#responsiblity

NEW PRODUCT ALERT!

KidCoins! We needed an easy way to reward our kids for positive behavior. We originally had a verbal agreement of "stars". If your child gets up and ready for school in the morning without trouble, they'd earn a star. After 5 stars, they get a trip to the dollar store.

I swooped in made made physical coins with stars on them. We offer small and big stars! In our home, a small star is worth $0.25, or 15 minutes of screen time, and a big coin is 4x that. We reward with stuff like chores and excellent behavior. And use ONE color per child, so they can't steal or trade without parental help.

The piggy banks are made in white, so that they can personally decorate them if desired, ours loved this idea!

Dominion IX.

11x14″

It’s that thing that quite a few people seem highly allergic too, but what ever. Sorry to start on a slightly pessimistic route, but it’s one of the number one challenges to over come when you work with the public in a retail environment involving living animals.

A pet-store worker can give you all the information under the sun. At the end of the day it’s the responsibility of the customer to also do their own research. A pet store worker can also tell you everything about how to do maintenance on a habitat, but we cannot do that maintenance for you. We cannot force you to do it either. That again, is the customer responsibility.

When you are given specific and clear instructions we cannot force you to follow them properly, neither can we do the steps for you. It is up to you to follow through, and ask questions if you don’t fully understand.

When you go to a pet-store and decide to buy an animal to add to an existing set up, it is your responsibility to ensure that the set up is ready, and capable of handling the new load.

In fish keeping this is very important. The pet store worker, and the pet-store as a whole is not accountable for a failure in personal responsibility in the customer level. This concept, I wish was more clear to people.

Good pet stores will help arm you with information. They will do testing for you to help you understand where your set up stands. They will give the best advice they can dealing with various set ups, compatibility, and circumstances. They can point  you to more reliable products, foods, equipment, and so forth. They can do their very best to bring in healthy animals and make them available.

They are a holding center for people to buy their animals, and supplies. They are not in charge of what goes on with the set ups where ever they may be (home, office, etc).

Now that this is out of the way I would also like to talk about what else you can or cannot hold a pet-store responsible for. Pet-stores all have to order living animals from other places that act as holding areas for them. While there are exceptions, they don’t always raise animals from the beginning, to a sellable stage.

So, it is completely unreasonable to expect that every single animal is going to be healthy 100%. As long as those animals that are not in ideal health are in quarantine and not being sold, that is fine. It is not always a failure on the level of staff if animals are not well. These animals come from somewhere else, go through the stress of shipping, and then have to adapt to being in a pet-store environment. This is where there are so many noises, movements, smells, and people. For fish that includes vibrations because so many children and adults cannot seem to control themselves and refrain from tapping on every single tank they go by.

This is a stressful environment. If they had anything wrong before shipping, it materializes once it shows up. All the pet-store employees can do is medicate, feed accordingly, give clean water, and hope the animal responds favorably. That is being responsible.

Now surely there are less than savory places that don’t do this, and sell sick animals knowing they are sick, or at least don’t do proper maintenance so nothing thrives. If a store has 200-300 tanks, and 20-30 of them are under QC, that’s normal. Every time a shipment arrives with new potential fish friends, there is a chance a good portion of them may come down ill, and need to be nursed back into good form.

This gets even more complicated if you are a store that takes in unwanted animals. Large fish don’t always take too well to being caught, shoved into a container, brought into a pet-store and then put in the best tank space they have for them. So they are likely to not look their best for a bit. Those animals may also be hiding symptoms of illness that the owner knew nothing about, or chose to pretend to know nothing about. So again, if they are not well upon being brought in, and the owner refuses to take them back, the pet store is left with having to try to nurse the animal to health.

That may mean for a week or so they may not look great. Again, that doesn’t mean the pet-store did anything bad. They are not the ones who raised the animal to the size it is. They didn’t do anything wrong. They are trying to do what they can right for the sake of the animals.