Last week, on a forum that I follow closely, I found a thread that was commenting on the level of customer service a vendor was dishing out to its clients. Lets just say it wasn’t too positive. So, after much deliberating, the website owner decided to force the vendor off of his/her site. Relinquished the vendor’s sponsorship rights, deleted him/her from their database, and was permanent. Their (owner,mods) argument was that the vendor wasn’t trying hard enough to rectify numerous customer complaints, and thus would greatly smear the image that the site is trying to build for their users. That, my fellow readers, is a victory for morality and the reefing psyche of Canada. They chose not to view their business model through the eyes of green.. uhm, red, blue, and green bank notes.

Exhibit two leads me to this story about morality vs money making. Again, we are involving a local board here for our discussion. A famous local reef store, actually more like infamous, has gotten into some more hot water with their USA suppliers of coral/fish (Hawai’i, California). The issues were over payment for their livestock, ones that were already in ‘sell mode’ over on our local board. The suppliers tried to reach out to them in many ways, just to be ignored. As usual. (some of these posts were deleted on our local forum). They even posted on many forums, asking people to help them in recovering their money in another country. In a surprising move, soon after these acts of help, the sponsor on our local board disappeared. Their threads deleted, sponsorship revoked, and their footprints swept away. I thought, “Finally, we have another victory for morality vs money making!”. I truly believed that the board owner has stood up and showed them that he won’t tolerate such detrimental behavior to his forum users. The sponsor was trying to sell wares that were not paid for. In my eyes, that doesn’t sound right.

So I get up this morning to browse around the net a bit, and surprising to me, I see the local board sporting the infamous sponsor with their new shipment of coral (extremely adjusted for the PFE award) and live rock. Quite shocked and disappointed, I tried to figure out why this happened. Why was I  so wrong? Was Jeff right all along? Was it only a glitch in the php code? Or was it a glitch in my hopes in believing in people having some sort of a responsibility to reefers? As Jeff told me, “I told you it was all about the money.” And he is right. It was. They probably didn’t pay their sponsorship money in time, and got cut off for a short time. Got my hopes up… and many others.

I guess there is a HUGE disparity between the views of the two big site owners in Canada. How much do you really need to run a site of this magnitude? How much are you willing to sacrifice just so you can have more fluff for your wallet? Are you going to support a vendor who doesn’t care for their customers? One that is allowed to sell wares that are not paid for? One that doesn’t know how to excel in customer service? One that doesn’t display prices, just so that they can have a different price for everyone?

If you want to be in this industry, you have to have a moral obligation to this hobby and its users, us reefers. There comes a point where you must draw the line, otherwise you just look supportive of their business practices by association.

Related posts:

1. The LFS that couldn’t, part 3
2. How to get a deal from an LFS
3. LFS That Lie

So what is in a name? A definition? A description? A trademark? A benchmark? A way to differentiate between two opposites? Or alikes?

You all know that I do a lot of web surfing,  sometimes too much.. friends add. But it allows me to get an understanding what is happening in many regions of the North American reefing industry. I can get a good feel on the pulse of the hobby in an area. So why is this entry labeled ‘Name Game Gone Berserk” and how does it relate to all of this?

Well, let me tell you. I am witnessing a vast majority of reefers AND e-tailers over-marketing every possible coral known to man to make a dollar. I am seeing SPS, LPS and soft corals getting the same treatment that a marketing firm would supply to big dogs such as Pepsi or McDonalds. I am seeing greed, and I am seeing detriment to our hobby. And I can’t stand it any longer!

Initially it was great. We would have very unique slower growing corals that were insanely colorful which couldn’t be found by many reefers. Usually, we tagged them with the farmer’s name and that would have been it. A lot of people would  use it to track lineage for originality as most likely they would command a hefty tag.  Steve Tyree, Greg Carroll, ORA are some that originally had their names on certain corals, corals that were worthy of unique names.  Now, for example, we have local e-tailers (online vendors) who cannot stop naming every coral in their possession with their acronyms. Is it necessary to label an aquacultured pink birdsnest a TNR Highlighter Pink Odyssey S. hysterix? Or a bluish grey chalice a TNR Enter The Matrix Echinophyllia? Trying to make a 20$ frag turn into a 120$ frag? Sad, really.

Not too long ago, I wrote on the whole name game and why it was ok to do so.  I think now I feel ashamed to even had thought so. Greed stewed this all up. People trying to profit from everyday corals that are seen in the hobby. Why not name something that is rarely seen? Something that takes three times as long to grow? Something that it is an immense challenge to keep?

But the problem lies with the vendors. They think all of their coral are unique and rare. Unsuspecting buyers would acquire this coral, and then see it at another location dubbed something completely different. Is that healthy for our hobby? Does anyone have any respect towards the consumers?  What about towards the hobby? Because partaking in this name game is completely and utterly disrespectful towards any member of our global community who takes a lot of pride and strives toward caring and culturing for hard to find and keep corals.

So lets keep the names on corals that need it, and discard your shameful acronyms. Unless of course you have the rarest collection known to man!

Related posts:

1. A Coral In Your Name
2. Coral Recognition: To Design or Not, part 1
3. Coral Recognition: To Design or Not, part 2