Petco isn’t alone in considering pet grooming “essential.” After closing its grooming salons on March 21, PetSmart, Petco’s main competitor, reopened some of them on April 6. I visited a PetSmart in Northern Virginia on April 11 and found the grooming center open, with a small dog inside being sheared of its fluffy black fur. (PetSmart declined to comment.)

This is just the latest instance of retail and shipping workers not receiving the protections they feel they need to get through the coronavirus pandemic. For example, Amazon has promised employees two weeks’ pay for time they spend in quarantine due to COVID-19, but many employees have said their payments were delayed by weeks, or indefinitely. (Amazon did not comment on this for my story last month.) Many retail workers feel they’re being treated as expendable and interchangeable—an impression that’s magnified at companies such as PetSmart and Petco, where workers are risking their human lives on behalf of animals.

Read: Amazon is struggling to pay workers in quarantine

Keeping the grooming salons open isn’t the only way Petco employees say the company is falling short on safety precautions. They told me that unlike retail workers at some other companies, including Amazon, they won’t receive hazard pay for the duration of the outbreak. They said they were offered five extra days of paid time off, but that it’s not enough to get them through a months-long crisis. Workers say animals are still being shipped to some Petco stores to be sold as pets—something workers don’t see as essential. (Stark denied this, saying, “We stopped restocking live animals in mid-March to avoid unnecessary traffic in our stores. We are only restocking live animals that are commonly purchased as food for other pets, or where our suppliers have overcapacity in their facilities, putting animal lives at risk.”)

What’s more, Petco employees said masks weren’t provided to them until very recently. An April 9 Petco corporate slide deck provided to me by another Petco employee reads, “We ask all Partners to order or create and wear masks”—appearing to put the onus on employees to find or make their own masks.

Some groomers said they were given the option of working on the store’s floor as a sales associate, rather than a groomer. But because they make most of their money on grooming commissions, they said working the floor would represent a significant pay cut and might still be just as dangerous to their health. Some who agreed to work the floor then saw their hours cut further. (“We’re proud of the way we’ve provided our employees with choices and opportunities to continue working and earning income during these uncertain times,” Stark said. “The majority of our groomers have expressed appreciation for our flexibility.”)

Working on the sales floor, “I still interacted with people,” said Mariah Martinez, a Petco groomer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. “Someone sneezed right next to me.” Martinez, who has asthma, has stopped going to work and plans to use her vacation time until it runs out. Rather than keep stores open to customers, employees argue, the company should tell customers to order ahead and wait for employees to deliver their orders to their cars. (Stark said that while “we are driving as much business as possible to Petco.com” for the curbside pickup option, “many customers, especially our elderly guests, prefer shopping in stores and we want to ensure their pets are taken care of.”)