id be nice to petco or petsmart carrying nicer fish, but it's all over when you see the salesmen sell a 10 year old an arowana and a 10 gal tank haha.
Petco Aquatics Makeover
- Thread starter airborne82
- Start date
Hi airborne82. I ran the Petco in League City, Texas. I dunno how long you've worked for the company but we were the #1 saltwater dept in the company for awhile and were neck and neck with the east coast big hitters , and Normal, Oklahoma (why they were ballin' I I have no idea lol) for #1 freshwater from week to week.
I'd like to share my story.
I ran another successful Petco aquatics dept. in Houston for a couple of years and when they built the new store in League City I was asked to transfer there before it opened as they assumed they would have a large saltwater market given it's proximity to the ocean. This strangely enough was correct. I couldn't move down there for a while so someone else was in charge for the first few months.
Sure enough they had respectable sales in both fresh and salt. About $1000 a week in both. (This quite decent for a petco.) I kept popping in while dealing with my move and transfer and the tanks looked like crap as well as the fish and I was amazed to hear about their sales with the livestock and tanks in such a condition. When I arrived they decided to keep the current aquatics specialist and break protocol and have two cert. aq. specs on staff as the sales justified it.
I soon realized that the majority of the salt sales were straight out of the box. People would hover around on truck day and damned near the entire shipment would be scarfed down in a couple of hrs mostly by uneducated people with improper tanks.
Sales began to skyrocket once I took the helm and took over all the ordering as well as put my heart and soul into the maint. and aquascaping. I found in my years at Petco that the RCACs would look the other way when you weren't followingf the planograms and stuff if the tanks were clean, stocked, sales were rocking and shrink was low. I was given an unofficial carte blanc to do whatever I wanted, (ie i was never told to stop doing was I was doing and got 100s on animals walks with half my inventory not supposed to be there
.
I brought in and sold the hell out of anything thats legal in Texas, and a few that weren't.
I'm not gonna try and list all the species I stocked but I put most lfs to shame. We regularly stocked and sold all the fish yourself and others have mentioned as well countless others, including Cichla,freshwater toadfish,long armed prawns, aussie blue lobsters (not just FL and red claws!) and on and on . I had moments while ordering where I just couldn't think of anything else lol. I can honestly say the only fish I never brought in that are seen at even the best lfs were Discus, Altums or Leopoldi Angels.
I had multiple stand alone display tanks we sold xl fish out of. Fresh and salt including a huge gar tank. (spotted, florida, and alligator).
I guess why I'm writing this is EVERYTHING your store is about to attempt we did at ours and it was quite successful monetarily.
Sales peaked at around $3500-4000 a wk in each (fresh and salt). FIsh and hardgoods were around $40,000 a month. They hired three additional aquatics specialist. Total of 5 in our team. Two managers (myself included) and 3 aq. specs. I constantly had to deal with pissed off customers from dealing with some of my coworkers and getting stupid advice/ sold fish they shouldn't have been. Most of my staff was pretty/very knowledgable in SW but nobody knew anything/gave a crap about freshwater so I kind of had to be the entire knowledge base for freshwater advice. I also had to do most of the maint and aquascaping and deal with the mess that would be left (wrecked tanks, live rock ON THE FLOOR, etc ) from the night before. I worked about 50-60hrs a week to hold that store together but I loved it and didn't mind the hrs or the paychecks lol.
After a couple of years I moved back into the city (Houston) and transfered to my old store that had been run into the ground. I was sad to see my old original store in such sad shape but kind of looked fwd to starting over and enjoying the much slower pace of. . .um. . .not League City Petco. I.e. not having to deal with 30+ customers waiting while all 5 of us were helping customers and getting a huge shipment every 3 days lol.
I had meeting after meeting with the regional and store mgt over a couple months before I left in order to hand off that store and keep what was once a great thing going. I made sure all parties involved new what it would exactly what it would take to keep it up. Sad to say took about six weeks and it was destroyed. It took one corp. visit from the RCAC and some other corp. peeps and they pulled the plug on the sweetness.
One piece of advice I can give you, although I'm not sure what you can do about it, is watch your pricing. Petco's pricing on awesome fish, in freshwater more than saltwater believe it or not, is typically way to high. I assume this is from sticking to the huge markup they place on the more common fish they buy in huge quanities from vendors.
For example: Yellow Labs = 2.50wholesale = 14.99 retail. They corp robots slap this same level of mark up on fish that have higher price points that are typically doubled or tripled in the trade and you end up with $60 fish that are usually $30 at a lfs. In the industry the amount of mark-up drops as the price goes up. Doesn't matter if you can bring it in if its priced to high to sell it.
