No, it's cool, Nemo likes freshwater!

[CaptainJillian]

The other day I was at Petco buying some filter pads for my fishtank and seeing if they had any of the fish I wanted in stock. I used to work for another pet store and Petco, so I was doing my thing and talking to the supernice sales guy that actually seems to know what he is doing, as opposed to most of the staff at this location.

A family walked up with a cart that had a Disney themed plastic tank (like 5 gallons, with an undergravel filter and hood and light, plus some Disney decorations) they also had a bag of rocks and some betta food. The sales guy went to help them and they indicated they wanted to purchase a "Nemo Fish." So, a clownfish. The sales guy looked in the cart and and asked if the supplies they had were going to be for the clownfish. Yes, they were. He then spends the next 15 minutes trying to explain to them that a) clownfish are saltwater fish and that kit was for freshwater and b) clownfish don't eat betta food.

He shows them some options on how to set up a decent little tank for a clownfish, but the cost would be higher than the plastic kit, so they say no and demand that he bag a clownfish for them. At this point, I am done and about to leave but I hear him tell them that he will be writing on their receipt that the fish has no warranty.

So basically they just paid like $15 to kill a fish. I'm sure their daughter will understand when Nemo dies.

[Twinblade]

I hope they don't give the poor kid nightmares over it. But it would teach the kid a lesson... that their parents are EW's and that stupid + life= death

[blas]

Are you allowed to deny sales?

I know cats and dogs are different than fish (and this is a different store), but one of the cashiers I love to BS with at PetSmart says that every employee there has the right to deny anyone adoption of a pet, if they feel for any reason that the pet won't be safe or won't be taken care of properly.

That cashier at PetSmart is so understanding.....whenever they have torties, he doesn't judge me for longingly staring at them and getting teary-eyed thinking of my beloved FatCat.

[CaptainJillian]

When I worked for Petco, which was a couple of years ago, basically we couldn't deny sales unless there was a blatant threat against the animal, such as "I'm going to buy this ferret, and then tie firecrackers to it until it explodes."
I think the sales guy thought they would change their mind when he told them that it would die and that they would not replace or refund the customer anything. I had to tell a few people the same thing when Nemo came out in theaters and I was working at a different store, and all of those people changed their mind.

(I know that putting a clownfish in freshwater is a direct threat to the animal, but for some reason the sales guy went the no warranty way instead of trying to escalate it.)

[blas]

Still sucks that the poor fish isn't going to make it

What an idiot father.

[CaptainJillian]

I know. A lot of people have an instant aversion to setting up a saltwater tank, but truth be told sometimes they can be easier than a freshwater as far as maintenance goes. The start up cost is slightly higher, but I think your choices as far as fish/coral/etc are far more varied with saltwater. It just seems like you say "saltwater" and people put their hands over their ears and shriek and run away.
I feel bad for the clownfish. I currently just have a tank of regular old comet goldfish and I am actually pretty attached to them.

[Micer]

I miss the set-up we used to have, had a bio-cube with some live rock, a few fish (tiny little clown fish, little crustaceans, anemone, ect) sadly all of them were destroyed when my better half's boss dumped a new fish on him to take care of, after swearing up and down that it would be fine in our tank, which proceeded to terrorize and kill everything.

I was actually a fresh water fan myself for a while until I saw how simple it was to get everything set up, so we're planning one of these days to set it up again and do some cast netting (We live by the Gulf) and repopulate the tank with some local species.

But that poor, poor fish ;_;

I need to poke Mr. Micer to post a few stories from his days at the pet-store (they finally shut down due to the manager/owner's utter incompetence and pack ratting tendencies which drove the paying partner to the store away) But I remember a few of them where customers would pick out a fish for the fact that it was 'pretty' despite his multiple warnings that that sort was very aggressive and would destroy everything else in the tank.

[teh_blumchenkinder]

o___o I would have kicked them out of the store. It's like saying "Oh, you breathe oxygen/nitrogen right? Uh... how about just nitrogen?"

[Mr Hero]

Ok what the FUCK! They've seen the movie. They know clown fish live in an OCEAN! And yet the family is setting up the tank for freshwater. My brain hurts.

[Brojekk]

Those people should NOT ever own any animals. The clerk should have refused the sale.

[Shalom]

You know, it occurs to me. I used to live ten minutes from the Atlantic Ocean. For my family it wouldn't have been a big deal to go down and fill up a tank of real seawater every now and then. (Five minutes from Sheepshead Bay, but the water in that would probably have killed anything within ten feet of the tank; the ocean is only a bit farther and less polluted. It's gotten cleaner in recent years, thank $DEITY.)

Yet we never thought about saltwater fish. Occasionally we'd get a goldfish, which would live until it died, and that was the end of it.

(I finally cajoled my parents into getting me a hamster. Fish were boring, and didn't live very long, whereas the hamster lived until it died of natural causes at the (for a hamster) advanced age of 2-1/2. Much more fun to play with, too. We eventually graduated to a cat, after which obviously no more hamsters.)

I miss the set-up we used to have, had a bio-cube with some live rock, a few fish (tiny little clown fish, little crustaceans, anemone, ect) sadly all of them were destroyed when my better half's boss dumped a new fish on him to take care of, after swearing up and down that it would be fine in our tank, which proceeded to terrorize and kill everything.

Yeah, not all fish are compatible. I was in someone's house once admiring his fishtank and all the fantastic critters swimming around in it, and he told me someone once sold him a baby octopus. Unfortunately this particular octopus was afraid of fish... so each time it saw a fish, it would make ink and swim to the other end of the tank. Whereupon it saw another fish, made more ink, etc. Inside of five minutes the entire tank water was purple. He had to give the octopus back to the store, because he didn't have another tank to keep it by itself in.

On the other hand, some fish seem to live happily together. The local hospital (where my son went for OT and speech) had in the old lobby a huge tank with lots of different fish in it. There was a puffer fish, a nemo-fish, a lionfish, one kind of generic-looking fish with one vertical red stripe that kept getting bigger each time I saw it (the fish, not the stripe) until it was longer than the width of the tank, an eel that spent almost all its time hiding under a rock at the bottom and occasionally poking out its nose, something electric blue-green with a long nose like an alligator, a couple that looked like hat feathers (black with white polka dots) which swam incredibly fast, and so forth. I used to love watching them, could sit there for hours, but when they got the new lobby opened, the old one was converted into the doctors' lounge and locked up, so we couldn't go watch the fish anymore.

There were some fantastic colors, but eventually I realised there was a black-light at the top of the tank, and that they didn't look like that in "real life".

[Kogarashi]

They've seen the movie. They know clown fish live in an OCEAN! And yet the family is setting up the tank for freshwater. My brain hurts.

But oceans and lakes are basically the same thing, right? /SC Logic

[Yarnil]

But oceans and lakes are basically the same thing, right? /SC Logic

But ofcourse, they are both wet

[mikoyan29]

But oceans and lakes are basically the same thing, right? /SC Logic

A friend of mine used to work in a seafood department and one day he was asked, "Do these ocean perch come from Michigan?".

[Frantic Freddie]

A friend of mine used to work in a seafood department and one day he was asked, "Do these ocean perch come from Michigan?".

My brother owned a seafood restaurant in Port Aransas,Texas (15 miles north of Corpus Christi) & people would ask if the Alaskan king crab legs were freshly caught