Honestly, while this sentiment is great, I don't think it's teaching companies anything.
When an animal dies in the store, it's stuffed in a freezer and eventually disposed of by an authorized party (humane society, vet, or something similar). It's written on a sheet of paper with the UPC so that every few weeks inventory can be corrected. There's no "Another animal has died in our care!" message sent to anyone that can do anything about it (usually, if anything, it's management blaming employees for doing something wrong). It's just numbers on that end.
Meanwhile, they make so much profit on animals that do sell (that $30 goldfish costs less than a dollar) that when every third one dies, nobody at corporate bats an eye. I'll give them credit for actually paying hundreds of dollars for medical care when an animal is noticeably sick, but for the people so detached from the thousands and thousands of real little lives in stores across the countries, the animal dying before that would be financially preferred. That's why they don't care about giving animals proper environments. And even if a store made an effort to stop carrying a certain animal for whatever reason, there's no guarantee that they wouldn't still get them. Store management has no control over what their store receives. All they can do is update inventory and the distribution center might send more or it might send nothing. Stores can receive animals they aren't supposed to carry, and they can receive more of something even if inventory is full.
If nobody anywhere ever wanted to buy any animals from Petsmart or Petco, that might eventually lead to change. A small, compassionate percentage of customers who silently refuse to buy live animals won't inform corporations of anything. It'd certainly cause more harm than good if everyone ran out to buy the sad chameleons from their local store, but unless you're buying every chameleon you wouldn't be making much of a difference. Until there's some sort of organized pushback (which I'm all for, but it can't be a silent thing), it's just a frustrating, heartbreaking moral dilemma.
I will say, though, if you see a visibly ill chameleon at Petsmart and are thinking of a rescue, you can have the store take it to the vet at the company's expense if you buy it & come back with evidence that it's sick. They process it as a return and should offer to let you re-buy the same one if/when it survives treatment- just be sure to clarify that with whoever you speak with. They have a somewhat no-questions-asked return policy, dead or alive, within the first two weeks anyway. Might as well make them pay more for their terrible practices ?
