My primary experience with Petco has circled around the desire to place blame in associates that have not yet reached 90 days in order to alleviate a responsibility gap. Understaffed, strained teams are disrespected, bullied and threatened with the possible "red-flag", demotion or termination.
Accountability is a two-way street. As a leader, if you desire to have a particular result, you must present the example, outline a practical risk method to attain it and be willing to entertain questions or concerns about the process. Choosing to wait until a failure occurs, point a finger and tell someone "they could show up in the news" is unhelpful and fruitless.
Petco employs (or chooses to use) no dedicated monetary budget for training at any store position. In short, a company that holds animal welfare above all will not spare a few hours pay to have a newly hired associate or leader work with an approved training partner to learn animal safety.
The response to this lack of information is as you may guess, computer based learning. Reflecting back, no financial payroll investment is placed aside for training thus the computer merged is futile because it is not utilized in lieu of new employees being forced into active store positions prematurely to meet financial restraints.
Payroll is based on sales configuration with both regard to volume of animals on hand. This is particularly stressing considering each Petco maintains a wellness room which separates unhealthy or hurt animals from their counterparts on the selling floor. In short an animal may require a specialized treatment requiring an hour to complete like a reptile soak to aid in skin shedding. No additional payroll is incurred. Furthermore, payroll dollars are routinely cut throughout the week meaning even if a time balance has been designed to meet each need, upper management can simply dismiss it in light of reduced income.
