Wal~Mart tortures future pets to death...

The BBQ Pit
1

I work at the bastion of corperate largess, Wal~Mart, and what I have seen this week made me far angrier than most days.
We sell tropical fish as pets in my store. About a week ago one of the underground filters and aerrators broke, cutting off the oxygen supply to the top three tanks in the tier. I brought this to three different managers attention over the course of the past week only to have them say “I’ll go look at it.” and of course, they didn’t. I was off for the next four days, and when I got in the water was so murky and shit filled that the fish were all at the top of the tank gasping for air as they one by one died off. I took matters into my own hands then and moved the fish into different tanks down the tier where they shared them with other fish. I reported this to my manager and he said “Ok, good, I will go and call for someone ot repair the tanks right now.” I told him that this was strictly a stop gap measure as now the remainig tanks were severly over-crowded each contaning 70- to 120 fish. Did I mention these tanks are ten gallon size? It was a good thing these fish were small.
The next day I come in I find out the remaining six tanks on the tier have failed. The poor fish are sitting again at the top and fighting for every breath. I call my manager, I tell him what happened, he tells me not to worry the repair man would be comming on Wendsday. That day was Sunday. I tell him that the fish will all suffocate and die by then and I could probally , with a little rearranging, move all the fish into the next working tier of tanks. He tells me not to bother, that he needs me to go back to sporting goods and fix the DNR license machine and then to print out a back log of licences all damn day long. I replied that the fish would all die a horrible death, and he told me not to worry, that we would get credit for all of them.
Now, I do not usually feel much empathy for fish, even though I have some as pets. But this is wrong, nothing deserves to be tortured to death like that. These fish aren’t food, they are not somthing we can even use dead. They died for nothing, just because there wasn’t a monetary value on them. It makes me sick.
When I went back to Pets at the end of my shift, nearly every fish was dead, floating on the top. Over seven hundred fish.

It disgusts, and saddens me.

I can’t do much, Im just an associate. They don’t listen to us, the only ones they listen to are the customers. So I am calling out all fellow dopers who find this sick to please check their local stores, it this happends at my store it can happen at others. If you find the fish or other live pets in such a state, please, please, please find some management, complain, get angry, tell them you will be back and if they don’t fix it you will tell all your friends about it. If there is one thing Wal~Mart is afraid to loose is a customer. You have the power to change this, please help.

I know it sound silly for just a couple of fish, but there are plans in the owrks for Wal~mart to carry other live pets like dogs, cats, and birds. If this is what they do to the fish, what will they do to the rest?

Thanks for listening.

2

That’s fucking awful. And stupid. Which describes WalMart pretty well, I guess. One more reason never, ever, ever to shop there.

3

Damn, you must work at the Walmart in my town. They don’t listen to the customer when they complain about that stuff either. The fish at our Walmart are always floating around in murkey water.

4

That sucks. Fortunately, The Wal-Mart around here has a pretty good fish guy in charge of the tanks. I’ve bought fish there, and talked shop with him for quite a while. From what I’ve see about the size and number of all the tanks in many of the stores around here, whoever did it had NO business ordering 700 fish. Were it me, I woulda started unboxing over the back filters and slapping them on the tanks.

5

That’s probably what I would have done, too, Weirddave. Walmart sells airpumps, right? Why not hook a new one up to the line?

It seems, from what I’ve heard on the Internet, that most Walmart fish departments are poorly run (although I’ve never heard a story quite like this one.) Customer complaints don’t seem to help much, either, apparently. Why does Walmart bother to carry live fish if they don’t give a shit? Target doesn’t carry live fish, and they seem to do just fine.

Your manager is an idiot. Sure, a fish doesn’t cost much individually, but almost all of them (except goldfish) cost at least $1. Seven hundred dead fish is at least $700 in lost revenue!

Walmart has already pretty much lost me as a customer because of their claustrophobic, labyrinthine store layout. If they are killing fish and other animals via neglect, that gives me just one more reason to hate them. Maybe you should call PETA or your local humane society or something. Does your local TV station do investigative reporting?

