Reef nutrition

"New" LFS recommendation.

anathema

anathema

Guest
BARcard
I drive up 16th street a lot because it's on my route home. Often, I stop for groceries at Potrero center. When I do, I swing by petco because I like to stare at fish.

The Potrero center petco has always had reasonably healthy saltwater fish. For a long time, it was run by the wife of one of the ocean treasures employees. It's always been a clean store, but only for fish.

It's now stocking coral, snails, a few inverts, and they look reasonably healthy to me. My only complaint is lower lighting than I'd like to see.

If you ask for the current manager, Rachel, you will find that she is very knowledgeable and cares a lot about the store.

Considering our current lack of SF stores, I'm going to start buying here occasionally. In fact, I've already purchased a yellow striped Cardinal last week. It's doing great.

I know it's a petco, but I thought I'd point it out to you guys.
 
Petco is serious player in the marine aquarium when they acquired liveaquaria and with the possible merger with petsmart, I don't underestimate them changing the hobby for the better.
 
Well Petco didn't acquire liveaquaria so much as they acquired Dr Foster and Smith the parent company, which is more for the dog/cat market since that makes the aquarium side seem like a blip on the radar. I'm not sure merging with Petsmart will do much either since I don't believe they deal with saltwater except the dry goods side of things, and then in very limited amounts. Overall one large company swallowing up any competition has historically been bad for the consumer side of thing, having less choices is not good.

That said, Petco stores are run by corporate rules, individual stores have people taking care of them in different fashions. I'll give that one in Potrero center a try, if anything it's fairly easy to get to, either hop on the freeway, or if there's traffic hop on Bryant, and go up that way. The upside is there's parking, AND it's free. Plus if the wife wants to bug me she can always go to Sports Basement, or the SPCA and look at the animals there.
 
The manager did mention corporate is pretty inflexible on a lot of things. However, she did "bargain" with me when I wanted a couple hitchhiker corals that weren't on her list. She found a sku near my offer.

It's not amazing, but with the recent news that Steve is selling out and or retiring, we are down to the dregs here in the city.
 
Well I remember Steve saying he was going to retire back when I first started, although he's quite a bit older now and may be more serious. Last I heard was to his brother *shrug*.

Went to that place in SSF as people suggested, and it was fine enough, prices were a bit on the high side for any corals, and I think the guy who helped me was the one people have called unfriendly, he wasn't mean he just didn't seem very happy about anything :D
 
Lol manfried at Natural Life Aquarium yeah that guy is not people friendly.

Gave me the cold shoulder unfriendly vibe the whole time and when it was check out time he said Have a nice day :D. With a big smile too lol guess he knows about his reputation from yelp and is trying to fix it.
 
Enderturtle said:
Lol manfried at Natural Life Aquarium yeah that guy is not people friendly.

Gave me the cold shoulder unfriendly vibe the whole time and when it was check out time he said Have a nice day :D. With a big smile too lol guess he knows about his reputation from yelp and is trying to fix it.
Click to expand...

You just need to get to know him, He's a ok cat. I think he takes time to get acquainted to his customers

I used to buy fish and inverts before at the Petco in Potrero back in the day.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top