veterinarian

veterinary technician

warehouse worker

veterinary assistant

forklift operator

Vetco

The work environment among employees can be both toxic and counterproductive at best. I feel ostracized by my coworkers. Management claims to have best interests in mind however instead of allotting more hours to those who are available and eager to work get usurped by new hires. New hires get prioritized over current employees that have been begging for more hours, are very open about their desperation from financial hardship, and stunting their ability to progress due to new hires being prioritized before they even prove to be worthwhile, viable employees. The compensation is the bare minimum with what feels like favoritism. Human Resources does not have the employee’s best interest in mind. When an issue arises, they seem to just placate the employee at hand to insinuate a sense of validity but regardless of evidence, the employee ends up being reprimanded with written warnings over hearsay. Growth within the company and building a career is stuck at a standstill if one were ever to receive a written warning because Petco has a policy stating that no raises nor promotions (which are promised within six months of employment — also false) for up to a year from the last write up. I find that to be very unethical given that after receiving only one write up, regardless of how minor it may be or seem and how the employees word isn’t taken seriously, more write ups seem to become more frequent and over mostly menial reasons. I hope other employees’ experiences are more positive as I am very displeased with my own experience. 

Otherwise it’s a rewarding job that, if you’re lucky enough, provides multiple opportunities for growth both inside the company and as a stepping stone to better jobs in the veterinary field in the future. The doctors are delightful and almost every holiday is a day off with floating holiday pay available to use without having to accrue it over time. 

When I was hired to work for Vetco I had no idea that the job would mainly be trying to sell to people. If I wanted a job like that I would have gone to work at the mall! It was ok at first; manageable some days with some fast crazy days as well. Then we started receiving report cards based on our sales within the past weekend. The "sales" are the products (medications) that we add on to customers' vaccinations. It's difficult because people come to Vetco because it's lower cost than a full service veterinary clinic, so they are A LOT of the time hard to persuade to buy our expensive "products". Each store you go to has a goal per pet that you're supposed to reach. It's usually out of touch, we do not make goal often. Goal is strongly affected by the extra things you can sell to people on top of their vaccinations. If you sell vaccinations to someone but no preventative or extra tests (fecal, heartworm, etc) then your team's rate will go down.

In the end, I left because I just did not like having to sell sell SELL. Some people are good at pushing others to buy things, but that's not me. I actually felt bad pushing people to the extent which my boss wanted us to, just to sell heartworm preventative or fecal tests. It's a shame because I wanted to focus on animal jobs, due to my education path.

Also, the days are long. Clock in 7:30-8:00 am, clock at sometimes even as late as 8 at night...depends on how smoothly paperwork on the clinics go that day. You have a lot of mess ups, you better be prepared to stay at the office figuring out the discrepancies until everything is accounted for. The long days didn't bother me, they actually go by quickly because you're so busy...but for $9.50/hr? The stress of trying to make goal and please your boss every weekend, getting report cards on performance, and the long hours, all simply make this job not worth it.

The management is very poor. That is ultimately what drove me to quitting the job. The job itself is so enjoyable and fun if you are an animal lover, which I am. But due to the very toxic work environment management created, it was impossible to keep working there and respect myself. There is not a direct supervisor working alongside you so it is the lead assistant who takes on the role. This makes it very hard to get any direct help from your manager. Me and another trainee were never given a correct password and login so we had to rely on the manager to keep track of our hours. Simple enough right? Especially considering that she is the one who would never fix the issue for us. Well the lead assistant relayed the message to me and the other trainee that our manager was, " Very p!ssed and annoyed that she had to keep clocking us in and out since we couldn't figure it out ourselves." That alone shows you the way management is talking amongst eachother. Then for her to relay that exact message to us? Very unprofessional. The whole environment felt very unprofessional. The lead assistant would often shout at me and the other workers. Not minding at all the customers were 6 feet away listening and watching her treat us so poorly. I finally spoke up after I had enough but she quickly went back to the same attitude the following shifts. I brought this to my managers attention when I quit and she did not address it at all. Terrible management, do not put yourself through the harassment.
And little to no training, yet expected to perform the job fully by second day. Not fair to the pets or pet parents bringing their business to them.

