how far would you drive for a quality pet shop?

[nonamesleft47]

I have thought many times about opening a store front. I worked in a mom & pop for 4 years in high school and learned a ton. I have been running my own aquarium maintenance service for 7 years. My main reason for not opening one is that I do not have 1 million+$ in reserve at my disposal and do not want to be married to a store. I am lucky and have a great day job that allows me to piddle with aquariums at night and on weekends and I get paid for it.
1. trans ship. Small shops get their supplies/fish from the same local distributors. Find new ways to get around these distributors. I am helping a friend get set up as a trans shipper so he can get fish to sell at his store for the same price as the distributor pays or less. For this you will need thousands of gallons to hold fish until sale. The up side is you can offer fish for less than retail and still make a huge profit. Buy fish food/water conditioners in bulk and offer RO water. These will attract the experienced fish keepers who are interested in your high dollar fish.
2. Forget online. Unless you can match Big Al's or Smith and Foster forget about it.
3. Dog and cat food will pay rent but unless you can hold inventory like Petsmart and can turn food over before it goes bad it will be a money pit and collect dust on the shelf.
4. Prepare to work long hours-Employees will steal, call in sick and in general are not trustworthy. Be prepared to work 14+ hour days for many days at a time.
5. Look seriously into doing aquarium maintenance. Most of the shops in my area do it as it is basically free money and gets people in their shop. I have agreements with several shops where they send me business that they do not want. I get the crazies and old women who answer the door naked (yes, it has happened) and they get the good stuff. It is an odd business and I work hard to please my clients but it is worth it.
6. Keep your shop CLEAN. People who are casual animal keepers or new to the hobby do not understand why a pet shop smells the way it does. It smells that way because animal food has to go somewhere. The shop I worked in we cleaned cages and used lysol every morning and at 3:00 pm before the night rush. We mopped with bleach EVERY night before leaving and had air cleaners running 24 hrs a day.
7. If you decide to do grooming (personally I wouldn't bother) Rent the space out to a groomer, don't pay the groomers as employees.
8. Bait-Why? Is there a huge call for bait in your area? Are you close to a waterway? Unless you are going to be open early in the morning when fishermen need bait I wouldn't worry about minnows. For your feeders make sure you keep them healthy. In a shop with a central system I always look at the feeders first. If they are dying I never buy from the store as the rest of the fish share that water. What we did that made a huge difference is we bought goldfish/guppies in huge quantities and held them in stock tanks in the back. Hi-cap filtration and treated for disease/fed before we sold them. We held a small number in the store and netted out of the stock tank. Jam 500 goldfish in a 10 gallon, no wonder they look sick.
9. Stay away from central system tanks and go with a large tank drilled semi automatic system and use dark gravel. There was a local shop with white sand as substrate. All the fish looked horrible and you could see every piece of fish poo in them.

If i set up a shop I would concentrate on fish, reptiles and small animals. I would leave the dog/cat stuff to Petsmart and concentrate on what they are not good at. Knowledgable, FRIENDLY!!! help and support and service. I can't stress friendly enough as I have seen more than one privately owned store be taken down when the employees/management became jaded and turned away customers.

Just some thoughts from someone who has done a ton of research on it but can't take the leap.

 

[tolawdjk]

I discovered a shop this weekend that I will drive out of my way for. And a shop I will never frequent again.

My weekend plans had me going across the metro area from my normal stomping grounds. I figured I might as well see what I could find over there and see if i could track down a couple specific fish I hadn't been able to find in the immediate area. Nothing too out of the ordinary, but looking for specific sexes of specific species.

First one, popped in, saw the species I was looking for and finally dragged an employee to help me. I asked him about sexing and his reply was "oh, you can't sex those, you just have to pick one and get lucky. I would pick the biggest." Now, I may not be the smartest pencil in the drawer, but I do know that you most definately can sex pearl gouramis, and not too difficultly. I politely excused myself and left. I wouldn't have been so put off about it, but it was the mater of fact way he tried to disuade me from what I was wanting. If you don't know something, ask. Odds are, in a specialty store like a good LFS, someone is going to walk through that door with more knowledge than you. If you don't know something, admit it.

Second store I went to was a little further out of the way, but was fulllll of tanks. And fairly well stocked with rarer stuff...not your normal big box things. Probably a dozen different types of rainbows, cories, pure strain angels. Yes, the prices were maybe 10% higher, but they all looked infinately healthier. And the kicker was that, as the guy explained to me, the holidays and the weather hed kept them from restocking, and he apoligized for the low stocking numbers! I was dumbfounded. The store is further away and I'm bound to hit rushhour traffic coming or going, but they have a new regular customer. I will also be taking excess stock and inverts as they stated they are interested.

So.

1) When you don't know something, admit it.
2) Stock stuff you can't find at the "Pet X"'s. You won't be able to compete with them on price. If you do stock, make sure you are visibly healthier.

 

[Cerianthus]

If one knows where to get fish from and can handle in bulk (box/half-box lot), lfs can compete easily with chain stores.

Competitiveness has lot to do is ability to minimize losses as well.
I think chain store mortality rate is very very high but still able to stay in business thus if lfs can keep the mortality rate lot lower than chains, very possible and easily achievable, price wouldnt be an issues as long as lfs dont go thru wholesalers.

As mentioned prev, retail exp def will play important role provided lfs where one works/worked operates direct shipments from farms/rec'd thru transshippers/tranship oneself.

 

[Slacker87]

About 100 miles round trip to go to a quality fish store but for your every day supplies we have a petco about 10-15 miles away. That petco does not have a very good selection of fish but the one about 25 miles away does. We only have one LFS that I am aware of and it is 46miles away but I only go there about once a month now. We had one open and close in a matter of months. They advertised a lot on the radio but never had a good selection. They did say they could order any fish you want and they were quite friendly. I just don't know if I would do something like this with the economy the way it is but I wish you the best of luck I certainly wish we had more lfs here.

 

[MickRC]

About 35 years ago I found a great lfs in my hometown that I used for years. One day I went in and they had a going out of business notice. I asked why as they were always busy. Turns out that somebody filed a complaint that their parking lot was outside the business district zoning. And it was by 25 feet because it was across the street from their place and the zone ended in the middle of the street. The fact that nobody caught it for 7 years made no difference, and the owners were stuck with a business without parking within a block of the store.

The other lfs in town was decent but they ended up going out of business within a year of the other shop. In their case some teens broke into the shop and poured motor oil into all of the tanks, wiping out their stock. They were closed for a month or so cleaning up and restocking and right after they reopened, the place was torched (supposedly by relatives of one teen that went to jail for the first vandalism). You might think it was in some city with a gang problem, but this happened in a small city in the Rockies.

Getting back to the subject - I voted 20 miles because I have two good (not great) stores within that radius, and no great stores within 100 miles. When I was stationed in Tacoma I used to drive all the way to Seattle and Federal Way for my fish. So that was 60 miles each way for one of the shops.
When I was stationed at the Pentagon, I would go about 30 miles each way for fish. The first place I went to was very good so I never did a lot of investigating other places.