However if you sift thru the universe of skus petco has you can find that some areway better than others. I had total price control on most of the exotic fish and inverts I brought in because I had to pull shennanigans just to order it because Petco either didn't have a SKU for the fish I brought in or it wasn't "activated for that vendor". What I did was substitute skus. You may be familiar with the practice. I would call vendors and negotiate a price that worked on their wholesale end and that ended up being a reasonable retail price on my end. There are certain skus that have way lower markup than others. Few I remember are elec blue johanni, albino oscar, and florida blue lobster. The 49.99 Mushroom Rock sku worked well for many saltwater items.I found some crazy old hermit crab sku that had only a few cents mark up and voila: 3.79 Flame Scallops! For expensive items I would do multiple subs. For example 2 x albino oscars = 1 x 3'' Frontosa. Almost always the prices I would negotiate were way better than Petcos chosen prices for these items. It takes some serious work to keep all that straight though, cuz your PO and what you actually receive were never the same.
I'm in no way telling you to do this. It's totally not kosher and can get you fired. Although you'll typically get told to stop before they fire you, although I was never told to stop hehe. I'm just giving you an example of what I had to do to make it happen.
The other piece of advice I can give you is get on a first name basis with ALL your vendors. If you don't know Laura Cousins @ ORA , if thats one of your vendors, already you need to. The availability Petco gets from most vendors is dated and incorrect. Also back on Petco's screwy pricing, Petco tells vendors what they will pay for fish. Not the other way around. So if whatever they have in the system for an item is too low you can order it all day long and the vendor won't ship it cuz Petco wants to pay them damned near what they paid for it. So check and make sure if your legitimately ordering and available item that the vendor will actually sell it to you at that price. If not your just wasting your order money with stuff that's guaranteed to be cut. It's a big problem in SW as petco's salt prices are generally pretty cheap with low mark-up, in theory to move the items out of the store quicker as Petco's theory with carrying SW livestock is get people to buy hardgoods and food which ARE insanely marked up. Most high end sw fish have way to low prices on the vendor end.
Running a supersweet aquatics dept was alot of fun. I learned alot while doing it and made alot of life long friends in the hobby and the industry. I honestly don't think I would be where I am today if it wasn't for my exp. running the show down there.
Just be prepared to bust your butt. Petcos policies and subpar equip. ,although I think the MARS racks work perfectly fine they're just usually poorly maintained, will not make your task easy.
Best of luck and again KNOW YOUR VENDORS. Pick up the phone when you sit down to order! ORA said I was the only Petco that had ever called them checking availability.
Jared Kirby
ADG Freshwater Livestock Manager/Aquarium Tech.
I'd like to share my story.
I ran another successful Petco aquatics dept. in Houston for a couple of years and when they built the new store in League City I was asked to transfer there before it opened as they assumed they would have a large saltwater market given it's proximity to the ocean. This strangely enough was correct. I couldn't move down there for a while so someone else was in charge for the first few months.
Sure enough they had respectable sales in both fresh and salt. About $1000 a week in both. (This quite decent for a petco.) I kept popping in while dealing with my move and transfer and the tanks looked like crap as well as the fish and I was amazed to hear about their sales with the livestock and tanks in such a condition. When I arrived they decided to keep the current aquatics specialist and break protocol and have two cert. aq. specs on staff as the sales justified it.
I soon realized that the majority of the salt sales were straight out of the box. People would hover around on truck day and damned near the entire shipment would be scarfed down in a couple of hrs mostly by uneducated people with improper tanks.
Sales began to skyrocket once I took the helm and took over all the ordering as well as put my heart and soul into the maint. and aquascaping. I found in my years at Petco that the RCACs would look the other way when you weren't followingf the planograms and stuff if the tanks were clean, stocked, sales were rocking and shrink was low. I was given an unofficial carte blanc to do whatever I wanted, (ie i was never told to stop doing was I was doing and got 100s on animals walks with half my inventory not supposed to be there
.I brought in and sold the hell out of anything thats legal in Texas, and a few that weren't
. I'm not gonna try and list all the species I stocked but I put most lfs to shame. We regularly stocked and sold all the fish yourself and others have mentioned as well countless others, including Cichla,freshwater toadfish,long armed prawns, aussie blue lobsters (not just FL and red claws!) and on and on . I had moments while ordering where I just couldn't think of anything else lol. I can honestly say the only fish I never brought in that are seen at even the best lfs were Discus, Altums or Leopoldi Angels.
I had multiple stand alone display tanks we sold xl fish out of. Fresh and salt including a huge gar tank. (spotted, florida, and alligator).
I guess why I'm writing this is EVERYTHING your store is about to attempt we did at ours and it was quite successful monetarily.
