Finding Life and Love in a Pet Store

One of my first jobs out of college was working in a pet store. I had grown tired of waitressing which had been my part time job throughout high school and college. I was living in Nashua at the time. My boyfriend and I were renting a room from a local woman. She hadn't really been all that pleased about renting to a couple since the original agreement had been between her and my boyfriend's family while he was going to school. The move to our own apartment couldn't come quick enough for all involved. So I took the first job that came along that didn't involve waiting tables.

The pet store was called Docktor Pet. I suppose they threw the k in the word doctor hoping it would somehow absolve them of the assumptions the word would conjure up with potential customers, although the word also served as a way to somehow legitimize the selling of living, breathing things. One gimmick the store used to further the image was to make it mandatory that the sales people all wear white lab coats. I learned quite a lot about marketing just from those two years with that company. I also learned about franchises. The owner was a hard man whom we rarely saw in the store. He didn't seem to care much about the people who worked for him, let alone the merchandise he was selling. To him it was just about the bottom line. The funny thing is, 25 years later I can't remember the names of my manager or most of my other coworkers, but I remember the owner's name without any struggle with recall.

Our pay was based solely on commission. The salespeople made money on everything they sold, from the $1000 exotic birds to the 20 cent goldfish and everything in between. We also sold dogs, rodents, fish and on rare occasion cats. I became one of two top selling salespeople in the store, consistently outselling my coworkers who spent the majority of their days standing in front of the dog windows hoping to score one big sale on a puppy. I spent my day quietly ringing up just about every other sale in the store. I quickly learned that the family coming in looking for a gerbil for little Billy would be back someday to upgrade the inexpensive tank for the expensive plastic Habitrail set up. It would be only human nature to want the nice young lady who proved so helpful the first time to help them out again. Likewise in the fish department. That 20 cent goldfish often became a big money fish tank set up a few months later.

That is where my sole competition came from, the young man who spent a good portion of his day in the fish department. He maintained the tanks and knew everything there was to know about caring for fish. Our manager loved to feed the competition between us and each month made it a point to let us each know how the other was doing. The surprising part of this competition was that we were both the shyest, most introverted people you would ever come across. We raked up sales, not by being in-your-face, gotta-make-a-deal salespeople. We made the sales by simply answering questions and letting the products, or I should say, pets, sell themselves. I ended up nearly marrying that young man, and he went on to a career selling computer products that ended up netting him a 6 figure income 20 years ago.

One of the hardest parts of the job and the part I hated most, was the morning stroll through the store before we opened. If you were the lucky person coming in to open up, you were the one who had to check all the cages and tanks to make sure there weren't any sick or dead animals. Every day there were dead fish to net out of the tanks, and nearly as often there were dead hamsters, gerbils or mice to deal with. The hamsters were the worst because the live ones in the tank tended to make dinner out of the one that died. I quickly grew to despise hamsters. I still hate them. Not just because of their cannibalistic tendencies, but also because they were just plain nasty little critters. At least once a week I was getting bit by one of them and those teeth of theirs left nasty, deep cuts. The only bite worse than theirs was a bite from a cockatiel. Another nasty critter that I steered clear of as much as possible.

Birds were messy, and often obnoxiously loud. Gerbils never stopped digging. That's all they ever did, dig, sleep, eat and dig some more. Cute little mice created the biggest stench. The upkeep on fish tanks was only outdone by the upkeep on puppies. Guinea pigs, rabbits and rats were about the easiest, cleanest, most pleasant pets. Rats were the biggest surprise of course. Not many people see the pleasure in owning a rat. However, I was forever grateful that we never sold bugs or reptiles in that store. Not that reptiles bother me that much, but the bugs we would have had to sell to feed them would have been most unpleasant for me.

While several of my coworkers would let loose puppies to run around the store, jumping on customers, peeing on the floor, I would invariably grab a rat to sit on my shoulder. They were more then happy to nestle down in my shoulder length hair and hang out there all day. It became quite a selling tool, even if the customer I was assisting was looking for fish food.

One day a family came in with a box of young, mini-lop rabbits. They had hand raised and loved the rabbits, but the family found it difficult to sell them, so asked if we would buy the whole lot of them. Lop eared rabbits grow to be among the largest rabbits. They can outweigh most cats and some small dogs. Mini-lop rabbits are smaller than their cousins, but still grow to be about the size of a normal house cat. Their main feature are their ears which lay flat rather than stand up straight. They were beautiful rabbits that came to us that day; ones that liked to be handled and stroked since they had been hand-raised. I immediately took a liking to one in particular. I would carry him around in the extra large pocket of my faux lab coat and feed him dog treats all day. He made for another great selling tool and within just a couple of days we had sold all his litter mates. On a whim, and because I had grown attached in those hours of carrying him around all day, I bought him. I named him Murray after Bill Murray because he made me smile. He ended up being one of the best pets I ever had, even if he did nibble the covers of all my vinyl records.

However, he was the final straw in my relationship with my boyfriend at the time. An argument ensued when I brought Murray into our apartment, even though I had never once complained about my boyfriend's annoying gerbils who kept me up half the night with their constant nocturnal digging. When my boyfriend went away for a week in Florida, without me, I decided it was the perfect time to move out. I found myself back in New London in my parent's house. And Murray wouldn't be the only pet I would bring home with me. I also ended up with a Welsh Corgi named Jessie.

Jessie was a little fireball when she came to the store. Like any dog bred for herding she was full of energy and spunk. Staying in a cage was too much for her. The stress brought on a severe case of mange. I actually didn't like her very much. I thought she was hyper and annoying. I paid little attention to her, even after she was relegated to the back "sick room" where she was only allowed to run around in the store after hours or out in the back storage area. Whenever I had to go in to the sick room, she was there bouncing around in her cage, yapping, happy to see someone. She may have looked awful with clumps of hair falling out, but she was still full of life and energy. After several weeks, she hadn't gotten any better and the vet told our manager that the likelihood of her making a full recovery was low. The owner of the store told the manager to put her down, she was now costing him money and there was no hope of selling her without hair.

Our manager didn't have the heart to put her down. He begged his employees to consider taking her at no cost and without the store owner's knowledge. I still held out. She was annoying, and I had already burdened my parents with myself and my rabbit. I certainly couldn't bring home a hyper, yappy dog too. One of my coworkers agreed to take her. It lasted less then a week. The coworker found the dog to be too much work and "untrainable". Jessie found herself back in that little cage in the back room. My manager, disheartened, made arrangements for the vet to put her down. Jessie seemed to sense her doom. She laid in her cage, quiet and sad. She no longer bounced around in her cage when someone came in the room. Her quiet broke my heart. I called my parents that day. They were not overly excited about another pet, but agreed to let me bring her home. She was nearly six months old when I brought her home, and ended up never really becoming fully housebroken, but she was the most loyal and loving companion I ever had the pleasure of knowing, even when I felt I wasn't always deserving of her loyalty. It's like she understood what I had done for her and never forgot. As for her mange, which I had been told would be a lifetime problem, it cleared up within a couple of weeks and never came back.

I ended up leaving the pet store because I felt during my training as assistant manager that I was being taken for granted and not being compensated for lost sales due to new duties being asked of me. However, it was an experience that taught me a lot about myself. I gained much self confidence during that time, as well as two wonderful pets and a fiancé who started me on a long road of recovery from depression and self destruction.