captain nemo's
 

heard on the radio today that capt. nemo's is now going to be another pets plus. i believe they said they were having a grand opening this weekend and are having a huge sale. i think they said 30% off freshwater fish. not one hundred percent sure because the shop i work in can get loud and of course, it got loud during the commercial. anybody else hear about it?

Pets Plus = Bad News

The best thing about captain nemos was that it was owned by the original owner of Martins Aquarium. ( My dad worked at Martins for 5 years in the late 70's) I believe Pets Plus bought them awhile ago.

I was at captain nemos today and they remodeled the whole place, it is now 50 percent other animal stuff. It's no longer a fish store. :(, and their plant stock was just awful. They had Anubias nana for 6.99 with only three or four leaves. Anubias nana petite with only about 6 leaves for 6.99. Their Java Fern was all black.

For RCS, it was 3.99 a piece! :icon_roll

I will never go there again, what a waste of time. It's a shame...

martin's was AWESOME!!!! that place was the only reason i ever got into salt water back in the 80's.

that sucks that pets plus took them over. the only one of their stores i would buy from is the langhorne store. i went into the one at red lion and the blvd. about a month back and they had a rotunda out front of all the small mammals and i saw 2 dead hamsters being eaten by two other hamsters in the cage. and what were the employees doing? one was texting, one was on the phone and the rest i can only assume were in the back room, because i kept hearing alot of laughter coming from there. i mean, really, doesn't anybody walk around the store and look at the product they are selling? i will never go back to that store again. and to think, i was actually thinking about buying my toy fox terrier a husband from there, until i saw the conditions of all the other animals.

$3.99 a piece?? wow!! i would rather get crs from mordalphus for $5/per!! and at least then i know i'm getting quality!

i bet between those of us on here, we have enough stock to open our own quality lfs!!!LOL

That's for sure. I've considered it at one point when I had my fish rack running with about 10 different strains of fish. I was like....I have more quality fish than most petstores right now. I even have tanks, pumps, heaters, etc for sale all the time so it pretty much is like running a fish store out of my basement.

I have this place near me called Art's Animals and they have a tiny little fish section with about 30 tanks, but only 15 of them would be filled at a time. But I was thinking to myself...if they actually painted the walls, painted all their tank backgrounds blue or black and threw in some good looking fish, they would be doing way more business. People who run stores like that forget sometimes that looks play an important role in a sale. Whenever I browse through that store I'm thinking..."Do I really want to buy fish from this crapwhole? It looks like they don't even care what this place looks like."

I second that...I won't be going back for at least a few months. They basically destroyed the fish section. It no longer has that WOW...this place is cool....mentality. Now it's just walls of tanks with sick fish in about 75% of the tanks. The plant section was horrid. Most plants were not even labeled in their correct spots and when you actually found a plant that was still alive, you saw the price tag and changed your mind instantly. A lot of their plants were just kinda floating in the tanks instead of being weighted down which caused some of the leaves to be all dried up and dead.

It seems we have had a lot of good LFSs come and go in the Philadelphia area. We have been kind of lucky in that there does always seem to be a few good stores around.

I see a couple of others remember Martin's too. For me it was a store that was in business a long time, but over the years it would cycle back and fourth from very good to really bad. My last visit was after they got involved selling large parrots and kerosene heaters. They had the bird cages down the middle of the aisles between the tanks, and there was bird droppings all over the floor. That was about the most yucky experience I ever had visiting a LFS, and I never went back.

As for Captain Nemo's, I am sorry to see it go. We really don't need another Pet's Plus.

As I see it, the locally owned stores are really in a bind. It's very tough to compete with internet prices on equipment, and unless you have a large established store, you can't easily have the sort of livestock the more advanced hobbyist wants.

i used to love martin's... for however disgusting the place was, i loved walking to the place as a child and just looking at everything. Anyone remember the monkey they had in there?

knowing that nemo's is/was owned by the owner of martin's makes sense as to how they've been changing... i used to love nemo's... but then the kid section went in... then the birds and cat/dog toys...

really... they should have expanded their fish section to offer a great selection to draw people from Hidden Reef. i think trying to do to much is what is costing them business.

Yup, it was named after my dad :hihi:

My name use to feed him his left over Chinese food!

man....i forgot all about the monkey!!! i just remember the variety they had!! that was the first place i ever saw a lung fish. i bought my first octopus there in the 80's. it was like a toy store for fish folk!!LOL

I think adding additional product lines was what killed Martin's They lost the focus on fish. Some of the same people involved in Captain Nemo's and adding additional product lines seem to have done the same thing to them.

To be fair though, in this day and age it's extremely difficult to keep a business going just selling aquarium products and livestock. Even That Fish Place changed it's name to That Pet Place and now carries stuff for just about every pet.

I figure I'll get the new owners a month or two, and then visit them and see what I think of the store. Got to at least give them a chance, but I'm not expecting much.

It was sold at least 2 months ago at this point. In all fairness, some of the Pets Plus stores aren't bad. The aforementioned Langhorne store I'm in a lot for crickets on the way home from work, and Quakertown and Lansdale I've had good experiences with. All the cardinals I've bought from them survived transitioning into my tank...seems to be a good sign.

My only real gripe was that in the Langhorne store they have ACF labeled as "True African Dwarf Frogs". I should have been educated enough to tell the difference, but I didn't think to check until a couple of my fish were suddenly missing...

i like the langhorne store. most of the employees there have a clue, unlike the chain stores. even the guy i talked to from the reptile room, knew his stuff. i would not hesitate shopping there.

and i will say this much, some of the pets plus beat out the chain stores, however, i have noticed in the past few weeks, that some of the petsmarts must be ordering from the same plant suppliers as hidden reef, because i saw the same plants in their tanks that i did in the reef's tanks. i actually picked up some crypt. parva and crypt. wendtii red at a petsmart a week or so ago. and don't ya know, i found the exact same plants at the reef 2 days later. next time i am in petsmart, i would like to talk to the manager and see how they order their plants. maybe if more plants are requested by customers, then maybe they will stock better product. might be a case of the customers pushing the store to be better. i know, it's a dream, but, "I have a dream!!" lol

The English guy? He's good.

And which PetSmart? The only one I've seen with a good plant selection is the one in Plymouth Meeting...

believe it or not, roosevelt mall

Ah, I've been in that one but I probably just ran in and out when I was looking for $1 cardinals. I'll have to hit that one up again some day. Thanks!