Acorn Pet Centre, Pollokshaws Rd, Glasgow Review

Overall Rating

Friendly helpful staff who give good advice on pets.
Clean cages, tanks, and happy healthy small animals in them.
Reasonable prices for high street pet shop.
Great selection of products.
Proper pet care information leaflets are handed out when purchasing a pet, and customer details taken for licencing purposes.
Nice sturdy boxes given to take pets home in.
No hard sell!

High Shelving, but staff there to help out.
Shop can be a bit crowded with large cages and bulk products.
No website yet

I recently visited this Pet shop with the view to buy a hamster cage and accessories before I bought an actual hamster. I knew what I was after, so I just collected everything together to pay for it as it was so reasonable, compared to some shops I visited.

I then asked if they had any Syrian hamsters in, sadly they didn't, they wouldn't be in for a few weeks, which was disappointing for my young daughter, but the guy who was serving me suggested some russian dwarf hamsters, but I was a bit dubious to this suggestion, as I know dwarf hamsters are harder to handle and young children shouldn't really handle them.

The shopworker then told me these ones were exceptional and tamed before they were brought into the shop, he demonstrated how tame, so we had a little pet and inspection, they were really healthy and bright even being woken up like that, so I agreed to buy them, as they were friendly and everything was nice and clean in the pet section. We collected them later on that day once I had set everything up at home.

We were given a hamster care advice sheet and obviously they assured us we had two females! But if we had any problems to come back and see them. We were also asked to give our details to abide by licencing laws, which not a lot of pet shops, in my experience ask you to do.

The box they were put in to travel home, was made of really strong, thick cardboard and was a decent size, which was great as it started raining. In my experience with carrying hamsters or birds home, pet shops give you a really small thin box and it is chewed up within 10 mins and you struggle to keep them inside!

The shop assistant also pointed out that there were some products that were a bit pointless too like a hamster harness! But said it was up to us if we wanted the hamster litter tray, which we laughed about, and declined! (If I wanted a cat I would have bought one, rather than treating a hamster like a mini cat, hehe!)

So a few weeks on and we still have two lovely friendly little russian dwarf hamsters that my daughter and I adore, so hopefully it stays that way for a couple of years!

This is the way a good pet shop should be run, clean animal housing, healthy livestock, advice on animals is available before making a decision, as having any pet is a big commitment, they also have a good selection of books on petcare for sale too.