Tech Mandarins will eat pellets, its just not easy to get them to start doing so...Petco's are not bad solely because of corporate, everything is up to the store managers discretion, I had a petco in Albuqueurque that had the best looking and healthiest SW fish selection in the city(better than any of the 3 very nice LFS), and if they tested your water when you bought the fish it fell under their 14 day live guarantee that they would honor(I had a lion fish just die after a week in a 100g tank when it was the first fish in there, brought it back got a new one and it was alive and happy 5 years later when I sold off the tank and moved to chicago). They all have discretionary budgets, they can all use that to store use some of the light fixtures, UVs, protein skimmers etc, in addition to building and buying stuff out of the store. While corporate should provide all this from the start, the store manager can build themselves a decent SW section by learning/training employee's and using some of their budget(instead of using it for the bottom line to help their bonus).
Corporate is the big guy at fault......the local manager is the one who sees these animals suffer every day and doesn't care when they could make it better.