Dear Reddit, what was the worst experience you've had with pet owners/pet shops?

I've had a snake for 22 years, and for 22 years me or my family (before I lived alone) have been getting his food in the form of live rats almost always from the same pet shop where we got him. It's changed hands several times, and for the last two of these versions, at least, it's been a different problem every time I go in there for the food.

It's a small shop and staffed by a couple full time people and a lot of part time students. So, usually, I'm getting a different person each time, and if it's a student, they often refuse to get the rat at all, calling me cruel (the store still sells snakes, by the way). This is invariably an 18 yo guy with metal shit in his face and a brony t-shirt - there's at least three of those. Other times, they'll put it in a cardboard container, when I specifically handed them a plastic quart-sized soup container I brought to save on containers, and so I don't have to worry about it chewing its way out on the way home. Recently, if I get the new owner, I hand them the container, they go in the back and come out with the full container inside a stapled brown paper bag. I start opening it because I need to see it first and make sure it's the right size (rats vary widely in size), and he stops me and says I can't do that in the middle of the store. I'm like, fuck that, I've been doing this for years and I need to see what I'm buying. Then he beckons me to a back room, opens it, holds it up briefly and restaples the bag. I ask what the fuck, and I'm told he thinks it will alarm customers. But these rats are feeder rats being held 50 to a tank and bred to be killed for snakes, what is everyone so fucking squeamish about?

Only once did he almost have a point, when I buy the rat and I've got it sat on the counter by the register being rung up, when some Hacidim queue up behind me, a large family of them. And we're minding our own business but the mother wants to make conversation, and says oh a rat do they make nice pets? I explain about the rat, and now the kids want to know, and the mother awkwardly tells the kids and the kids are fucking crying and the cashier taking forever and I want to reach in there and break the rat's neck in front of everyone. The thing is in all the years I've been getting rats, I've never had anyone come up behind me at the register. It just doesn't do that kind of business and is usually a ghost town - probably why it keeps changing hands.

I've worked in customer service before, I know it's a shit job and it's really really hard to get a reaction out of me when something goes wrong, because I know things go wrong all the time and most humans are retarded to deal with. I know the customer's almost always wrong, too. But, all things considered, I might try a new place or just start breeding my own rats in a closet when I get additional snakes.

/r/AskReddit Thread