Pets at Home threatening schools with legal action after classing emplyees as key workers

[Keepcalmanddoyourbit]

twitter.com/simonkidwell/status/1241390189102186497

Advising employees to contact their legal department re: school places

So many responses I haven’t read them all.

But it does surely need a skeleton staff, as some have vets on site and all have small animals and fish that need fed.

@GemmaTellerMorrow That's a good idea re Click & Collect. Our PAH is on a small retail park on the edge of town. The Laura Ashley, Pizza Hut and Costa next door are all closed now. B&Q is the only other shop there, it's a large store with quite a few staff but unsure if they'll be staying open or not.

If I were the PAH staff, security wise I wouldn't want to have the shop open there in the evenings with everything else closed. Same at all times really and there's the big social distancing/contact issue.

Pre arranged times to collect pre ordered goods would spread customers visits out.

Christ on a bike this has given me the rage. Flame me if you like but your pet is not essential to anyone's life. PAH are selfishly preserving their business interests, it's disgusting.

Animal welfare is surely essential - but we can buy pet food in the supermarkets or online.

They should be closed for retail, but staff in for the vet and to feed the onsite animals..

I assume zoos are still staffed - we aren’t going to let animals starve?

Pets at Home is the only place in our area that still has pet food available. Supermarkets have nothing! Do we want our pets to starve?

Supermarkets don't stock the food for my pets. So are they supposed to starve to death? What about all the pets in the store too, should they starve and not be cared for? You need to ask if PAH have the infrastructure to deliver too. I'm not sure what the answer is. Maybe a click and collect service and social distancing measures when picking the order up.

I'm no animal rights activist, but isn't it the maltreatment of animals that got us into this mess in the first place?

If you cant get your head round the logistics and the PR disaster of euthanasing thousands of animals in each district, letting Guide Dogs starve isn't a good look.

Its one of the reasons we now have the rabies vaccine, which used to be banned. The govt realised they'd have to round up and destroy Guide Dogs in the event of an outbreak, and that people might have an opinion about that.

Throughabush
What is your solution? If it closes some pets will starve.

NO ONE IS SAYING THEY SHOULD CLOSE

and breathe

The point is that they DON'T have to have their workers classed as key workers - forcing the workers to send their kids to school.

Christ on a bike this has given me the rage. Flame me if you like but your pet is not essential to anyone's life.

If you really stick by that thought, then I dare you to post that on an animal welfare board on this site if there is one. You will get ripped to shreds and by anyone who has a pet too. Listen to yourself and calm down. PAH need to work out how to continue delivering their service in a safe way so that pets are kept safe - not just birds, goldfish, cats and dogs, but all the other pets that supermarkets do not cater for. I have a type of rodent that you can only get stuff at PAH for. If I can't get a delivery like with everything else, what do I do? They are as confused as anyone else in all of this and just trying to find a solution.

Yes, finding a solution must be so difficult

PertElla
Who do you think will look after the children when not at school? Or in the evening? Plenty of one parent families around. To get any kind of non familial childcare now, a parent has to be declared a key worker, which rather makes store opening hours during the school day a moot point.

i had to hunt around online and pay way over the odds for my small pet food, bedding etc. but have had to buy a couple of packets of each as i would do normally in the shops.
they might be only 'disposable small animals' to some people but i love them and need them to support my bipolar management.

A lot of parents are "approved" by their employers as key workers because their business appear to be more important than anyone else. Me and DH categorised by our DD's school as "key workers" (not expected). We work around each other so that at least one of us is always at home, we know we will struggle, we won't able to provide "adequate" amount of home schooling because we both working FT. We struggle with shopping for the family of 5 as well because whenever we shop after work, there's nothing left for us! I am greatful I don't have to do 12 hours shifts though.

It is a nationwide effort to avoid contacts with anyone who don't live with you! Please keep your kids in whenever it's possible!

Who do you think will look after the children when not at school? Or in the evening?

Who's looking after kids not at school now? Their parents, who are having to juggle working from home, or taking long term leave and so on.

PaH are not that special that they cant deal with it in the same way the rest of us have to.

Exactly how many customers will go to PAH? Probably a lot less than would use the local supermarket. So is it beyond the realms of possibility that they don't need every customer service assistant in, all day? Certainly the few occasions I've been in on a Saturday there's been one other person in front of me and one person on the till. Not exactly heaving - whereas Tesco, Asda et al have umpteen tills open. So why can't that one person deal with the pets they sell in the quiet times (which seems to be pretty frequent round my way)? You don't need every member of staff in and, apart from an emergency vet, our one does appointments. So that's one vet per store for emergencies and one in store. You don't need every member of staff in and those people don't need to be those with children. The pet store can bleat to their legal department all they like - customer service for pets is not a key worker if they do a rota system.

Anyway, if they find out the virus is leaping across species the vets will be busy elsewhere and PAH won't exist. And that comes from a cat owner.

Thinking more about it its not the idea of them being open i have a massive issue with

Its the taking legal action bit

Mrhodgeymaheg Sun 22-Mar-20 12:06:00
Christ on a bike this has given me the rage. Flame me if you like but your pet is not essential to anyone's life.
.....
They need to be fed and cared for for goodness sake!

Mine 'conveniently' died last Tuesday, he must have had a lightbulb moment.

As everyone now wants to be clasified as 'essential' maybe the school closure needs to be rethought, some other countries haven't had this halfway closure and they are managing it. Schools are either closed, 100%, or they're not.

There's one Pets at Home in our district of about a hundred thousand people. They have a handful of staff, and there may be one or two who have primary-aged children.
That's not going to overrun the school system, is it?

They can probably manage to run the store without those one or two staff members then.

Kids have had their exams cancelled, the NHS is bracing itself for the biggest public health crisis in years, and yet people are still arguing that their need to buy pet food during the day is more important than preventing the spread of this disease.

To get any kind of non familial childcare now, a parent has to be declared a key worker

It's a pretty broad list. Many people are being declared key workers, including people who wouldn't have even considered themselves to be one.

If people can't keep their pets alive and healthy, the mental health impacts of isolation - as well as dangerous panic - will be much worse.

This is a small necessary measure to keep people calm.

Grooming activity can involve procedures which prevent illness or disability to the animal. It's not just a shampoo, it can be absolutely essential to the health of the animal.

I have no pets, myself, but really not going to get upset about PaH as "key workers".