Cagney, I understand what you are trying to say but I think you are missing the vital link in the chain.
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I'm curious as to how making such a critical stand of others (meaning the ones that only have to shop for products at a petstore, not live animals), by purchasing Oxbow straight from the company all you're doing is cutting out the middle man, which is the petstore.
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Please try to see the difference here....
The petstore does NOT make money from
buying Oxbow, or from
stocking it. They only make money from
selling it.
The pet store has to pay Oxbow for their product. They then add their mark up and make a profit from the customer. If nobody buys the Oxbow products in the store the store does not profit from them. More than that - they have lost the money they spent on it in the first place.
If I buy direct from Oxbow - I give Oxbow my money. (Not the petstore).
If Oxbow uses some of their profits to make more products to sell to a petstore - so what? The petstore can ONLY profit from it if people buy it from them!
The petstores are not influenced by their suppliers - only their customers.
Lets say Oxbow decided to stop selling through petstores. Would it affect the petstores? Not in the slightest - because "Jo Public" would continue to use the store and just buy another brand of food. The petstore would not lose any money.
If, on the other hand, people stopped buying products from the petstore, the store would lose money. If the petstore knows that they are losing money BECAUSE they sel live animals, they would be forced to consider changing in order to maximise profits.
Now - please consider the difference between not buying animals, and not buying anything at all from pet stores.
How often do you actually get a new pet? Very rarely for most people - maybe one animal every few years.
But if you have pets - how often do you buy supplies (food, bedding etc)? Probably every week.
Petstores make the vast majority of their money selling supplies - the animals themselves are not big money spinners.
If you say to the petstore "I do not believe you should sell live animals, therefore I will not buy any live animals from you" the petstore can see that they have lost maybe $20 every 3 years from you. Not enough to care about really....
But if you say to the pet store "I do not believe you should sell live animals, therefore I will not buy anything from you (and by the way I own X number of pets!)" the petstore can see that they are losing maybe $20 a week in supplies. Enough of a difference for them to take notice.
The other thing to consider is that live animals bring in customers - even if they are hard to sell.
People, especially kids, like to see cute animals. Therefore the vast majority of people (who don't know about the problems) will choose to visit the stores that carry animals - even if they don't buy them. Thanks to the animals, the store makes a profit from supplies.
Even those who do not own pets do this. As a child - before I had any pets - we used to regularly go into the local petstores to see the cute animals. And although we didn't buy pet supplies, we did spend money on other things like food for garden birds, or books.
The stores are well aware that this currently works - the animals are a form of advertising. This is the important bit.
The animals still make the store a profit even if they do not sell themselves!
If the petstores realised that live animals actually kept people OUT of the store, instead of bringing them IN they would stop stocking them.