Do you leave your local fish store disappointed? Why is that?

[Jilly92]

Living in New Hampshire there’s nothing I have to drive a minimum of one hour each way to get RODI water and decent but pricey corals/frags. Sucks. I have ordered online and had great luck and quality but hate to pay $40-$50 for shipping.

You can get an rodi system for $70 on Amazon thats easy to install. We installed ours in one of our showers and have used it 6 months now and just now replacing one filter. The tds always comes at 0. I can send you link if you like

 

[MightyMO]

Idk if dude is on here or not so I'll keep my reasoning to myself... Don't want to shoot myself in the foot...

 

[lefkonj]

Living in New Hampshire there’s nothing I have to drive a minimum of one hour each way to get RODI water and decent but pricey corals/frags. Sucks. I have ordered online and had great luck and quality but hate to pay $40-$50 for shipping.

I would invest in an RODI system, you will save it in time and gas quickly.

 

[Anchor]

Yes, I am dissappointed that they dont have more of what I want when I get there., I can only attend on weekends and they get thier shipments in during the week.. Most is gone when I et there.. But I try not to leave empty handed.. snails, and some dry goods usually leave with me.. AND until I can get a setosa or other Monti to survive, I wont adventure into sticks

So, I mostly leave disappointed. But not by any fault of the stores I frequent

 

[Olefreebe]

Central alabama here. Hour plus drive to get to any fish store. As we dont have many around I dont have a good comparison. Definitely dont look like any in the pictures y'all been sharing. At this point if they have fish or coral I guess it was worth the drive...

 

[SPitts6654]

10000% not a mistake. I wasn’t going to say but it was at WWC so you go figure

My experience is WWC and TSA offer lower prices in store for their livestock than they do online. The only time I buy online is when it’s a better sale/deal than they are offering in the store.

WWC’s Super Store by Sea World is a little more pricey than the small store in Winter Park, likely a little “tourist mark up” there. The selection is beyond what I’ve seen at most stores, if you want to walk out with a complete setup for 100+ gallon system same day, no problem...then you get 10% back in points. So if you buy a system from them (dry goods are priced where you’d expect them to be), you can get some great corals when you’re ready for basically free.

I actually go to TSA more often than WWC, they have just as good of a selection, the prices are better than WWC, the’ll work with you if you feel like they are a little high, they’ll order or cut almost anything you you want and have an awesome tank show room.

 

[brandon429]

I leave my fish store beyond frustrated when the water they sell me is 1.020 or .019

i then go buy more salt, add back to sw I already paid for, and do jerk mode a bit. The reason I don’t mix my own is because I dont to want buy ro di maker, so I just pay for salt twice over.

 

[Nitcrawler]

I hate my lfs they keep ordering the same dang fishes all the time,

 

[ZoWhat]

JUST THE OPPOSITE....

my LFS is disappointed in ME when I leave empty-handed saying, "when's your next fish order?"

.

 

[paintman]

Hate going to an LFS that has huge tank packed with beautiful corals but none of them are for sale. Then you go look at the for sale stuff and it's nothing but junk.

 

[Michael Biando]

It's an awesome thing to have a local fish store that carries healthy fish, beautiful coral and all the supplies that you need! But in reality this isn't a reality for must of us. We all know there are MANY of these amazing local fish stores in the world, they exist, but for most of us it's not the truth. So what is so disappointing about a lot of these stores? Let's talk about it today!

1. What are the most disappointing aspects that make a local fish store bad or makes you leave disappointed? (no names please)

2. Do you have an amazing LFS near you and if so why are they great?

@TopShelfAquatics store

 

[Michael Biando]

It's an awesome thing to have a local fish store that carries healthy fish, beautiful coral and all the supplies that you need! But in reality this isn't a reality for must of us. We all know there are MANY of these amazing local fish stores in the world, they exist, but for most of us it's not the truth. So what is so disappointing about a lot of these stores? Let's talk about it today!

1. What are the most disappointing aspects that make a local fish store bad or makes you leave disappointed? (no names please)

2. Do you have an amazing LFS near you and if so why are they great?

@TopShelfAquatics store

I frequent two local fish stores. One is very close to where I live the other is a 20 minute drive. I often leave the store closer to me disappointed by the service. I’m ready to spend money but it’s tough to get somebody to help me, they are busy cleaning tanks or doing other busywork. The store that’s a longer drive has much better service and knows my name. As a result I find myself making the longer drive because I feel they appreciate my business instead of seeing me as an interruption of their work.

 

[Butcher333]

1) The options are pretty limited.
2) Everything is tiny. You have to grow them to the size they use to be for sale at.
3) Everything is under too little PAR. No matter where I place something in my tank it goes into light shock. It never use to be that way.
4) One of the LFS has no pricing, so you literally have to ask “how much is this”. Makes me feel like they’re just making it up as they go.
5) All the good stuff is “NFS” or “SOLD” or twice the price that’s marked because of some trait I’m not even able to see that distinguished it from the ones that already sold.
6) Color changing coral. Yellow is really green, red is orange. Etc.

