Saturday, May 10, 2008

Pet Shop: Hobby or Business?

The pet shop has definitely garnered a firm foothold in the economic landscape of the old hometown. While their number may not approximate those of the lechon-manok eating places or the must have one in each corner bakeries, the pet shop certainly can be seen and counted among the visible players in the malls and some of the heavily-trafficked commercial areas of the city.

While people from other places may wonder why my sudden interest and/or surprise in the pet shop as a business, let it be said that when I left the old homeland about 29 years ago, the number of pet shops in the city was an absolute nil. You wanted dogs or cats, you simply asked your friends or our relatives who had them. Birds or fowl as pets? Again you asked your hunter friends. Okay, so some solitary guy may position himself conspicuously in the market and sell a monkey or two or some birds, or even dogs. But not as an established business, in permanent locations, and providing the whole panoply of things needed to acquire and maintain pets.

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