Name: Al Smith
Occupation: Pet-store manager
Background: Smith, 29, worked for a pet supply wholesaler and at another pet store before coming to Docktor Pet Center at the Golf Mill Shopping Mall in Niles. A lifelong area resident, Smith has been married for eight years and lives with his wife in Elk Grove Village.
Years in present position: 2
Of course I love animals, but that`s not what drew me to this job in the first place. Initially, I just needed more money to pay for my hobbies, which are fish. Besides fish, I have a dog and two cats, and I used to have birds.
What I like most about this job is making people happy, especially making kids happy. Whether it is with a goldfish or a parakeet or a puppy, you get to see that big smile when they walk out with it. That is the best part, without a doubt.
Selling a little kid his first goldfish is even more fun than selling some of the more expensive stuff. They get so attached to this goldfish. Then they come back and say: ”He died. What did I do wrong?” But all of us start somewhere. Probably most people start with the little stuff and work their way up.
The great majority of people just come in to look. They say they had no intentions of going home with a pet, but they fall in love with one, and that`s it. Then we have people who come in for months until one day they say, ”I`m taking this one home.” You always have people looking for a certain animal. They know just what they want, and to find it can be really tough. It might be a certain coloration that they`re looking for. Other people just fall in love; they don`t care what it costs or if it`s what they had been looking for. Everybody has it in his head somewhere. It`s just a matter of timing.
A lot of people are unrealistic about the pet they want. Usually it`s people who have just lost a pet and expect the new one to be just like the old one. It doesn`t happen. Usually we don`t know this about a person until later on. They come back expressing their dissatisfaction: ”My puppy used to do this, and now this one won`t.” They may have had one animal for 15 years, and they just expect a certain type of behavior.
A big hurdle is trying to get people to feed their animals properly. If you feed your dog a quality food it may cost a little more, but you feed your animal less, it goes to the bathroom less, its intestines work less and you end up with a much healthier pet. And if you continue it, they`ll live longer. When we explain this to people, they`re very receptive toward it. We don`t recommend table food for dogs and cats. We just recommend that you buy beef-or chicken-based foods, not soy-based foods. Puppies are designed to use a meat protein, and the soy protein doesn`t do quite as well for them.
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Sometimes poeple come in and they don`t seem like they should have pets. When that happens, we just don`t try too hard to sell them. We try and make sure they understand the pitfalls of owning a pet: Expect the biting, expect the chewing, that sort of thing. That`s about all you can do. You can`t really play traffic cop and say, ”No, you can`t have it.” There are times when you`d like to, though.
My best advice for people who want to buy a pet is to find out what their own needs are. What they can handle. Do they want a small dog that`s going to climb into their laps or a large dog that`s going to go hunting? Does the dog they`re interested in shed? Does it get to be 12 pounds or 70 pounds? They have to get a general idea of what they want and what they don`t want, and from there we can help them make choices to fit the categories they`ve asked for.
We try to explain to people how to get their children to react favorably to the pet. Some children need to be taught not to climb on a puppy`s back and ride it like a pony. Depending on the child`s age and how he or she behaves in the store, we can see some of the potential problems and help the parents out. We can say, ”Look, they`re 7-year-old boys. They really don`t want this dog. They`re beating it up here. When they get it home, they`re going to do the same.” But it`s all pretty much case-by-case because everybody`s situation is different. There are a lot of things you have to take into consideration.
People do try to return pets sometimes, but we state our policy when they buy the animal. We don`t accept returns, and that`s done for the welfare of the animals. It`s real stressful for the animals to be going back and forth. If you buy a pet as a gift for someone else, find some excuse to get the recipient in here and make sure this is what he or she really wants. From that point, find out what supplies the receiver of the gift has, and make sure the puppy goes home with everything it needs. That`s real important, especially on Christmas. You get a puppy home on Christmas morning and don`t have a bowl for his food, and you have a problem.
I`m in charge of purchasing, scheduling employees, keeping sales figures up and animal care-everything except paying the bills. The number of employees in the store at any one time can vary from three to nine, depending on the day of the week and the time.
Animal care is most important to us. We split it up into categories. We have one animal-care person in charge of puppies and kittens, for example, and that`s all they do. Every morning the entire floor is scrubbed from top to bottom and disinfected. All the kennels are cleaned and bleached. The puppies are checked, and those that need baths are given their baths. The cat cages are cleaned and disinfected every day. We sterilize everything we possibly can. All the birds and small animals and fish get fresh food and water every day, sometimes three or four times a day. We try and treat the puppies and other pets here as we would our own. The goal is to have this store so clean that it never has an odor. I`ve been in stores where it smells, and nobody wants to work in conditions like that.
The puppies take the most care-about 50 hours a week in care, for our kennels. We have anywhere from 20 to 30 puppies at a time. There are 35 kennels in the store.
Snakes are the only animals that people sometimes ask for that we don`t carry. That`s because we just don`t want to handle them. They don`t sell real fast. You`re supposed to have a license for the exotic pets, like monkeys, and it`s just cost-prohibitive to get into all that. And people shouldn`t really have exotic animals. I wouldn`t want them; the repercussions could be too great. I`d hate to be the one to sell someone a tiger and have it eat somebody up.
The animals are left alone for most of the night, but the mall security checks in on them. I`ve stayed late many times with an animal that`s ill. It`s not just the investment we have in these animals. If you see a puppy that`s sick and you can go home and not worry about it, you shouldn`t be in this business.
The biggest disaster we ever had was when an employee closed the kennel and forgot to lock it. We had all gone home, and as I sat down to dinner I got a call from the mall saying: ”You`d better get down here. You`ve got a puppy loose in the store.” By the time I got back to the store the puppy had probably started to eat about 35 or 50 different pieces of rawhide. He was having a ball, and there was stuff all over the store. When I walked in, the puppy looked at me as if to say, ”Wow! Here`s somebody else to play with.”
He did a real good number on the store.
We had a bird get loose once, and he ate quite a bit of food in the store. Then we couldn`t find him because he had eaten his way into a box and was living in it. We`ve had hamsters get out, and they`re real hard to find, but we`ve been lucky enough to find every one of them. These things seem funny now, but they weren`t at the time.
I often get attached to the animals and don`t want to give them up. I ask the people who buy them to bring back pictures. Most customers will do that. In one case my wife got just as attached as I did, and we had to bring the puppy home. But that`s the way it is with these animals. We get a tremendous amount of retired people who can`t have animals, and they come in and visit us and play with a different puppy every day. It`s good because it exercises the puppies and socializes them. It also brings a lot of happiness to some older people who no longer can have pets for one reason or another.