New Petsmart

[trematode]

If I were you, I would not push any "starter" homes on people. The kind that are okay for baby animals but too small for the adults. The likelihood of people returning to buy larger cages and aquariums are probably pretty slim. Most of my friends growing up had tiny cages/aquariums for their animals. I wonder if my theory partially explains that.

[Raturday]

It's always good to be up to date on your knowledge when working somewhere like a pet store. It's sad how many pet store employees have no idea about animal care!

HOWEVER. Petsmart is a VERY big chain and their main motivation is money, not the welfare of animals. If you are not selling enough and making the company enough money, you will be fired. They are not making money by you giving out advice, they are making money by you pushing store products on people. If a person wants something, you CANNOT refuse to sell it to them. It doesn't matter if they want to put a tiger oscar in a 5 gallon tank or a rat in a hamster cage, if they're paying for it, it doesn't matter what happens to it afterwards. It's the sad but unfortunate truth about places like Petsmart.

I definitely won't disagree with you about their main motivation being money, but I work in the Pet Care department and we are never fired for not making enough sales. They don't keep track of what we sell and how often. And we can definitely refuse sales, but only on live animals - I have done it plenty of times, especially for fish.




As for the OP, make sure you learn all you can about the fish, birds, small animals, and reptiles. You will be asked a ton of questions on all of the sections, not just small animals, and the training they give you is not adequate information to start out with. You have to learn as you go. Take a bunch of Care Guides home and get to reading.

[trematode]

For betta care, I highly recommend browsing http://www.bettatalk.com and http://www.healthybetta.com.For other fish, I recommend the Aqua Hobby forums (google it). Read the article on take cycling. Browse the profiles on each fish.Just a few notes:The only thing that would comfortably fit in a 5 gallon would be a betta.For a 10 gallon, a good variety of fish without overstocking would be a small school (7-10) of tetras (black neon or neon) or rasboras, centerpiece fish (platy or guppy trio, some bettas do well but not all) and a couple of ottocinclus as algae eaters. If you lean towards 7 schooling fish, a trio of dwarf corydoras work. Sand substrate is recommended for them.Never sell tricolor sharks or plecos. They grow far too large for most tanks.This is a HUGE pet peeve of mine: letting a tank run go 24 hours DOES NOT cycle a tank. It takes about one month to properly establish the bacteria levels in a tank to handle the fish. Cycling a tank using pure ammonia is the most humane way. If you do it with adding fish, you have to be monitoring ammonia and nitrite levels daily to avoid harming your fish. If you have any questions about the process, PM me. There are several threads in Aquahobby that outline the recess.

[riotfox]

i skipped the second page, so sorry if im repeating, but one of the first things that i would stress is exercise! not so much the physical aspect but the mental. cage size is important, but a cage is still a cage and animals need to be let out daily. for rats, and probably for most similar species, i would say an hour a day is absolute minimum. even most cages people consider to be "large" really arent that big if you think about it. they are fine as long as the animal is allowed to come out for playtime, but locking them up 24/7 is a surefire way to make them bored. you can have enclosures large enough to allow for adequate mental stimulation, like a big backyard aviary for birds, but they would have to be larger than most people would normally have for rats, and i would assume, much larger than any that petsmart sells.

[trematode]

Oops. Duplicate post. Silly phone.