My Love-Hate Affair with Petco

I love Petco. I hate Petco.

More accurately, Staff loves and hates Petco, but being the end user of its products, I bear the brunt of the consequences. Also, I have a blog and Staff doesn't. Neener neener.

I (the Godlike "I") love Petco because it's only a mile away from our apartment and open seven days a week, 10 am-9 pm, and the staff there is always super-friendly (if not as knowledgeable as Staff would like) and never give Staff a hassle.

I (the Satanic "I") hate Petco because it's located in a cul-de-sac of sorts at the strip mall, next to a bridal shop, with limited adjacent parking. And that bridal shop gets busy. And brides and their entourages spend hours, not minutes, there. So sometimes Staff has to park at the main mall and walk over or (gasp!) park illegally on the side of the building and hope not to get ticketed or (ack!) towed.

I love Petco because it has so many different brands of cat food at reasonable prices. Staff can and does get some of those foods shipped via Amazon Prime, but not everything we like is available there. There are some high-end brands Petco doesn't carry, but that's OK because I won't eat any of those. No organic grain-free hormone-free cage-free $25-per-pound artisanal cat food for me.

I hate Petco because they're often out of stock of the handful of cat foods I actually will eat, especially when they're on sale.

I love Petco because they never give Staff a hassle about returning cat food when my housemate, Scully, or I have decided, on the spur of the moment and usually after Staff buys a 24-can crate, that we'd rather not eat that particular item anymore, kthanxbye. Can't do that with Amazon without paying crazy return shipping charges. At one point this summer, we hit the "like" and "unlike" buttons practically simultaneously on four different varieties of cat food.

I hate Petco because it takes them forever to ring up returns, and other customers always show up immediately to pay for their purchases, and Staff has to apologize 3-4 times for the delays and still gets the stink-eye from them. It's bad enough when we give him the stink-eye but when other humans do it...

I love Petco because they invented Soulistic Luna Tuna, which is shredded tuna in grain-free pumpkin soup, and I actually lap up all the soup and eat all of the tuna, and it's priced at a very reasonable 89 cents per pouch. Right now, it's the one food that gets me to clean my bowl. I also will eat 80-85% of Soulistic's Sweet Salutations chicken and tuna in grain-free gravy, which makes it my #2 favorite.

I hate Petco because Soulistic Luna Tuna is impossible to get. It's an exclusive Petco brand, so you can't get it anywhere else. You can get Soulistic foods on Amazon, but only through Petco, which adds shipping charges (no Amazon Prime there). And you can get almost all of the Soulistic foods at Petco.com -- but NOT Luna Tuna. The Petco store can't special order it because "the regional distributor won't do it." And whenever the store gets some, it gets no more than two boxes of eight pouches each. For me, that's a mere two-week supply. The Sweet Salutations is in stock more often, but I don't like it nearly as much. We've tried the other flavors, and I don't like them. I like my tuna straight up, not mixed with mackerel or shrimp or salmon or crab or snapper or sardine or barracuda or piranha or fishzilla or Nessie.

So thank you, Petco, for getting me hooked on one of YOUR foods and then not making enough of it. One pouch a day. That's all I want. Is that so hard?

Love Petco. Hate Petco.

Next time, I want a pre-nup.