A while back there were topics on comfort animals walking around stores and things, like the turkey that took a flight with it's owner. The comfort animal thing is one issue, but I'm seeing a new trend that seems to be happening more and more: people just walking their dogs, everywhere.
Is this a trend in any of your areas? Either as a worker or a customer? This is in the Bay Area, and I have seen it happen in SF, because there is not a lot of places to walk your dog (check out the news story of the lamp post that fell over due to excessive dog urine), but not in the more suburban areas, until recently.
We don't get this too often but it's more frequently than before, yes. I currently work some off-hours in a tabletop game shop just outside the local mall. We're in a pretty high-volume foot traffic area, for this city, and I get probably 2 or 3 dogs a week, tops.
The owner of the shop hates when people bring in their pets. There's been a handful of 'accidents' where dogs have peed in various parts of the store. There's always a ton of dander and pet hair everywhere after they leave. There's been a few incidents of animals damaging product both incidentally - knocking it off a shelf - or less so - by chewing on it. We also get a lot of little kids and they don't have a fraction of the impact that pets seem to. People tend to watch their kids a lot more and when a child breaks something, the parents almost always just pay for it without complaint. Dog owners, on the other hand, seem to ignore their pets and are the first to argue when their pet does something wrong in the store.
And a good portion of customers don't like dogs, are allergic to dogs, or simply don't want to shop in a place with other people's dogs. There's also some people who love when dogs come into the shop, but they seem to be in the minority. The problem is that... if you don't like kids, it has no impact on the kid. If you don't like dogs, the animal can generally pick up on that and, depending on the level of training, react poorly. We've had this happen a few times already where someone really, really doesn't like dogs - like has a legitimate phobia of them - and someone brings in their pet only to have it make an immediate fucking bee-line for that person and freak them out. Now we've just lost a regular customer. We might have a unique circumstance compared to other shops, however. Because we're a tabletop gaming store, our customers don't just stop in to shop. They're in the store for hours and hours at a time playing board games, MTG, Warhammer, etc. And bringing in their own games, minis, cards. We need to maintain an environment where it is reasonably safe and comfortable for them to do so. Throwing animals into the mix is another variable we need to account for and plan for.
Overall, it's a huge net negative to have animals regularly in the store. We're not a pet shop. We're not used to, equipped to deal with, or have the expectation for our customers to have animals in the store. There's a lot of little things those shops do that completely negate or minimize the impact of animal traffic. We don't.
And we can't say anything about it either, really, because of comfort animal laws - which non-necessary people are clearly abusing the fuck out of. No one wants to take the risk of telling someone they can't have an animal in the shop only to have them pull out their card and throw a tantrum in the shop about how we're breaking the law or otherwise some form of prejudice. Because
"other shops don't say anything about it". Even if they don't have a legal comfort/assistance animal, they still take that shit to 11 in a heartbeat. So we say nothing while secretly hating them.
If everyone had well-trained pets that were legitimate comfort/assist animals, there probably wouldn't be a problem. But every person thinks their dog is 'good' and well-trained, sometimes even after it clearly demonstrates it isn't. And they've unfortunately learned that +90% of shops won't say anything to avoid having a confrontation. So they do the typical dog owner thing and just impose their pets on everyone around them and if you don't like it something must be wrong
with you.
).