While I completely agree that the manager needs to do a better job in representing himself as a responsible fish keeper, we need to realize that not everyone is like us (the few, the proud, the fish-brained), even the people who work at or manage these stores. If the guy was the manager of the whole store, maybe he's a dog person and the specialty manager of the fish department set the tank up for him. You could march in there guns blazing and the guy could say, "Oh, I had no idea. Jim takes care of that thing for me. I just think it looks nice."
There are also a large number of people out there (and I'm sure some of them work at Petsmart) who are involved in the hobby but never visit a site like this one to find out the majority opinion and the "right" way to do things from seasoned vets. The Drs. Foster & Smith's website is one of the few non-forum sites I have found with a wide variety of complete and accurate information on any kind of fish you could want (they are actually a little over-cautious for me in a lot of cases). You have to take into account where and how that person got his fish information from. If it was a book they got out of the library, a mentor of some kind, or just from trial and error, they might not know everything they should. They were hired because they successfully kept aquaria and demonstrated a basic knowledge of the hobby, not because they were experts in the field. The specialty manager at my local Petsmart insists that dip tests are better than drip tests and backs it up with his BS in biology. Who's to say somewhere along the line whoever set up that tank didn't get some false information to say that that number of chiclids could survive in that size tank?
