I completely agree with the post of 6-5-08, "Where Animals Come First." What a crock.
As a former manager, I realized during training that Petco did not care about the health and welfare of the birds, small animals, reptiles, and fish carried in the store.
My training consisted of 8 weeks of doing stock and planograms in a rat-infested store. We were not taught the fundamentals of how to care for anything at any time, and their concept of "the wellness room" is a cruel joke. The "wellness" room is basically an out-of-the-way area, not available to customers, where they put every living creature that is sick, oftentimes never taking them to the vet because it is "too expensive."
I was then sent to a store where, thank God, I had a staff that could train me on the basics of caring for everything in the store. It was a dedicated staff that went above and beyond, fighting a losing battle against the overly high mortality rate, because the majority of the animals, fish, birds and reptiles were poorly bred and sick to begin with.
Many, many times we received hamsters with wet tail and respiratory infections, and fish that were already so stressed from sitting on a dock for 80 hours that they had a variety of conditions that most times led to euthanasia.
Didn't know that, did you? Locked in the safe of every Petco there is a bottle of deadly poison used for euthanasia. Then in the "wellness" room there is a standing freezer where the bodies of everything that dies get tossed.
I made it an entire 6 months with the company. You haven't lived as a retail manager until you talk to one of your associates who held a baby sun conure in her hand while it died, because it was sent to us sick and there was nothing we could do. Trust me, everyone cried, because, bless all of THEM, no matter how few hours they were given, those associates did the best they could to save lives.
The store I managed was one of the few that could take our sick animals, birds and reptiles to the vet. Depending on the cost, if it was "worth" saving, we would be given the medication for whatever was sick and sent on our way.
Unfortunately, not everyone who works at Petco is vet-trained to administer shots or to use a syringe to inject medication into their mouths.
If the treatment was going to be too expensive, EUTHANASIA. There is actually a Petco-approved vet that all the stores use, whom the managers and staff nicknamed "DR. Death." This is primarily where we took reptiles and birds, never to see them again.
IT IS TRUE: the Petco stores are given no hours at all to cover their stores. The primary concern for the business is to get the freight out and keep the store stocked. After all, the exorbitant markup on food is where the money is, not at all in the living, breathing creatures that Petco loves to brag "Always Come First."
They only come first IF:
You have payroll, otherwise, skip it.
You have people, which you can't schedule as there is no payroll, so skip it.
The freight is done, which is a never-ending flow that is so ill shipped you never get caught up, so skip it.
I am so sick of corporate America being able to put up this squeaky clean image of helping animals through "Adoptions" and "The Petco Foundation." They can throw out numbers all day, and yes, it is great that cats and dogs find homes every weekend, but what about everyone and everything else that lives short, tortured lives so that Petco can build a ballpark in San Diego?
Even in California, where Petco's corporate office resides, there have been so many complaints against their locations that massive fines have been imposed, as well as strict charters created against Petco to ensure the health and welfare of their living creatures.
I guess I finally realized what a terrible job I had when I got fired and, being an idiot, agreed to work two weeks to get the store ready for a new manager. Each time someone from corporate visits your store, you are evaluated on a numbers system of 1-100 on the quality of the live care in your store. The Division person in charge of the health and welfare for all the Petco locations in the southeast gave the store a rating of 80. Then the division manager came in behind him and changed it to a 98 so the new manager checking in would look good in his first week. So much for accountability!
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