Pros
I enjoyed working with the animals. They had a good animal care policy and followed it. A decent veterinarian was accessible for the occasional illness.
Cons
My main complaint is that upper management insisted on giving me bad advice in animal care. For example, they kept insisting that put a solid opaque acrylic lid on cages that had animals with UV requirements (UV does not transmit through acrylic). I tried to explain this but insisted because of humidity requirements (not as important as UV for the animal in question). People who know nothing about the animals in question don't need to be reading a piece of paper and think they can give advice on it. Instead, I just had to change it while they were there and then change it back. Another issue is the high turnover rate and constantly hiring kids fresh out of high school who have no work ethic. If someone gets lazy, an animal could suffer, so this practice is not okay. The pay is very low at minimum wage but this is also just a pet store. Raises are time based so you can get a higher wage later on. There was some extreme retaliation and nepotism problems at my particular store which resulted in other people getting their hours cut so their buddy could have them (even though they worked in another dept). Also, there was too much emphasis on sales and not enough on animal care. No common sense. For example, they saw no problem selling a full grown turtle in a starter kit meant for a juvenile because "it's a starter kit and we sell it". No. Just no. The policy is great while caring for animals in store but it seems as soon as it comes to sales, that kind of thing goes out the window. There is absolutely no training in animal care. All of the new employee training deals with sales, not animal health. We are also typically are there at 6am to do maintenance before opening hours but often there is only one employee scheduled and it is very difficult to clean an entire department, scrub the fish section, feed all the animals, clean dirty dishes, and then take care of receiving and the quiet room in only three hours.
