I owned 4 retail petstores and sold them in 07, then went to work for Petco as a manager. I was hired due to my saltwater and management experience, In a very short period of time I was able to turn a poor (bad)performing store around and increase the saltwater sales to #2 in the region. I coached and trained the SW person who was awesome to start with, had tons of experience which is rare for a Petco store...Then it started, you can't even begin to understand how backwards the upper management is(district - regional) There was a problem with the tanks and all the inverts would die within 24 hours, I said stop sending them and let me replace all the sand & CC and clean the systems, also wanted to run chempure(petco used to dose with copper years ago but they don't anymore) they said no that it would be too expensive and then they would force ship the inverts to me on regular intervals and within a day or 2 a couple hundred dollars was down the drain and the poor inverts died for no reason other than upper management would not address the problem and this has been going on for years with the inverts dying, even the SW person came up to me the day I arrived at the store and told me "we have always had a problem with inverts dying within 24hours, can you do anything".
Whats so weird is that it was a vicious cycle, once the inverts died, you had to take them out of inventory (electronically) you listed the reason as "deceased" and so the computer system would automatically generate a replenishment order, then the whole thing started over the next week. I called my regional mngr and regional animal mngr and they were well aware, but the cost to fix the problem was too much. It became so bad that my fish person would come into the office with a bag of snails that just arrived and ask me "Do I have to put them in the death tank" I even watched her one day dump the bag into the water, drop her head and say "good bye"...Thats when I started to feel horrible about my job and pretty much mentally checked out and gave up..
The RO system had been broke for who knows how long, so topoff was chlorinated tap water, you can't even imagine how many fish we had to black bag each and every day. It's part of opening the stores, grab a scan gun, net, black bag and start scooping dead fish every morning. I tried to get the plumbers to fix the problem, but it was a nightmare having to get the upper managers to address the issue, which they never did, the deaths were within acceptable levels was what I was told
Salinity for the systems is kept very low as instructed by the company vet,
they use a floating hydrometer and we know how accurate those are, I brough my refractometer in to do a spot check and the salinity was 1.015
Anyway, I didn't last for more than 6months as it really is a horrible place to work, it's all about the bottom line and pushing all the employees to the limit, I was salary and they expected 45hours a week, but in reality I was working 60hour weeks, looking back it was the most miserable 6 months of my life...now I'm semi retired