6

My kids and I have already written letters to our local Wal-Marts asking them to stop carrying fish at all, since they obviously don’t have the resources to care for them properly. The tanks are always overcrowded and there are always dead fish floating in them. I’ve complained to the store managers, too, but nothing ever changes.

AquaPura, can you give us any ideas about who to contact at the next level? This is obviously not a local problem, and my daughters are both very interested in pursuing the matter. I want to encourage them to take action when they see something they know is wrong, and I’d like to help them be as effective as possible.

7

I don’t know how you feel about them, but PETA is against keeping fish as pets and against stores selling them. They may be able to point you in the right direction about who to contact.

Zette

8

The WalMart in my town has a small McDonalds which sells Filet-o-Fish or whatever those fish thingees are called.

Personally, I’m a vegetarian.(And I’m also disgusted that WalMart would treat their fish the way the OP described. Yet another reason for me to avoid WalMart.)

9

Ugh. In addition to being cruel, that’s really stupid financially.

I have a small tank, so I can only keep one fish at a time (which is fine because I like Bettas and they don’t play well with others). Because fish are pretty delicate anyway, I won’t buy from a store that has a lot of sick or dead fish. That certainly leaves out Wal-Mart and K-Mart, and even the local PetsMart horrified me once by having a very expensive goldfish in one of its tanks that was obviously in terrible suffering from the FIVE anchor worms hanging off it. As a result, I only buy at a local fish store that has immaculate tanks and knowledgeable people.

How many people walked past those tanks filled with dying fish and made the decision to NEVER buy a fish from any Wal-Mart again? How many sales did that cruel treatment prevent?

I repeat: cruel and stupid.

10

I’ve said it before, and I’ll (probably) say it again; I believe that what you do to animals in this life will be done to you in the next. That includes any lifeform (even cheap little fishies) that you are responsible for keeping alive and healthy.

11

Are you insinuating a connection between this fact and the dead fish in the OP? Although that might explain the manager’s lack of concern, especially if there was a sale on Filet-o-Fishes coming up.

12

http://www.walmartstores.com/newsstand/archive/prn_coofficers.shtml
and

http://www.walmartstores.com/corporate/coinfo_research.html
If you are serious about complaining. And I think you should be. ESPECIALLY if they are going to start selling birds and mammals. I shudder to think.

stoid

13

I stopped buying fish a Walmart years ago. I now buy at PetsMart because this store takes very good care of their fish, and other animals. They also aren’t selling clumps of reef and endangered species. All stores being individual, one company can be great in one place and horrible in another. I will pay a bit more in a store that sells well kept animals, over the unkept ones.

14

dwala bought a bunny at SupaPets-which went into a coma and died the very next day. The vet told her it was parasites.

Can you IMAGINE them not taking care of animals like that? How sick and disgusting!
I’ll point her to this thread.

15

Just to be sure that they were still selling fish thingees at the McD in WallMart, I popped in today after work. Guess what? No fish at McDonalds. Lots of crying babies, whining children, and hollering parents, but no fish.

Sure enough, Wallmart was selling dead fish. Of about a dozen small tanks, two tanks had one dead un each, and one tank had four dead uns.

Then I went next door to SuperPet. Over fifty large tanks. Dozens of one fish glasses. A large fish pool. Only one dead fish in the lot.

What can I say. I was wrong. McDonalds is not selling dead fish – only Wallmart is doing that to any degree.

But wait. It gets more interesing. Remember the dysfunctional children in Wallmart? There were none in SuperPet. What there was in SuperPet was a large pool inhabited by large fish (a foot and a half long and sort of stocky), and beside the pool was a sign saying “No Unattended Children”.

Where did the children go, and how did the fish get so big?

16

Walmart puts all filtration on a single circuit, so I sick fish will infect them all.
A decent pet store or tropical fish store keeps each bowl seaparately filtered and quarantines fish before selling them.

Buying a single fish from Walmart can infect your whole tank.

17

Check back on Friday.

18

I would first approach the store manager, then go above his head to the District Manager, if that doesn’t have an effect, call the Wal~Mart home office, before you do, get the store number, ask the manager with whom you speak what it is. Then start making calls, tell your friends, tell them to call. Only the customers make the difference. The number is 1-800-walmart.