Overall Experience 3.5
Service 3.5
Cost N/A
Variety of Fish 4
Quality of Fish 3.5
The boys and I stopped by mid afternoon last Wednesday. We had business elsewhere in Renton first, so took the advantage of being over in Seattle to check out another fish store I'd not yet seen. Overall I thought it was an OK experience. Initially lots of offered help, but they were ok to let us browse in peace. They seemed to have a fairly broad inventory, to include marine, plants, and freshwater. The tanks were in average shape, I thought. A couple of floaters for sure, but there was active maintenance going on while we were there, so I figured that was the price of doing business. The big display tanks were cool, as was the salt water frag tank (although I have NO IDEA what I'm looking at with respect to SW, it seemed like a good number of things to shop). The tank organization seemed to be a little lacking, and things were scattered around quite a bit more than I've seen at other LFS and the tank labels were clearly not fully up to date or otherwise inaccurate compared to what was actually in the tank. Not enough to really go ballistic, but enough that if I wasn't fully prepared and researched on buying a fish, I might be a wee bit hesitant to trust what was written on the outside of the tank.
I rated cost as N/A because I wasn't really shopping for anything, and so didn't pay any attention to the prices.
I was slightly disappointed when a young child was demanding "Nemo" from his mother, and the mother was definitely promising him "Nemo", and the sales staff seemed perfectly ok doing everything they could to sell the woman a clown fish. I don't know much about marine, but I didn't hear him ask her any questions about her tank or setup, and I was a little suspicious. I could have been totally wrong, and she was a salt water master with amazing skills and experience, but I have 3 kids, and I recognize appeasement when I see it, and there wasn't anything in her demeanor that told me she knew what she was doing. Not sure there was any thing else the sales guy really should have done, but I'd have liked to see an independent LFS take a bit more of the high road and ask some questions before selling what could potentially be a tough fish to keep, based on the few things I've read.
I'd probably come back, if I was looking for something specific, and I called them and they had them at a competitive price. Or if I was in the neighborhood, I'd stop by, but I'd probably hesitate to come over from Bainbridge just for this shop.