Pros
I've learned a lot about animals and fish. Pet Parents have offered to give me free animals, just because I would take care of them (getting a tarantula next week, free of charge). I've become more interested in reptiles. Every time our animals are sick, they generally go directly to the vet. They have always been accommodating to my school schedule.
Cons
(In no particular order) 1) Management. I've had one manager be regularly late for work by an hour (give or take) and nothing ever happens. This same manager is also known to spend over 40 hours a week doing paperwork in the office. If this were not bad enough, she also spends hours on the phone talking to her mother, who calls obnoxiously. 2) The Bettas. We are shipped TONS of bettas. They are disappearing from the shelves, but this is largely because they are sick or dead, not because they are selling. They are in small containers and often live there for months at a time--no wonder they die! Their natural environment is a rice field, which stretches for miles. Yes, it's a essentially a shallow puddle, and they can live in a very small body of water, but those tiny cups are just too small to keep them healthy and our customers think they can live in them. 3) The stupid customers. I've had customers ask me the stupidest questions, such as "are hamsters poisonous?" or "I can put this koi in a bowl right?" NO. Why would anyone think a hamster might be poisonous? And a koi gets 2 feet long in less than two years and their natural lifespan is 50+--NO IT CANNOT LIVE IN A BOWL. Fish do NOT grow to the size of the tank, and just because they live in water, does not mean they can all live together. 4) Management expects us to get 136 tanks of fish plus one large "pond" scrubbed to perfection and siphoned every week, yet there are only five people working part-time in the department, working with only one person on the clock pretty much all the time, and then we have the manager mentioned at #1, who obviously doesn't have the time to scrub the tanks. When they do not get finished, we are blamed for this. Furthermore, we are very often given large lists of stuff to do by the weekend, but it doesn't get done because there are so few people working, and the work is not divided evenly. 5) Once, there were only 2 people in Pet Care scheduled for an entire week. Enough said. 6) I once had to do all of fish shipment by myself, from checking in boxes, releasing fish, and feeding, and handling customer service. The stack of boxes was up to eye-level on me. This was a major scheduling error, and should not have occurred. 7) The computer makes our schedule, and the computer is not intelligent, and for some time, the Store Manager couldn't easily make changes to it. 8) No one ever tells me about any changes going on in the P&P's, so I often don't know for days or even weeks after. 9) One of my coworkers got fired for being an hour late. She regularly neglected to give the animals fresh food and water, only pretended to clean tanks, and slacked off constantly. For all the things they could have fired her for--being late!? 10) We used to be able to refuse to sell people animals if we knew they were going to be used as feeder mice etc (petsmart doesn't endorse live prey), but we can't anymore. We need to reinstate that we can refuse service; feeding a snake a hamster isn't good for the snake, and some child would have wanted that animal as a pet. Furthermore, I've been forced to sell hamsters to pet parents who didn't want to buy something as simple as food or bedding because it was "expensive." This is unacceptable. 11) Employees who pretend to be knowledgeable but aren't. All employees should know how to bag crickets and fish, but that's often the extent of their training. I had a customer return an oscar (a very aggressive large cichlid that needs to be housed by itself in a large tank) because it chased and killed his guoramis. No one owned up to it, but the customer told me that he asked if it was ok to do, and the mystery employee said "yes."