A day of work consists of preparing various needles, vaccinations,equipment and then loading them onto a van or a rented vehicle to multiple Petco locations. While being at a clinic you will be recommending vaccinations and preventatives, updating customers information, taking the weight and making sure the animal is ok.           The idea of having a cheap and affordable vaccination clinic and taking part of this sounds cool and good for experience. But unfortunately i would stay away to find other opportunities as the job environment has bad management, high turnover, lack of proper training, low morale, 12-16 hour weekends, and tons of issues within staff (I think the environment is that bad the business might not last too long). The issues start with new hires.... The online training is very informative but hands on training is non existent as they will put you out there. This results in newer employees not being able to do their job properly or not be fully prepared to handle some of the situations they will face. It creates this domino effect of issues like stress for the new hires, the co-wokers, and even the customers who do expect for us to be professional and knowledgeable. If management took the time to properly train their employees the right way then there wouldn't be as much stress as there is now.But with the high turnover, its hard to properly train them which creates low morale, which can result in many employees calling out sick because they do not want to work there.The most enjoyable part is the accomplishment of educating customers and making a difference and working as a team. But again i think the negatives far out weigh the good and i don't think its worth it unless things change.

Management is painfully unprofessional. Our aml skims thru everyone’s time sheets to avoid the overtime. Take 30 min breaks out of each day, when no one ever took a break because there was no time to and in a bulletin she states it comes out whether we take the break or not because that is the law. Many believed this to be true. Sets everyone up for failure with the staffing. Many have had days where they were the only one to a run besides the doc. Everyone gets paid horribly. And when we make incentive .. it’s taxed 40% And a lot of the time, she won’t even add it to our checks 
Favoritism is screaming so loud around here. While one ca who was here for 3 weeks gets bumped up to tech while there were some here who were certified and he been mastered the ca position, all just to find out on his training day, he hates and is scared of dogs and he’s only doing this to help his gf out. Family members work together and people’s significant others. The drama is worse than high school. There is never a consistency in punishments to any one offense. I forgot to plug a printer in one day and got grilled. But the next ten people to do it didn’t hear a word. Don’t work here. They wonder why vetco can’t keep employees and why is this turn over rate so extra high. Spend a day here you’ll know why. People get blamed for things they didn’t do for example someone left a kradle point in a store. Didn’t notice till he went to go plug it in at the end of the day. He realizes he forgot it so he takes a kradle point from another Petpass making it seem like that crew forgot it. The list can go forever. 

Worked for 5 years with company and never got a single promised raise. Was expected to do jobs of a higher pay grade without the pay. Management only cared about money not well being of employees or pet parents. If a customer couldn't afford the vaccinations, employees are instructed to guilt the customers into buying the larger packages. Employees need to reach a certain average of sale prices based on number of pets seen per clinic and if that average is not reached, they are threatened with demotion or termination which was not an original agreement upon employment. If an employee got hurt on the job no matter what the severity, they are expected to continue working through the day. If a hospital visit is required (due to animal bite which is very common), the employee needs to find their own ride home from wherever they are located. 'Company polices' are only used as guidelines even those put in place to protect employees. IE, no dog over 50lbs should be lifted on a table however most veterinarians demand all dogs on the table causing the employee to risk injury lifting a 80-100lb dog on the table and then restraining said animal. Most veterinarians ignored the warning signs of aggressive animals and just wanted their end of day paycheck.  Most hired employees are smokers and despite the 'no smoking' policy, I was subjected to many car rides with both tobacco and Marijuana smoke. Highly recommend to avoid this employeer. Oh, and once hired, don't ever expect a single day off. No matter how many weeks in advance you ask, you will be denied.

I personally strongly enjoyed my time here, I joined when I was in college but learning remotely because the main hours were during the weekends, and i had no classes on the weekends. Essentially the job was getting to interact with pets all day, and helping people who normally wouldn't be able to have pets safely to be able to get the necessary vaccination. no experience required, and alright pay, especially for a part time entry level job.

my direct manager was good but the management at the company was difficult to interact with, they are by far the worst part of this job, they don't give you what you need to do your job, the tablets we use for our job are ancient and take a few seconds to load after every button press, and they also sometimes don't send you the merchandise they want you to sell to customers, to the point I've had a customer want to spend more money but couldn't because corporate didn't send us the product they wanted to buy. 

it is retail, so you can expect to deal with customers all day, which for the most part is fine, but you get a lot of people that don't want to spend a lot of money, as it's meant to be a low cost vet alternative.

the work environment was good though, there is at least room for growth for the first few promotions, you start as a customer advisor then go up to veterinary assistant, and finally clinic lead. there can be many of those roles so those positions aren't very difficult to get, but after that it becomes more difficult as the next role only has 1 available position.