Sales peaked at around $3500-4000 a wk in each (fresh and salt). FIsh and hardgoods were around $40,000 a month. They hired three additional aquatics specialist. Total of 5 in our team. Two managers (myself included) and 3 aq. specs. I constantly had to deal with pissed off customers from dealing with some of my coworkers and getting stupid advice/ sold fish they shouldn't have been. Most of my staff was pretty/very knowledgable in SW but nobody knew anything/gave a crap about freshwater so I kind of had to be the entire knowledge base for freshwater advice. I also had to do most of the maint and aquascaping and deal with the mess that would be left (wrecked tanks, live rock ON THE FLOOR, etc ) from the night before. I worked about 50-60hrs a week to hold that store together but I loved it and didn't mind the hrs or the paychecks lol.
After a couple of years I moved back into the city (Houston) and transfered to my old store that had been run into the ground. I was sad to see my old original store in such sad shape but kind of looked fwd to starting over and enjoying the much slower pace of. . .um. . .not League City Petco. I.e. not having to deal with 30+ customers waiting while all 5 of us were helping customers and getting a huge shipment every 3 days lol.
I had meeting after meeting with the regional and store mgt over a couple months before I left in order to hand off that store and keep what was once a great thing going. I made sure all parties involved new what it would exactly what it would take to keep it up. Sad to say took about six weeks and it was destroyed. It took one corp. visit from the RCAC and some other corp. peeps and they pulled the plug on the sweetness.
One piece of advice I can give you, although I'm not sure what you can do about it, is watch your pricing. Petco's pricing on awesome fish, in freshwater more than saltwater believe it or not, is typically way to high. I assume this is from sticking to the huge markup they place on the more common fish they buy in huge quanities from vendors.
For example: Yellow Labs = 2.50wholesale = 14.99 retail. They corp robots slap this same level of mark up on fish that have higher price points that are typically doubled or tripled in the trade and you end up with $60 fish that are usually $30 at a lfs. In the industry the amount of mark-up drops as the price goes up. Doesn't matter if you can bring it in if its priced to high to sell it.
However if you sift thru the universe of skus petco has you can find that some areway better than others. I had total price control on most of the exotic fish and inverts I brought in because I had to pull shennanigans just to order it because Petco either didn't have a SKU for the fish I brought in or it wasn't "activated for that vendor". What I did was substitute skus. You may be familiar with the practice. I would call vendors and negotiate a price that worked on their wholesale end and that ended up being a reasonable retail price on my end. There are certain skus that have way lower markup than others. Few I remember are elec blue johanni, albino oscar, and florida blue lobster. The 49.99 Mushroom Rock sku worked well for many saltwater items.I found some crazy old hermit crab sku that had only a few cents mark up and voila: 3.79 Flame Scallops! For expensive items I would do multiple subs. For example 2 x albino oscars = 1 x 3'' Frontosa. Almost always the prices I would negotiate were way better than Petcos chosen prices for these items. It takes some serious work to keep all that straight though, cuz your PO and what you actually receive were never the same.
I'm in no way telling you to do this. It's totally not kosher and can get you fired. Although you'll typically get told to stop before they fire you, although I was never told to stop hehe. I'm just giving you an example of what I had to do to make it happen.
The other piece of advice I can give you is get on a first name basis with ALL your vendors. If you don't know Laura Cousins @ ORA , if thats one of your vendors, already you need to. The availability Petco gets from most vendors is dated and incorrect. Also back on Petco's screwy pricing, Petco tells vendors what they will pay for fish. Not the other way around. So if whatever they have in the system for an item is too low you can order it all day long and the vendor won't ship it cuz Petco wants to pay them damned near what they paid for it. So check and make sure if your legitimately ordering and available item that the vendor will actually sell it to you at that price. If not your just wasting your order money with stuff that's guaranteed to be cut. It's a big problem in SW as petco's salt prices are generally pretty cheap with low mark-up, in theory to move the items out of the store quicker as Petco's theory with carrying SW livestock is get people to buy hardgoods and food which ARE insanely marked up. Most high end sw fish have way to low prices on the vendor end.
Running a supersweet aquatics dept was alot of fun. I learned alot while doing it and made alot of life long friends in the hobby and the industry. I honestly don't think I would be where I am today if it wasn't for my exp. running the show down there.
Just be prepared to bust your butt. Petcos policies and subpar equip. ,although I think the MARS racks work perfectly fine they're just usually poorly maintained, will not make your task easy.
Best of luck and again KNOW YOUR VENDORS. Pick up the phone when you sit down to order! ORA said I was the only Petco that had ever called them checking availability.
