 tanks, 60 or 80 varieties of fish, and the only way to treat it would be to treat that entire system, and it's a serious fiscal blow to not be able to sell, oh, ANY community fish at all until the problem is gone.
I think it depends on the people working there. You can get great employees that know what they are talking about or those who have no clue. I once overheard an employee tell this woman that gouramis don't mind water 95-100 degree water. 
So yeah. Depends on the employees. Dead fish floating in the tanks is a good sign they aren't well taken care of.