I loved this job. It's a weekend only job, but the days were long so it made the money pretty good. Once I settled into all the knowledge and the pace of the whole thing, I loved it. I was working with people, and I was working with adorable cats and dogs. I got to know Veterinarians and coworkers by spending so much time with them in long car rides or when clinics aren't busy. But it's usually a part time job where you're also working in the middle of the week. I personally had a very busy life working two jobs and attending school. The first half of working was pretty great with a manager that was on top of things and flexible. The whole team functioned together and generally had a nice time around each other. But the last half was a nightmare with a really irresponsible manager. We reported to higher ups once her negligence was no longer tolerable and we saw it damaging the clinics we were running. One time she said we had to use compromised vaccines (the only ones we had were not refrigerated after being delivered and they were room temp for two days) and we weren't allowed to cancel clinics. Both clinic leads and veterinary doctors we worked with called higher ups about the manager. I left the company in the spring after a year of bad management so I could focus on my education. She wasn't replaced till recently. 

It's a shame. I did really enjoy the job, it was a good source of income, and fit well for that time in my life. But it got mega stressful for me personally and damaged my faith in the higher ups at that company.

The work was fun and an opportunity to get your foot in the door if you wish to become a veterinary assistant.  A typical day consisted of packing up supplies, driving to the clinic, setting up shop and SELLING.  I enjoyed my job until a few folks from 'corporate' decided to 'audit' us at a very busy clinic where I was bombarded with back to back appointments (only given 5 min. per appt. but since they are stacked, really only 2.5 min. per appt.), phone calls, walk ins, and questions from Petco customers all while I was alone at the podium.  The people from 'corporate' stood around observing, criticizing, and asking us questions while we were trying to help customers and their pets.  They clearly made the clients feel uncomfortable.  Corporate decided to judge us based on the 1 hour (if that) of their 'assessment'.

Vetco Vaccine Clinic is supposed to be a 'wellness' company, but really they push you to peddle vaccine packages.  It is not consultative like they claim it to be.  You are pushed to sell packages with additional products and only downgrade if the client asks you to.

The hardest part of the job was the pressure of meeting quota and pushing the sales of vaccines and products the customer did not really need or want.  Being new was also challenging because only a couple people really wanted to help or 'train'.  A couple of the colleagues got irritated if you asked them questions even though they had been there for years and were new too at one point.
Expectations and responsibilities were way beyond the pay grade here.  

The most enjoyable part of the job was getting to be around the animals.



I was with this company for almost two years. There is opportunity for advancement if you're interested in business administration and/or management. As far as veterinary medicine, there is minimal exposure or growth. The most you will do is draw up vaccines and restrain animals all day.

50% of your shift is dedicated to driving, setting up and breaking down clinic. You set up in the middle of Petco store aisles. With no barriers to separate the clinic from regular customers shopping. Customers would regularly walk in the middle of clinic set up to grab items, which was very unsafe.

Appointment times were difficult to keep up with. We started at 7 minute appointments per pet. That went down to 6 then 5 minutes plus double bookings. This meant that any appointment that wasn't confirmed was open to be booked again. It was difficult to do exams, pull blood, give vaccines and have conversations with pet parents in 2.5 to 5 minutes. This would cause us to run behind on appointments. 

The DVMs are the reason I stayed with Vetco for so long. I had the opportunity to work with DVMs from different backgrounds and experiences. 

If you're interested in working with animals but don't plan on going into vet med this is a good way to into the animal field. If you're interested in going into veterinary medicine I wouldn't recommend this company.

Conclusion: Overworked with unrealistic expectations from corporate. Profits are prioritized over animal or team member's wellbeing. Unsafe and unhealthy work environment.

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Veterinarian 1759 salaries reported	$144 per hour
Veterinary technician 73 salaries reported	$26.46 per hour
Warehouse worker 4 salaries reported	$18.09 per hour
Veterinary assistant 1 salary reported	$15.50 per hour
Forklift operator 2 salaries reported	$18.31 per hour

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