Petco reviews

I realize that this review sounds very bitter but this is the pattern I've seen during my years at Petco. The best kinds of employees, the ones who are enthusiastic about their job, who love learning about and caring for animals and sharing that passion with customers, are the ones who will become the most bitter and disillusioned after working here. I hate it when we hire someone who is energetic and enthusiastic because I know that despite my best efforts, I will have to watch them slowly turn into a person who hates their job due to the animal abuse and neglect they're forced to witness and their complete powerlessness in getting anyone in upper management to listen or care. Store standards and animal care vary wildly from store to store and are based entirely on the level of engagement of the store staff. If the staff doesn't care about giving the animals proper care then the animals will not receive it and no amount of complaining to higher management will make a difference. I have seen and heard a very wide variety of animal abuse and things that would make great undercover PETA type videos, if only I'd had a way to record them. Do not work here if you care about animals. You will see horrible things on a regular basis and if you complain about them, you will be harassed by management until you quit or they invent some excuse to fire you. In close to 7 years with Petco, I have seen over half a dozen employees harassed and fired or quit after they raised legitimate concerns in good faith about animal abuse by general managers. The only reason I have kept my job is because I usually keep my head down and try to care for the animals as best I can while ignoring the abuse and neglect committed by my boss and coworkers. Here are some quotes from my general manager and other members of the management teams I've worked with: "When removing dead fish from the fish tanks(to be placed in a freezer), it's fine if you accidentally scoop out some live ones too. It takes too much time to get only dead ones." "It's ok if you forget to feed the fish every now and then. If they get really hungry then they'll just eat each other." I want to emphasize that this next quote is from the general manager of a pet store who had been manager for 3 years at the time: "I don't know anything about (area of animal care) and I don't want to know." I could write a book of quotes like this and specific instances of abuse. Managers will blatantly lie about feeding animals or caring for sick ones and will shrug their shoulders when sick animals die from lack of care. I have either raised concerns about these things myself or seen them raised by others to FIVE different district managers during my time with Petco. The response has been the same every time - issues were ignored, whistle blowers were retaliated against, nothing changed, animal abuse continued. Obviously this is not a problem with a specific store or manager but direct corporate policy. As mentioned above, Petco has good policies on paper but they are just window dressing and the reality is abuse, neglect, and open retaliation against anyone who complains. What else? You can also expect the typical favoritism you get at places like this. Example: in theory, our internal employee recognition program provides money each month for the employee of the month to be taken out to lunch. In practice, there is no employee of the month and each month the general manager buys lunch for herself and a few of her favorite employees. If you're not a favorite you won't be scheduled that day. Hours for salaried employees are not tracked so your general manager can and will arrive late, leave early, spend well over an hour on lunch, and so on. If you're dumb enough to complain about this to the district manager, you will be told that they will "look into it" and the general manager will be told your name and what you said and, per protocol, you will be openly retaliated against until you quit. If you contact the corporate human resources department and tell them that you're being retaliated against for whistle blowing? They will forward your "concerns" to the district manager who will relay them to the general manager he hired who will ramp up the harassment as a result. I have seen this same pattern repeated in different stores with different general managers and different district managers. It's not an issue affecting only one store or one manager. It's corporate policy. By far the least ethical company I have ever worked for. The amount of hypocrisy in the corporate marketing regarding Petco's supposed love and care for animals is truly stunning from an insider's perspective. And yes, I'm still working here. Why? Because the vast majority of animal care is being handled by me, I am surrounded by coworkers who don't know and don't care to know anything about it and when I quit, dozens of animals will die from neglect and improper care. I mean that literally. Even when I'm only gone for a week or two for vacations, animals start dying.

- Leadership is completely lacking at Petco. We don’t have senior leaders, we have senior employees who are carving their own patches versus understanding and leveraging their teams existing skills and knowledge, and empowering them to be a part of the solutions and strategy-building sessions that are being held at rapid fire since the new regime got into place. In fact, entire departments currently have no organizational structure as this carving is happening, floating, with pockets of teams having largely no management, guidance, or understanding of when they will. - The revolving door on leadership has a Ground Hogs Day Effect on the underlying business. We are grossly behind where we should be with some basic retail and omni-channel innovations (I.e. voice mail for grooming, BOPUS, POS capabilities, online booking, training tools) as the organization has had to pause with each leadership change to absorb a good amount of do-over, office re-design to fit new leadership styles (ie. RIP Frenchies), and a handful of jazz-hands “our employees are everything” token gestures (ie. music in the cafeteria vs meaningful changes to the worst medical benefits I’ve ever seen). - The benefits are terrible. Graduates fresh out of school pay less for better benefits than we have here. And the out of pocket is alarming, even with THE BEST health care option we have to choose from. You know it's bad when you hand over your insurance card at some locations, and they visibly react to the co-pay and extra charges we brace ourselves for, AND always ask to connect you with someone to be sure they're reading it right. But yawhoo, we can sway to the grooving elevator music in the caf now so,... yeah us. - Employees are not valued at Petco. There is no employee development or growth planning or mentoring at Petco. None. Going to a conference is something you have to beg for in most departments and training is non-existent. Promotion planning or rotation of top talent to develop rounded out skills to retain and grow them is something that does not appear to exist here. If actions are proof, retention of employees clearly isn't of interest to this leadership team - with increasingly more and more confusing organizational structures (or lack thereof), continued lack of clarity on roles and responsibilities, almost no due diligence to understand individual value, contribution, job scope, or ambitions, and a new top down approach to collaboration that feels more like “do as I say”, actions are speaking very loudly. - Consultants are the new “go-to smart employees” at Petco. New leadership hasn’t bothered to survey existing employees... but rather, gone out and layered on a ton of relationship complexity, role sort confusion, and extra work for us by bringing in a bunch of external consultants and agencies to ‘figure it out for us’. Shame on them for the expense and employee churn that is coming from that, not to mention the way it devalues all the work that came before them. History is a college discipline for more reasons than folklore - to be learned from. And we didn't all just wake up yesterday with no memory or good ideas. Perhaps if they could make efforts to understand and remove the 'why we didn'ts' vs. assuming we didn't have the idea in the first place, it would result in less out of pocket to consultants and more retention of talented and passionate employees.