[Quinn]

I should stop slandering teens, yes. I am sure there are fine aquarists who are hardly 20 years old.

What this conversation comes down to for me is that other than one single LFS in Edmonton, Albertan shops have consistent and rather serious issues that cause me to either not want to shop there, or not want to visit there at all.

Until I want to spend time in an LFS, a relationship between myself and the employee will not develop. Some of the responses to this thread are rather long and because of this I am probably missing the jist of what some people have said, but I don't think I should be expected to excuse the LFS employee with good intentions stuck in a sub-par store. If that were me, and I was losing sleep over the problem issues, I'd attempt to change the way the store was managed, and if that didn't work, I'd quit. If you're suggesting that I wouldn't talk to customers either if I worked in a store I felt bad about, you're partly right. At some point in time, if the situation was stressful enough, cognitive dissonance would kick in and I'd start thinking about the situation differently, ie. in a way that would reduce my anxiety over the situation.

The problem isn't the employee per say, however, it's the management. I will go out on a limb here and speculate that the reason why I've found so many LFS employees to be uneducated/unfriendly is because the hobbyists who are willing to spend the time to learn about the hobby and who have outgoing personalities to boot probably have better jobs because a. they are older b. they have skills that can earn them more than the $8/hour I expect most LFS employees are paid. The cream rises to the top right. I am fairly certain that if LFS' paid $60,000 salaries you'd see a lot of the people on this board applying. Occasionally you get a 16 year old kid who does care about the hobby and knows a lot. However he or she is the exception, not the rule.

You are correct in assuming that when asked if I need a hand, I probably say no. Because it's the truth. I don't trust that the fish aren't all chock-full of cyanide, I don't like the fact that there's a dried-up flame angel lying on the floor, and I don't like the fact that those mushrooms are $50 each. On the occasions that I have gotten into a discussion with an employee, the conversation seems to centre around the store's problem with valonia and hair algae, or the fact that they are trying to sell people a shark egg and a seahorse for their 50 gallon tank.

In short, we seem to have bad taste in our mouth regarding LFS' here in Alberta. We've presented our case, now it's the defenses turn to approach the bench.