 

[SaltISlife]

The new local fish store that opened in my area a year ago, called Nova tropicals in Northern VA, is a great store, clean some aptasia in the tanks though but its maintained with aptasia X. The corals he gets are amazing and ive bought a bunch of them.. Torchs, and gonioporas and so forth.. Unfortunatly he only stocks, LPS corals and some basic zoanthids. I warned him about his lights on his 8 foot long glass frag tanks when he set the store up. He got some radeon g4 or g5's the XR15's.. Only has 4 on each 8 foot tank, i told him the lighting wouldnt be enough and he also only keeps the blues and uv on.. We checked his par the other day with a 600$ par meter a friend had, and it was only 110 par directly below the light 6 inchs in the water, and fell off to like 50 only a few inchs to the sides.

He has had thousands in SPS corals die, so thats why he only carrys LPS and stuff now, plus most average people seem to only want the wavy lps corals. The owner doesnt seem very in the know for SPS either, he said hes been doing it for 30 or 40 years but he must be a slow learner. His store his money he can do what he wants, but its dissapointing to have a local store 10 min from me, with a great owner, clean store.. and only carries lps.

I hate driving 40-50 min out to the other shop with a nasty smart butt manager, and prices that fluctuate too much just for sps. Hate spending money in places like that. I wish Nova tropicals would carry SPS, and change the lighting so he can support those corals. Unfortunatly.. this is the problem with LED lights you need really expensive lighting with LED's to get the same par output that T5's can produce.

This is actually a pet peave of mine in local stores, most shops the par is way too low, 100 or lower.. They just keep lower end LED lighting and turn the uv up to make them glowy to sell and thats it. I get that they need to make money... But this also kills sps, or browns them out and causes other issues.. I also hate having to ask if they can change the color spectrum from just uv to white/pink/blue so i can actually SEE the coral.


Only one shop 1 hour away uses T5's and Halides and actually grows their own corals to frag.. The rest just use LED's to make em glowy and they buy corals online and re-sell them

 

[ingchr1]

I don't really have what I would call a LFS, but there are numerous shops in the 45 minute to 1.5 hour radius. I have visited most all of them. The ones I left disappointed or put off by I will not go back to. There are two that I have chosen to frequent.

 

[jskidds2294]

Because it feels like quarantined aquaculture is becoming harder to come by as time goes on then getting better. Even stores like WorldWideCorals and TopShelfAquatics who charge typically above average premium prices because of their reputation in the coral side of the hobby have admitted to me and others if reviews are to be believed that they just throw fish in the selling displays and don’t quarantine them a lot of the time. Nothing makes me more disappointed then going into a lfs and seeing more then one dead fish in the tanks from lack of quarantine. My fish are to important to be risked with a new addition from a store like that that shares filtration. Also almost no lfs I’ve ever been to is willing to show even if they have quarantine tanks even when it’s slow. Then you have the fact that most of the stores here in central Florida have no garentees for healthy live stock in place and try to make you out to be the bad guy if you want your money back for a fish that dies in the first two days of getting it from a disease that takes a week at-least to kill it meaning it came sick. Then if they do give money back it’s like partial store credit or some bs like that. Like I’m ever gonna want to go back to your store.

Really miss the LFS’s I used to go to in Ohio for my freshwater stuff called Agnoquatics, and SomethingFishy. It’s run by some of the nicest people I’ve ever met in this hobby and they truly went out of their way to help customers and didn’t make you feel bad. More stores especially those in Florida need better customer service policies and an overall personality change if the owners think it’s okay to conduct business in these manners. It one of the main factors pushing my wife and I to create an online fish store with a very different model. Not ready to say anything about it yet but with what I’ve seen from stores around me I think it could make quite a dent in the Florida market.

 

[tharbin]

I always leave disappointed because I always go in to just look and always end up spending money.

I would not say I have a great LFS near me but there are 5 in the Phoenix metro area that I would consider very good.

 

[MarshallB]

Most of the stores in my area are pretty small with a limited selection. One place I normally shopped usually kept me pretty happy. I previously bought some montis from said store which ended up introducing monti eating nudies into the tank. Suspecting it was from the LFS, I went back and noticed all of their hard coral being eaten away and they still had them for sale, for the same price, no care in the world.

I haven't been back since.

 

[jskidds2294]

Most of the stores in my area are pretty small with a limited selection. One place I normally shopped usually kept me pretty happy. I previously bought some montis from said store which ended up introducing monti eating nudies into the tank. Suspecting it was from the LFS, I went back and noticed all of their hard coral being eaten away and they still had them for sale, for the same price, no care in the world.

I haven't been back since.

That attitude feels like it’s becoming more common atleast in the saltwater side. It’s really bad.

 

[Reefing102]

I chose sometimes. Most of the time, never, as I already know what to expect. I occasionally go in hoping they got that something special in their shipment only to find they didn’t but that’s on the rarer occasion