Petmania becoming a sponsor

Hi All,
Just in relation to the private message issue, I was a bit apprehensive about comments being made about individual staff members but going by your posts so far i believe that wont be a problem. If anyone has a specific problem with a staff member i would like to be pm on it to avoid any legal or slander issues and i can deal with it privately.

Petmania as a company is committed to driving the standards of care and knowledge in the market, and our store teams work extremely hard looking after all of our live stock and our customers. Each and every one of them are dedicated to ensuring the best standards of animal welfare and providing our customers with the best care advice. They undergo constant training in different areas of pet care and fish care is just one part of this. The gap in knowledge was the reason I have been brought on board and my role is dedicated to increasing the standards of maintenance and store team knowledge in our fish department.

Customer feedback [good and bad!] is something which is critical to our business, and we genuinely like to hear what you have to say. However, where reference is being made to an individual store or staff member, out of respect for our team, and to enable us to address concerns in a fair and unbiased manner, feedback of this nature should be sent by private message.

Any product requests or suggestions will be subject to further research and brought to the attention of our buying team. It may take time to respond to all queries, but each will be addressed in due course.

Again thanks for your comments and keep them coming

well said neil, its is best things being out in the open, at least stephen can explain to the masses that he recognises a problem and is working to fix it. or that a problem in a certain store has been brought to his attention via us PUBLICLY just ONCE and he can address it publicly, otherwise as said he'll be inundated via pm and in the end his head will be melted for the reading the same whinge over and over and over and over again

i think there is concern some folks will let rip but then the mods/admin can take care of the post - at the end of the day someone can let rip on any thread so its just the mods doing the job. just look at all the above posts: none are wholly destructive and certainly not offensive

Welcome Stephen,
I hope to see your store coming soon to Cork????? We have a serious drought on marines here:(

Hi Stephen,

Welcome along. Fair play to Petmania for putting in place measures to raise standards - this is great news.

In terms of my own 2 cents.. Out of interest I dropped into my local petmania (Santry) this evening. The quality has definitely gone up but there's still work to be done. I used to visit in the past as there was always a decent variety but quality was really hit and miss with some really obviously sick and poor quality fish on display.

In terms of the shop today, there were a couple of bays with whitespot in them, a good few dead fish about the place, the marine display tank wasn't in the best of shape and some of the prices were off the wall. The marines didn't look good generally and there were so many microbubbles in the main marine tank you couldn't see the stock.

On the plus side there was an Ok variety of species, I didn't see any deformed fish & the tanks were generally clean.

My advice for this shop would be to:

1) There needs to be a better policy for handling dead fish, there were way too many in the tanks and the chap looking after the fish wasn't particularly busy
2) Review the pricing - I've bought Tropheus that were for sale at over €44 elsewhere for a third of that price.
3) Get rid of the unfiltered tanks and bowls - there was a tiny unfiltered tank on display with 3 fish in it.

There are some really excellent LFS in Dublin these days so you guys have some stiff competition. Good luck with your mission & once again - great to see you taking the welfare of the animals seriously.

-Patrick