Jared Kirby
ADG Freshwater Livestock Manager/Aquarium Tech.
idk if corporate would frown on this, but why not make a binder with a monthly price list of what you can order for people that really do know about fish keeping. you could present it to people that you sense really are looking for unique fish. maybe some lake victorians or dats or what not. give them the option to special order them. that way, you can still make the sales and they don't have to pay out the nose for the shipping. plus, you don't need to house them as long as you might if you ordered them solely for the store hoping someone would be interested. might spare you some big losses and spark more interest in shopping at petco. I would shop there if you offered a special order list ..... and if you weren't 1300 miles away from me
swede;3483563; said:
Unfortunately the only place "months" exist in the fish trade are on the retail end. Most vendors load up on Mondays and sell out by Fri. Just the way of the world. Wholesalers are holding facilities not stores.
Therefore availability and pricing is constantly subject to change.
All Petcos have a special order programs. Regardless of what their employees tell you out of ignorance or laziness, as I was told by several chain stores back in the day that they couldn't special order anything. In fact the majority of "MFK" fish can OFFICIALLY only be ordered by getting a "special order approval".This policy is in place in part to help make sure the person wanting that aro knows what they're getting into. Also to prevent the employees from stocking a bunch of fish that are expensive and/or hard to care for or house.
And I wish people would stop all the hatin' on Petco and Petsmart for goobers selling people improper fish and tanks. That happens everyday at LFS worldwide as much as it happens at the chain stores. For every awesome LFS there are hundreds of crappy ones who will sell anything to anybody. Not to mention dozens of online vendors who never even see or speak to the people buying fish.To me this isn't a chain store problem it's a monster fish keeping problem. I've been on and off of this forum for 10 years. Even back when it was predatoryfish.net every other person had a RTC in a 55gal. and was planning some super tank or indoor pond build. 90% of the people on this forum put livestock before the tank. Constantly buying fish they own nothing close to a permanent home for. I'm as guilty as anyone lol. Years ago I bought 2 baby RTCs and thought my 180 would last a while. A year later they're 2.5ft long in a 300 gallon rubbermaid stock tank in my kitchen and I'm trying to figure out "now what".
I'm not hating on this forum or the hobby. It's just a sad truth that we all hate to see.
I like some of the ideas I have herd. Petco places an emphasis on having the fish to sell the fish and this is true to an extent. I think I may cary a few monsters but make most special order. I will place signs around the department to encourage people to special order somthing they don't see. Many people just walk off the second they don't see what they were looking for instead of asking. I have made sales when people were looking to walk off because they were looking for (big) fish because of what they had in their tank when I asked what they had and what size I made recomendations based on my experience that worked. I think the special order system is good it will cut down on the impulse buys of mocho fish but signs will let people know to ask instead of just moving on to the next store.
airborne82;3483806; said:
moo.
airborne82;3483806; said:
what?
airborne82;3483806; said:
Out of curiosity which vendors are assigned to you?
airborne82;3483806; said:
Your biggest hurdle will be the fact your biggest buyers of "sweet" fish are going to be midlevel to advanced hobbyists. The majority of which rarely buy fish from Petco. Partly due to the company's reputation. Partly due to the open systems (0 quarantine beyond netsoak). (do you have MARS racks or are they moving on to something else now?) and again partly due to the outrageous pricing on the good stuff.
It took me months to win over the real hobbyists in my market. Even though they liked what they saw in the tanks when they came in for supplies it took quite a while of consistency in our presentation and stocking.
Your other biggest hurdle will be the fact that it 's really gonna take more than two people to run what amounts to a REAL LFS in a petco. Are you active duty working at Petco as a side job or are you in the guard/ reserves?
Oh yeah and one more thing. . .for your fresh display tanks as you cant really perform this kind of wc on the racks. . .this may be common sense. . .I assuming you have the same 4ft carbon bottle + micron cart. plumbed to the sink that most nicer petcos have? You can hook a hose directly to the carbon bottle for maint. purposes. Twist corp.'s arm till the buy you a roll of bigass eheim hose and some cable clamps. Use the big ehiem hose and clamps to drain water into a floor drain or toilet via simple siphon (screw the python they give you. chunk it in the trash where it belongs!) and then get your fill water going on the opposite whilst draining. And tada. This called performing a superdouche.
If you have auto-top off floats in the sumps as well as the safety overflows that run into the sewer you can flip up the floats to constant fill the sumps and overflow into the sewer essentially doing a slow constant water change I actually had mine running 24-7 but it's probably a good idea to only run them like that when your there. I'm assuming your store has new MARS/PISCES I or II racks or will be getting them as part of this aquatics revamp. . . ? Yes No Maybe???
