Tokis-Phoenix
^_^
Ok here goes;
My main lfs which is the only one in my town has been getting worse and worse over the last year. When the current owner(Andy) bought it he didn't know a thing about fish keeping, he used to ask me alot about things in fish keeping and i was glad to help him out as he seeme to listen. The fish species he kept were all the usual small growing ones like livebearers, danios, various tetra species, corys and bettas- he also sold angels, Chinese algae eaters, common/sailfin plecs and various coldwater fish and RTBS.
Move on a year and a bit and he is selling the shop because of an affair he had and he is leaving his wife and kids. This is apparently whats going but it looks like its going to be many months before this happens, if it ever does. Anyways....
Over the last year he is becoming a worse and worse lfs owner, they are always selling sick fish, fish that are completely unsuitable for community tanks, selling tropical fish like platys, guppys, mollys, silver dollors, tiger barbs, corys of various species and cichlids in the coldwater section for coldwater tanks. I live in England, coldwater tanks can drop below 19degrees here in the winter
....
His and his staffs advice to customers is terible- i mean i once asked a girl working there in the tropical section(knowing what they were of course) what these fish were, and she said she was only there to sell the fish despite the fish in question being labbelled "pearl danios" on the tank she was getting them from. She then started handing out terible adice to a customer in front of me who asked "how do you tell male and female guppys apart" and she said "the males have bigger tails". She aksed me 2weeks later how do you tell male and females guppys apart and i told her but despite that she got sacked a week later and another useless girl with no knolege was put in her place.
This is the same story in the whole shop, they are always selling fish to completely unsuitable customers with bad tanks. They used to have a girl there that told people how to cycle tanks but she got sacked. For a while i used to try and get a job there thinking that if i could share my knolege to the customers, they and the fish would be better off- anyhoo, i never got in...But theres a trend in the staff there- anybody who knows anything about fish always gets sacked.
To be honest im a shy person but recently i started plucking up the courage and speaking to customers who were about to buy bad fish, and eventualy to Andy face to face.
It started when a guy came in asking for another male betta explaining the previous male betta had killed his old male when he put in the same tank. The lady was about to sell him another male but i spoke up and explained to him about bettas and managed to persude not to buy anymore male or female bettas for his 40gal tank with 12 bala sharks, 1 clown loach and a RTBS.
I stayed there a bit and managed to stop the sale of 12 male guppys, 7 platys 4 RTBS, 3 koi karp(for a 10gal tank
!) and some african cichlids for a 10gal guppy tank- i finally left when the staff started giving me serious evil eyes.
I want to help more, but....I don't know what else i can do. I don't often get to go to my lfs, but pretty much every other lfs i know of is just as bad as this one. I feel very helpless. The other day they had a male betta with dropsy, finrot and mouth rot- his fins were so damaged and short i thought he was a female betta at first. I told Andy to euthanise him and explained why and he said yes, only to come back 2days later and the fish was still up for sale.
My lfs doesn't have a quarentine tank and they don't shut tanks off for sale when they do get deseased so practically every fish there has got some sort of illness/desease.
They don't buy very good quality fish either, particualy the livebearers- they get about 50 guppys in a week for example from the kind of stock that was too inbred or deseased to sell and get bought by my lfs at a "special price"- i once saw one of these arivals and they had 50 guppys in a bag that must of only been about 10inchs wide and half of them had finrot or some other sort of desease...
I tried persuading Andy to sell some other sort of plec other than common and sailfin plecs, like bristlenoses for example, as they don't even sell tanks over 40gals and he just said the commons and sailfins were cheap and if they got anything more expensive nobody would buy them apparently....
Is anyone else in this sort of situation?
Is there anything else i can do?
I feel so helpless at the mo....
My main lfs which is the only one in my town has been getting worse and worse over the last year. When the current owner(Andy) bought it he didn't know a thing about fish keeping, he used to ask me alot about things in fish keeping and i was glad to help him out as he seeme to listen. The fish species he kept were all the usual small growing ones like livebearers, danios, various tetra species, corys and bettas- he also sold angels, Chinese algae eaters, common/sailfin plecs and various coldwater fish and RTBS.
Move on a year and a bit and he is selling the shop because of an affair he had and he is leaving his wife and kids. This is apparently whats going but it looks like its going to be many months before this happens, if it ever does. Anyways....
Over the last year he is becoming a worse and worse lfs owner, they are always selling sick fish, fish that are completely unsuitable for community tanks, selling tropical fish like platys, guppys, mollys, silver dollors, tiger barbs, corys of various species and cichlids in the coldwater section for coldwater tanks. I live in England, coldwater tanks can drop below 19degrees here in the winter
.... His and his staffs advice to customers is terible- i mean i once asked a girl working there in the tropical section(knowing what they were of course) what these fish were, and she said she was only there to sell the fish despite the fish in question being labbelled "pearl danios" on the tank she was getting them from. She then started handing out terible adice to a customer in front of me who asked "how do you tell male and female guppys apart" and she said "the males have bigger tails". She aksed me 2weeks later how do you tell male and females guppys apart and i told her but despite that she got sacked a week later and another useless girl with no knolege was put in her place.
This is the same story in the whole shop, they are always selling fish to completely unsuitable customers with bad tanks. They used to have a girl there that told people how to cycle tanks but she got sacked. For a while i used to try and get a job there thinking that if i could share my knolege to the customers, they and the fish would be better off- anyhoo, i never got in...But theres a trend in the staff there- anybody who knows anything about fish always gets sacked.
To be honest im a shy person but recently i started plucking up the courage and speaking to customers who were about to buy bad fish, and eventualy to Andy face to face.
It started when a guy came in asking for another male betta explaining the previous male betta had killed his old male when he put in the same tank. The lady was about to sell him another male but i spoke up and explained to him about bettas and managed to persude not to buy anymore male or female bettas for his 40gal tank with 12 bala sharks, 1 clown loach and a RTBS.
I stayed there a bit and managed to stop the sale of 12 male guppys, 7 platys 4 RTBS, 3 koi karp(for a 10gal tank
!) and some african cichlids for a 10gal guppy tank- i finally left when the staff started giving me serious evil eyes. I want to help more, but....I don't know what else i can do. I don't often get to go to my lfs, but pretty much every other lfs i know of is just as bad as this one. I feel very helpless. The other day they had a male betta with dropsy, finrot and mouth rot- his fins were so damaged and short i thought he was a female betta at first. I told Andy to euthanise him and explained why and he said yes, only to come back 2days later and the fish was still up for sale.
My lfs doesn't have a quarentine tank and they don't shut tanks off for sale when they do get deseased so practically every fish there has got some sort of illness/desease.
They don't buy very good quality fish either, particualy the livebearers- they get about 50 guppys in a week for example from the kind of stock that was too inbred or deseased to sell and get bought by my lfs at a "special price"- i once saw one of these arivals and they had 50 guppys in a bag that must of only been about 10inchs wide and half of them had finrot or some other sort of desease...
I tried persuading Andy to sell some other sort of plec other than common and sailfin plecs, like bristlenoses for example, as they don't even sell tanks over 40gals and he just said the commons and sailfins were cheap and if they got anything more expensive nobody would buy them apparently....
Is anyone else in this sort of situation?
Is there anything else i can do?
I feel so helpless at the mo....
Maybe take a pad of post it notes with you and a pen, scribble out notes and stick them on tanks. Or take a clipboard and a piece of paper in, right all the bad things you see and hear and tell them you're sending a copy to whoever licenses petshops and the spca or whatever you have.
