If you’ve tried visiting DrsFosterSmith.com recently, you weren’t taken to a pet supply store. You were redirected straight to Petco.com. That’s not a technical glitch — it’s the result of a permanent closure that happened back in 2019.
This article explains exactly what happened to Drs. Foster and Smith, when and why the brand shut down, what it meant for customers and employees, and where you can go now to find similar products and services.
Yes, Drs. Foster and Smith Has Closed — Here Are the Facts
In early 2019, Petco announced it would permanently close all Drs. Foster and Smith retail operations. The shutdown took effect on or around February 12, 2019. Employee layoffs followed over the next 60 to 120 days.
About 289 employees in Rhinelander, Wisconsin were affected. The DrsFosterSmith.com domain now redirects to Petco.com, and the brand no longer operates as an independent retailer in any form.
This is not a temporary pause, a rebrand, or a quiet sale to another company. The Drs. Foster and Smith retail and catalog business is fully closed.
What Drs. Foster and Smith Was Before the Closure
Drs. Foster and Smith was founded by two veterinarians — Dr. Race Foster and Dr. Marty Smith — in Rhinelander, Wisconsin. It started as a catalog-based pet supply business and eventually grew into one of the largest online pet retailers in the United States.
The company ran three main online properties:
- DrsFosterSmith.com — the main pet supply and pharmacy store
- LiveAquaria.com — a site focused on live aquatic animals and aquarium supplies
- PetEducation.com — a library of pet health articles written by veterinarians
What made the brand stand out was its veterinary credibility. Customers trusted it for prescription pet medications, honest product recommendations, and detailed health information. It wasn’t just another pet store — it had a reputation built on professional expertise.
For niche pet owners in particular — bird keepers, aquarium hobbyists, and reptile owners — it offered a depth of selection that general pet retailers didn’t match.
How Petco’s Acquisition Set the Stage for the Shutdown
Petco announced the acquisition of Drs. Foster and Smith in late 2014, and the deal closed in early 2015. At the time, Petco’s stated plan was to keep Drs. Foster and Smith running as a separate, independent brand. LiveAquaria and PetEducation were also supposed to continue operating under their own identities.
A major reason Petco wanted the company was its veterinary prescription medication and pet pharmacy business. That was an area where Drs. Foster and Smith had built real expertise over many years, and it gave Petco a foothold in a growing and profitable segment of pet care.
The founders, Race Foster and Marty Smith, were expected to remain with the company after the acquisition. Everything pointed toward continuity.
Then, roughly four years later, Petco reversed course entirely and shut the brand down.
Why Petco Shut It Down
Petco’s official explanation was straightforward: it was a strategic business decision to streamline operations and focus on the core Petco brand. Running two separate online pet retail businesses side by side created obvious overlap. Consolidating everything under Petco.com eliminated that duplication.
There’s also broader industry context worth understanding. During the years between the 2015 acquisition and the 2019 closure, the pet retail market became significantly more competitive. Chewy grew rapidly and put pressure on every other online pet retailer. Amazon expanded its pet product selection as well.
In that environment, maintaining a legacy catalog brand with its own separate operations, staff, and infrastructure became harder to justify — especially when Petco was working to build up its own e-commerce platform.
None of this is a definitive stated reason from Petco, but it reflects the competitive reality the company was navigating when it made the decision to close Drs. Foster and Smith.
What the Closure Meant for Customers
For longtime customers, the closure created real inconvenience. Anyone who tried to log into their old Drs. Foster and Smith account after the shutdown found themselves redirected to Petco’s site, with no way to access past order history or account details under the old brand.
Prescription medication refills were disrupted for pet owners who had relied on the Drs. Foster and Smith pharmacy in Rhinelander. That pharmacy was a significant part of the business, and its closure was one of the more disruptive aspects of the shutdown for customers managing ongoing pet health needs.
Niche product availability also took a hit. On Reddit’s r/parrots community, for example, users noted that after the domain redirected to Petco, the selection of specialized parrot food and toys was noticeably smaller than what Drs. Foster and Smith had stocked. This is a common pattern when a specialized retailer gets absorbed into a generalist chain — the long tail of niche products often doesn’t survive the transition.
What Happened to Employees and the Rhinelander Community
Drs. Foster and Smith was one of the largest employers in Rhinelander, a city in northern Wisconsin. When the closure was announced, the local impact was significant.
The 289 affected employees were notified that their jobs would end within 60 to 120 days of the February 2019 announcement. For a smaller city, losing that many jobs from a single employer in a relatively short window is a meaningful economic blow.
There is no indication from available sources that Petco absorbed or rehired a significant portion of the Rhinelander workforce. The layoffs appear to have been a straightforward result of shutting down the operation entirely.
What Happened to LiveAquaria and PetEducation
When Petco announced the closure of Drs. Foster and Smith in early 2019, it specifically said that LiveAquaria would continue operating separately. It was carved out from the shutdown.
LiveAquaria has since gone through ownership changes and has been discussed extensively in reef and aquarium hobbyist communities. It is worth being clear: LiveAquaria is not the same thing as Drs. Foster and Smith. They were related brands, but the core Drs. Foster and Smith retail catalog business and the LiveAquaria aquatics site were treated as separate entities — and only the main brand was shut down in 2019.
As for PetEducation.com, the veterinary content library that supported the brand, it has been largely discontinued or absorbed. That resource is no longer available in its original form.
Where to Go Now for the Same Products and Services
If you’re a former Drs. Foster and Smith customer looking for alternatives, here are some practical options:
- Petco.com — The brand that absorbed the business carries a wide range of pet supplies and has an online pharmacy. It’s the most direct continuation of what Drs. Foster and Smith used to offer, even if the selection isn’t identical.
- Chewy.com — One of the largest online pet retailers in the U.S., with a strong pharmacy section and a broad product range. Many former Drs. Foster and Smith customers have migrated here.
- 1-800-PetMeds — A well-established online pet pharmacy for prescription and non-prescription medications, accredited through the VIPPS program.
- Your veterinarian — For prescription medications specifically, your vet can help you find an accredited pharmacy that fills the same prescriptions you used to get through Drs. Foster and Smith.
For pet health information, Petco and Chewy both have content hubs, and the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) maintains reliable resources as well.
What This Tells Us About Acquired Brands in Retail
The Drs. Foster and Smith story is a useful example of how acquisitions actually play out versus how they’re announced. In 2014, Petco said it would keep the brand running independently. By 2019, it was shut down entirely.
This pattern — buy a brand, promise continuity, then consolidate — isn’t unique to pet retail. It happens across industries when the original reasons for keeping a brand separate no longer outweigh the cost of running it. The capabilities Petco wanted (pharmacy expertise, online retail infrastructure, veterinary credibility) could be absorbed. The brand itself didn’t need to survive for that to happen.
For anyone tracking business strategy and retail trends, publications like InBiz cover these kinds of corporate decisions and what they mean for employees, customers, and local economies.
The Bottom Line
Drs. Foster and Smith closed permanently in February 2019. Petco shut down all retail and catalog operations, laid off 289 employees in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, and folded the brand into its own website. The DrsFosterSmith.com domain redirects to Petco.com, and the brand has not returned.
LiveAquaria was initially kept separate, but it is not the same brand and has had its own separate history since. PetEducation.com is effectively gone. The Drs. Foster and Smith that longtime customers knew — the vet-founded, catalog-based, niche-friendly pet retailer — no longer exists as an independent business.
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