Personal Touch Pet Store
Princeton, WV
David Scott Patton, owner

How’s business?

Great. We’re doing a lot better than last year. This is probably our best year ever, and we’ve been in business now 20 years. I think it’s because we have the lowest prices in town and we own the business. I have sole proprietorship; we own our own stock and we own the building. The business is family owned and operated by my, my wife and three other family members. And then we have one other employee. We’ve lived here for 52 years, so half of these people [our customers], we’ve grown up with them.

The store’s all about giving that personal touch of customer service, and we’re especially helpful in the fish hobby. Fish are our biggest seller.

We have about 300 types of fish, which makes us the largest selection around. We didn’t start out specializing in fish at first, but, after the first couple of years and as time went on, it just sort of developed that way. We still sell a little bit of everything, though the majority of our stock is in fish. We keep over 10,000 fish on hand all the time. We have 5,000-6,000 feeder fish, and they’re in a separate room just for feeders. The room has all sorts of feeders, from goldfish to crickets to mice. So people can actually see what it is they’re buying before they get it, where as most stores keep them in the back and just give you the feeders after you’ve bought them. Our customers really appreciate that.

We also sell outdoor fish. Pond supplies are another area that we’ve done well in this year. Not right now, because it’s not the right season, but sales were good in spring and summer. People aren’t putting in extremely big ponds, but rather more of the small ones. Water gardening has gotten to be a good, big thing for us. In the summer, our tropical fish sales go down, but we make up for it in pond sales.

Are you doing anything new?

We opened in 1990, so this January will be our 20th anniversary. We’ll probably have a big store-wide sale to celebrate.

Other than that, we’re not really doing anything new. Every 2 years, we try to do something to expand the store. We converted our house into the store and live upstairs above it. It’s a 28-room house. Every two years, we build additions to the building for tax purposes. A few years ago, we made a bigger parking lot. We have a lot of people say that the house looks more like it should be in the mountains or something. We have sales reps and distributors who say it doesn’t look like any other store they’ve ever seen. I think it makes us more memorable to people.

We try to specialize in buyouts. So many stores are going out of business lately, and I’ve been buying their stock and selling it at a lower price than any competition. Right now, I have enough products to stock five or six other stores. We also try to carry all of the brands that the major stores don’t carry. You won’t see the same stuff in our store that you’ll find in Walmart. But you can come to our store for any of the specialty foods or stuff like that. We make sure to carry the more difficult finds.

Do you sell livestock? What are your biggest sellers?

Yes. We don’t sell dogs or cats, but we do sell fish, reptiles, birds and small mammals. We sell a lot of all types of fish, but probably the biggest sellers are the more exotic varieties because we’re the only place around where people can get them. Anything hard to find or out of the ordinary like the big, saltwater fish and different types of cichlids.  --LH