Someone posted a thread on Reddit a couple days ago asking "Do you have any interesting stories from working in retail?" to which someone responded with this:
I worked at Petco for a year when I was first out of high school. Here are some things you may not know about Petco:
- The first chore of the morning, 2 hours before the store opens, is checking all the enclosures and aquariums for dead animals and removing them.
- I'm not talking about a quick glance. I'm talking about getting a big carton and a net and scooping the hundreds of dead fish into the carton. Sometimes half the fish would die overnight in the summer.
- Similarly, about half the hamsters from each shipment end up dead either before someone buys them or right after some little kid gets a hamster as a present, just in time to ruin their birthday.
- If you return a dead animal within 14 days, you can get a refund, but you have to bring the corpse in.
- All these little corpses are shoved in a giant chest freezer in the back room, the same room where sick animals are stuffed while they're "treated" (usually with the wrong medications and administered in the wrong way) until they die and go in the freezer too.
- Every couple weeks somebody has to clean out the freezer and drive the corpses to a veterinarian who can send them for incineration.
- Oh, and if a fish gets sick, you're not allowed to isolate it to prevent it from infecting the others. You have to let them all get sick and most die.
- Official store policy if an animal gets pregnant because of an accident or a broken enclosure is that it should be isolated in a back room until it delivers its litter and then the babies should be adopted out or put into inventory and sold. Unofficial policy at most stores is sell the pregnant animals for snake food first to avoid dealing with a litter.
- Official store policy if an animal is sick or injured is to take it to a veterinarian or have a veterinarian come to the store. Unofficial store policy, again, is sell it as snake food to save money.
- Official store policy is that any associate can refuse a sale if they don't feel the animal will get proper care (with the exception of "feeder" animals which are the two most intelligent and personable species sold, rats and mice, yet aren't deserving of the same protection somehow). Unofficial store policy is that any associate who refuses a sale will get verbally berated and possibly fired.
- Where do all these animals come from? I'm so glad you asked. At most Petco stores, they come from Rainbow Exotics, a giant warehouse whose CEO once bragged about his brilliant idea to control escapees by inviting stray cats into the warehouse to catch and eat them. They've been videotaped stomping on animals to kill them and holding down female rabbits while a male rapes them instead of letting them mate naturally. Yeah, it was PETA who taped all that, but having dealt with them in the past, I believe it's true. If you refuse to take a shipment because the animals are sick, the delivery person will go outside and kill them rather than waste time and money shipping them back to the warehouse.
Don't buy animals from chain pet stores. Please.
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