Beam Me Up Scottie



When I was a boy, pet shops were strange, slightly alien places with large open sacks of smelly dried this and that lying next door to aquariums full of neon tetras and buckets full of millet strings .
They were totally utilitarian places, that often smelt of leather.....and when you took a second look, there was always some sort of depressed feathered creature asleep on the counter.

That was then.
Now it's all very high tech .....it's gone all Star Trek
Last night Chris and I attended a 'friends and family' open day at a newly opened pet superstore.
We were invited by my twin Janet, who has, after 30 years in the same job, has just moved  careers into the modern day petshop retail sector and given the fact that our combined age is well over 100, the night still felt as though I was going to a school open day.

The pet superstore was a surprise to be sure!
The whole place was totally space age! With rows upon rows of gleaming pet food, a pet grooming centre ,more medications
that you would see in your average hospital pharmacy and squeaky clean miniature hamsters climbing across their rope swings within futuristic aseptic containers, the place looked more like Waitrose than the pet shops I knew from old.

It was nice to be there to support my Sister on her first official opening day... But we needn't have worried....working along side kids just out of their teens , and faced with handling snakes, rats and bearded lizards and a computerised till more complicated than in ITU ventilator  ...she looked as though she had been working there for years.

Off to London later tonight.......meeting up with Nuala..my touchstone



28 comments:

  1. Anonymous12:12 am

    Good luck to Janet......sounds like a fun career move.

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  2. tell Janet good luck on her new job from me as well.

    Gill

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  3. So I went to the pet shop and asked the owner, "I would like to purchase a 'peeve' please." The rather perplexed owner of the pet shop told me he did not have a pet peeve. Now my pet peeve is the fact that the owner of a pet shop does not have a pet peeve.

    Enough of my crap. Sorry about that. All the best to Janet with her new job. All the best to you and apologies for not visiting your blog lately. Being close to sixty and spending quite a bit of time at an NHS hospital has plenty to do with it. Never mind. I'm outta' here...

    Gary

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  4. Has she got any dead parrots John ? XXXX

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  5. Congratulations to Janet !

    cheers, parsnip

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  6. Have fun, Janet ! and you on your time with Nuala, John.

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  7. Wow~ the new pet shop almost sounds... exciting!
    Have fun!!

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  8. It is so incredibly sad that, at our age, a trip to the pet store is considered an evening out...just shoot me now!
    Jane x

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  9. Say hello to Janet for me. I miss her and her blog.

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  10. Do they sell anything that doesn't either poo, piss, or eat?

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  11. Wow that's a far cry from the shabby little pet store there was when we moved to this village. It was closed down.

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  12. Yay Janet! Its never too late for an employment change like that! And enjoy your time in London with Nuala - sounds grand....

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  13. they're wonderful places for toddlers. Used to spend hours with my grandson watching the small mammals. It was free, within walking distance and nobody bothered us. and less overwhelming than the zoo.

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  14. There are still pet shops of the old school, like the one we use in the village. It still has that cramped, full to the gunnels feel about it, the shelves stuffed with various animal foodstuffs in shop filled brown paper bags, cages of love birds and canaries and a cat sitting on the counter.

    I quite like it, especially the woman who serves behind the counter who spends her wage on wild bird seed and has 27 caged birds in her home!

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  15. Do people who work in pet shops get to take the unwanted and dead ones home for their dinner? That would be a perk that might get me interested in the pet shop industry!

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  16. I have 18 of those miniature (dwarf) hamsters but they're not squeaky clean!
    Enjoy London x

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  17. From one of those old time pet shops in Bristol, I bought a puppy the shop keeper told me it was a Jack Russell. By the time it had ceased growing it was the size of a Borzoi with JR markings.
    That was my first and last time of buying a dog from a pet shop.

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  18. Wow! That pet store doesn't look like rural northern Wales. For your non-Brit readers, what's "Waitrose"? C'mon John, get with it: you've got an international following, and you've got to annotate those features with which we might not be familiar. (Just teasing, but still curious.)

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  19. Yes, good luck Janet!
    John, have a great visit with your friend.

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  20. Yeah, Janet...now if Sophie could just show up and surprise her!

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  21. I Googled Waitrose and learned that it is a grocery store. Nice name.

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  22. Waitrose is not just a grocery store, it's upscale.

    Good on you for supporting Janet in her new job.

    As a child, i used to love to watch the turtles in those shops. I had three little green ones, one that i bought myself and two i inherited from a friend when her parents divorced. The two i got from her were a tad sickly and died within a year after i got them, but the one i had initially lived for several years.

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  23. How wonderful! I love pet stores.
    Good luck to your sister!
    Hope you have a great time, John. ♥

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  24. And did you sing "How much is that little doggie in the window?"

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  25. Anonymous6:26 am

    Looks like you two share the love-of-animals gene. :-)

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