By Brittany Gehrett
When you think of Petsmart, you think of the ultimate pet superstore. A place where you can bring your pets with you to shop for whatever they may need. They have food, toys, a veterinary clinic, and a grooming salon. Their motto is “Where pets are family,” but do they really care about your animals, or are they just about getting your money?
In October of 2006, 5 Petsmart employees were fired due to supposed “safety violations.” All of them were let go in an instant with no signs they would ever be terminated. What really happened will be cleared up in this article.
Over the last several years, the actual corporation itself was having their own safety violations and not giving a care to fix them. Myself being a former employee, I saw all of this first hand. For almost an entire year, there was a smell coming from a hole in the wall that resembled the odor of natural gas. Everyone in the grooming salon felt faint all the time and would occasionally black out. Katie Stamatelos, the former salon manager, sent several emails to corporate about this issue, but no one actually cared to take a look.
It wasn’t until several months later when Dustin, a current employee (he was new at the time) found a few litters of dead mice in the hole and someone finally was sent out to inspect it. It turned out that all off the sewage pipes from the entire strip mall, which is 7 stores, were all leaking through the hole into the tiny grooming salon. The reason everyone felt so faint was because there was methane gas flowing into the air that all of the employees and animals were breathing. Methane gas is the type of gas in cigarettes and cow gas, and being enough to make people black out is a lot.
In September ’06, an employee at the time named Kim Knighton, brought a video camera into the salon to take small video clips of her favorite dogs, because she was making a documentary of her entire life. She would make video clips right when she woke up, on outings with her husband, right when she went to bed, before and after work, and so she took a few small ones during her work day, which weren’t at all harmful to any human or animal. When an employee from a different department had apparently “tattled” that she had a camera, it became an immediate issue.
Two days later three people from corporate had come to the store and questioned every person in the salon over a period of about 3 days. They did more harassing and accusing than questioning. They knew the answers to everything they asked, but asked the certain questions that they did in order to try to catch someone in a lie and/or make them feel stupid according to every associate I talked to. They refused to believe that her camera was for personal use only.
They believed that she was taking videos and pictures of everything that was wrong with the salon that they had not fixed, to expose to the public so people could see the place where they were leaving their pets. Because of what they thought she was doing, they fired her and everyone else who had been there long enough to know about it all. The excuse of termination was “safety violations.” When I asked for a specific example of what any of the employees had done wrong, the store manager replied, “Uh, I don’t have one.”
In reality, they are just trying to cover up their lack of care to the animals and employees. 5 employees were fired in the last few months of 2006 for knowing “too much” of how Petsmart was really running its stores. I was so enraged at the time for the accusations of taking pictures to expose to the public, that I went back and did just that. All the scum and broken kennels were of course covered up immediately after termination of the previous employees just incase it was exposed, but I talked to a current employee last week, and everything went back to being the same. “Everything is out of control in there,” she stated, “they moved a bunch of cashiers into the salon because it is so short staffed, and no one knows what they are doing.”
On March 13th, I spoke with a now ex-Petsmart customer. Elice Zimmerman had taken her collie Scout into the grooming salon to be groomed. She had said that all the dogs were out of control and the employees seemed to not know how to handle it. She made the decision not to take her dogs to Petsmart anymore when a dog was continuously barking and a male employee grabbed the dog by the neck and yelled in its face “Shut the f**k up!” in front of customers.
A girl had gotten suspended that same day for going into the hotel a few minutes before her shift began for the past week to count how many dogs didn’t have water, so she could write to corporate of the problem that people were not taking proper care of the dogs. Management quickly took her off the schedule before she could get through to the CEO, they didn’t want her causing any more “problems” for the companies income.
Don’t get me wrong, it is a great place for toys, food and supplies, but you might want to think twice about where you are leaving your best friends. Petsmart cares so much more about the profit than the pets, that they actually fire people instead of fixing the problems so they won’t get bad exposure and loose money. The best they do is get rid of the people they are afraid will expose them.
(Back to top)
