There tend to be two types of pet store owners. The ones that care about pets, and the ones that want to monetize pets. I rarely see any that are a mixture of the two.
From my experience, tropic isle is one that wants to monetize pets, be it coral, fish, shrimp, or crap equipment from the early 2000s that they're still trying to sell at 2000s prices. I don't think there's much point to speculate on why they do what they do, we can see it when we walk around as experienced reefers.
However, imagine all the kids and families just starting off in the hobby and they go to the "biggest oldest store in the boston-area" and see aisles and aisles of fish. That might all look glitz and glam for these new people that don't know any better. Then they buy it, and go home, fail, go back, buy more, fail again, and now the hobby has most likely lost another. And now if the child that was once interested in fish now think it's a pain in the a** and sucks and is hard, that means their kids are less likely to succeed or go into the hobby.
To me, this is the saddest part of the hobby and the hardest part to fix in Massachusetts. I know the problems associated with owning and running a store and honestly it's the community that's the biggest problem. All you have are these crappy stores. Not enough people like Dong and Frank around to educate and proliferate best practices. They and I know better, fiscally speaking, to open and run a LFS. It simply doesn't work with the supply chain that the NE region has and the way internet shopping is. Then you look past the stores that make up the community. Look at the throngs of people on BRS that ask for half off of half off of something new, when it's already listed at prices better than eBay. Who wants to stick around and deal with people like that? It's annoying and devaluing life and equipment. Sometimes we sell used high quality stuff at low low prices to people because we think they need a break and mainly because we're doing fine financially on our own, then we see these same people flip the stuff that we just sold them thinking that we're helping them out. Sometimes they just want to buy stuff for cheap because they are "testing things out" and don't want to associate fiscal risk to it. Can we get rid of these type of people? Probably not, and it's too bad it's these type of people that make up the majority of the people that we deal with. These are also the same people that stores deal with.
The LFS is dead without a good community. Nobody focuses on building the community because it's a hard problem to solve. I'd like to solve it but this is unfortunately not the correct venue or vehicle to do it
