This weekend I contributed to the death of the neighborhood retailer and I am not sure how I feel about it.  My wife and I have three cats and live in a small town between West Palm Beach and Ft. Lauderdale Florida and I need to get cat food.  The small store I have been going to is no more than a mile away from my house and I have been going there for years even after a Petsmart opened in between my neighborhood store and my house.  But this weekend, things changed.   For reasons beyond my understanding, each of my cats eats different food and my neighborhood store doesn’t always have the different types required by my little critters so I decided to stop in the Petsmart and check it out.

Upon entering the Petsmart I felt like I was walking into a Home Depot with barking.  It is like a small  town with a hospital, grooming facility and pet training classes (I wonder if they can train my cats to eat the same food) and it is enormous.  The aisle with the cat food had more choices than I knew existed.  I ended up walking around for 20 minutes playing with the animals and watching this trainer trying to convince this mean Chihuaha to sit on command.  Little Rufus had different ideas.

I started to think about what use to be the neighborhood stores where I grew up on Long Island.  The pharmacy and the 5 and dime had the same people behind the counter and the same owners all the time while I was growing up.  We really had a connection to those stores even of compared to superstores, they were severely lacking.  My neighborhood pet store here in Florida is really just a small superstore.  The face of the store to me is some high school kid that change constantly.  I have no idea who the owner is and while  I go frequently, I don’t know the workers and they certainly don’t know me.

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Maybe while I am making the purchase from Petsmart, I wasn’t really helping to kill the neighborhood store, maybe they were doing it to themselves.  You go to a store for service and products, if you aren’t going to provide me with every possible product available you better provide me with great service.  Oh yea, as I was looking for cat food, a Petsmart employee walked up and started rattling off information about various snacks for cats and asked if mine like Tuna, Chicken or Turkey.  So maybe now, the “big box” stores like Petsmart are also offering great service.